A friend contact me this week alerting me to a dealer selling the new Chevy Equinox, a $40K 300-mille range EV, for $25K, a huge discount of it’s list price. The car has generally received good reviews and seemed on the surface to be a terrific deal. However, doing a little digging, it does not have Apple Car Play or Android Auto, a deal-breaker for me and many others. Wasn’t Chevy warned?
In October 2023, when GM CEO Mary Barra announced the company would phase out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto across its entire vehicle lineup, the automotive press, tech reviewers, and consumers erupted in opposition, saying it was a terrible idea that will cost you sales. Now, as GM’s CarPlay-free vehicles reach customers, the verdict is in: it’s exactly the disaster everyone predicted.
GM initially framed the decision around electric vehicles, claiming their new EV architecture required a different approach. But in October 2025, Barra announced CarPlay and Android Auto would be eliminated from all GM vehicles—gas, hybrid, and electric—by 2028.
The replacement is GM’s proprietary system based on Android Automotive (not Android Auto), branded as Ultifi, with built-in Google services. It meant your phone apps could no longer work in your car: It was being done so that GM could require us to pay a monthly fee for their versions of our apps and so they would be able to moneitize our information. It’s turned out to be a user-hostile mess. As gas-powered models go through redesigns or refreshes between now and 2028, they’ll lose CarPlay. By 2028, no new GM vehicles will offer it.
The customer response has been brutal. One Chevy Bolt EUV owner stated: “Love my car, but GM dropping CarPlay is a deal-breaker. No CarPlay = no future GM purchase from me. I will also never rent a car that doesn’t have CarPlay”.
Another owner who just purchased an $80,000 ZR2 truck said: “I would have not purchased this truck if it did not have car play or android auto capabilities”.
The anger from those who’ve actually used GM’s replacement system has also been scathing. Multiple owners report: “The google experience in my 2025 GMC 2500 AT4X is weak and laggy”. An Apple user noted, “I have spent decades building, transferring, curating my music playlists in the Apple ecosystem. You can’t take away CarPlay until you have a viable alternative.”
GM’s replacement system requires paid subscriptions for features that work free with CarPlay. One owner with 5 GM vehicles wrote: “I have no interest in paying monthly subscriptions for the 5 GM vehicles in my household when I already pay for 4 lines of unlimited cell phone coverage”. A Corvette Z06 owner who paid $185,000 discovered the factory navigation “only worked for 30 days” before requiring a subscription.
The user experience has been a disaster. The Android-based system forces users to log in to each app individually, a process GM admits they’re “working to streamline”. Meanwhile, it makes it impossible for iPhone users to use native apps like Apple Maps, Messages, Phone, Podcasts, and Music. Many of us go between our home and car listening to a podcast or navigating to a destination on our calendar. We now have a seamless connection. So much of what we do is on our phone and we just want to have it accessible in our car. It’s even more important when we step into a rental car and magically have the same interface we have on our car at home. It’s something so obvious, you’d think it would also be obvious to Barra.
Barra’s justification for eliminating CarPlay and Android Auto was that customers complained it was “very clunky” moving between those and the car’s native interface and that it “could be distracting”.
Cars.com editors stated: “It seems premature to make plans to remove features like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto that are still highly valued by many shoppers. It’s not hard to see a scenario where a shopper weighing two similar vehicles—one with CarPlay and a GM one without—chooses the non-GM vehicle based on this feature alone”.
The real reason, as industry analysts note, is simple: “You’re seeing pushback against effectively giving up access data to the big tech giants. They no longer want to make that compromise between offering an appealing experience and maintaining control of their data”. GM wants your data. GM wants subscription revenue. GM wants to lock you into their ecosystem. Customer preferences are secondary.
Mary Barra gambled that GM’s brand loyalty would overcome customer preferences. Early returns suggest she badly miscalculated. In a market where a single feature can swing purchase decisions, GM just made every competing vehicle more attractive. Now they’re learning the hard way: when you ignore your customers, they ignore you back.