My Debut Edition Lyriq

Congratulations, how many months did you have to wait for delivery?

Got mine on Ground Hog day, it joins my 2019 Bolt EV Premier. VIN 387. All the great features you can read about on YouTube reviews were there.

Main complaints are that it’s missing the chip that handles Super Cruise, as well as Adaptive Cruise Control, Auto Parking, 360 degree birds-eye-view, and maybe also the feature that lets you set the liftgate height by opening it, manually pulling it back down to the desired height, and holding the close button until there’s a beep and the turn signals flash. (They beeped and flashed, but the liftgate still goes up to its full height, which annoyingly hits my carport roof.)

The only reason I wanted the Lyriq is that it’s GM’s smallest car with lane-changing Super Cruise, which Consumer Reports rated above all other Level 2 driver assistance systems except comma.ai’s aftermarket system based on OpenPilot. The moment I can get a smaller similarly equipped car my Lyriq will be on Angie’s list.

Apropos of the QMerit installation option, since overnight charging at 32 amps has always met my needs in the past, I opted instead for two years of free EVgo charging for any long distance trips I might make to Canada or Mexico. As tested just a few hours ago, after enrolling with the dealer-supplied code, you plug in and open the app on your phone to start charging for free. (6.5 years ago I leased a 2016 Toyota Mirai which similarly came with $15,000 of free hydrogen. Unlike EVgo, hydrogen between San Francisco and Canada is nonexistent.)

Since EV technology is changing so fast, I leased my three previous EV’s (Mirai + 2 Bolts EV Premier), and would have leased the Lyriq too until I realized that with GM Financial’s 9.336% APR on three years of renting a $47,372.35 car (average of MSRP and residual), plus another $2700 or so of lease-related costs, along with GM getting half the tax credit of $7,500, it would be about $25,000 cheaper to buy than lease assuming a private sale in 2026 could get me the residual. A private sale $25,000 less than the 36-month residual struck me as extremely unlikely, and moreover I wouldn’t have ACAR on the title along with the restrictions lessors like GMF like to put on “their” cars.

Yes there’s the opportunity cost of paying up front of buying instead of leasing, but I wasn’t going to bet on a soaring market in the next 36 months given Russia’s missiles, China’s balloons, new pandemics based on avian-swine flu, and the possibility of Trump back in the White House in 2025. But I could be wrong on at least half of that, we’ll see.

I do have one big complaint, namely that Detroit-based auto designers like GM and Ford are clueless about HCI, human-computer interfaces. The HCI expertise on America’s west coast is concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area (Stanford, Google, Apple, etc.) and Seattle (Microsoft). Yet when GM picked west coast drivers for early testing of the Lyriq, they picked only Los Angeles drivers, perhaps on the assumption that no one north of LA would buy a Cadillac. The result is that the Lyriq’s user interface is a total disaster.

When I got the car home, I spent the entire next day trying to get the car’s interface to be humanly usable. My wife only wants to be a passenger for now, but even as a passenger neither she nor I was able to figure out how to control the passenger’s seat’s lumbar support

On my side, it is possible to open the garage door from the Lyriq, given enough time and patience. My 1987 Mercedes E430 had three buttons above the sun visor to open any one of my three garage doors. The Lyriq has the same capability, and moreover accessible without touching the infotainment (right) half of the huge display.

However to actually open the garage door on the Lyriq without touching the infotainment screen takes ten operations on the armrest’s control instead of one button push on my ancient Mercedes E430. It would have been eleven had I not eventually figured out a way to reduce it to ten.

The next time GM designs a human-computer interface based on input from the west coast, hopefully they won’t assume that Hollywood is where that expertise resides.

I got call from dealer informing me yesterday that my AWD ordered in May will now be a 2024 and should be delivered summertime one good thing now sun roof is available

SuperCruise has worked on my DE since April 4 delivery. But cruise control stopped working recently.