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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> My perception of American designed and engineered vehicles is that they’re really awful, not just from a reliability standpoint but also from a user interface standpoint.

For about 18 months in 2017 and 2018, I had a job that had me in a new city every other week. Lot of rental cars. And I started to have very strong preference.

I would go out of my way to get a Chevy. Great Android auto integration. Good controls generally. Decent cars.

It kills me to hear that Bolt is have these problems. I was thinking of buying one as my next car.

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I own a Bolt. I loathe GM's software. With a flaming passion. Like, I will never buy another GM vehicle.

The infotainment system crashes about once a week. It will come back in 10 minutes or so, but nothing I've done has ever managed to make it decide to reboot faster than that.

The radio turns on. All the time. Over and over again. I literally never want the radio on. I only want CarPlay to ever play audio. GM seems to think any time anything changes in the car's state "oh look, now seems like a good opportunity to turn on the radio!". When the radio turns on, its volume is 10-20 notches louder than it was when playing CarPlay audio, so not only does it do a thing I don't want dozens of times a week, it does it much too loud.

It would be truly sweet if I could sell it back, but I doubt the buyback option is actually a particularly good deal financially.

The "it's an EV and it drives like a car with great range" part is really nice, though.

My Subaru does an annoying thing where every time the car is turned on (or cranked from the on position), the radio comes on. At least it’s whatever volume was set last, but it makes me a little crazy.

The Bolt I test drove didn’t do that at all, IIRC. I’m going to look at another one soon; I’ll pay close attention to that.

Maybe yours is faulty?

I have the same complaint about the Bolt's radio. It seems the issue is that pressing the power button merely mutes the radio. If you can figure out how to actually turn off the radio when the car is on, it doesn't turn back on when the car is turned on.

The infotainment in mine also sometimes will not boot for a good 5-10 minutes. Why. I don't know.

Otherwise, I love the damn thing and wish it weren't a giant fire hazard.

It depends on your state lemon laws. Check r/BoltEV to find some local takes on what is provided.

I’ll check them out next time I’m looking. Last I drove one it was touchscreen for everything I wanted a dial for, and the IOS integration didn’t work except wired, and then it was also very slow. And of course my experience isn’t universal; it’s really hard to make an attempt to go back though after I’ve had many personal experiences of just faulty electronics and engines to trust a brand again.

The cord is an iOS restriction on all cars in my experience. It does seem kind of silly to me.

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