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  • in reply to: My Debut Edition Lyriq #94910
    Vaughan
    Participant

    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.

    in reply to: Status of Debut Edition Production #92947
    Vaughan
    Participant

    According to Stevens Creek Cadillac, DE is still in pre-production, meaning that they’re still collating the requisite parts. Current thinking is that production will begin late October or early November. Interesting that you got a specific date, your dealer may know something mine doesn’t.

    in reply to: Where is my place in line #92094
    Vaughan
    Participant

    If you’re asking about the Debut Edition you ordered last year, my understanding is that there were only around 1500 orders accepted. If you have a 6-digit reservation number that’s unlikely to indicate anything about a “place in line”.

    Supposedly the first deliveries will be to dealers where the demand is highest, namely in NY, LA, and Detroit, at least according to

    in reply to: Very little Lyriq news #91243
    Vaughan
    Participant

    I’d be fascinated to see where GM promised the Debut Edition of the Lyriq in the “first quarter of 2022”. I’d always heard it would be in the first half of 2022, of which still a week remains.

    However current word from my dealer in Santa Clara seems to be July at best, possibly even August. (My order is silver with 20″ wheels. I hadn’t heard about a heads-up option.)

    Annoyingly Super Cruise won’t be available until later in the year. I just hope Adaptive Cruise Control doesn’t need Super Cruise. Not having ACC on either the 2017 or 2019 Bolt has been a real bummer after experiencing it on the 2016 Toyota Mirai for 36 months.

    Meanwhile I just heard that Mach-E’s are being recalled and their sales stopped while Ford deals with a contactor welding problem. Being into hardware design debugging myself, I’ve been trying to figure out independently of Ford where their power distribution unit design might be failing.

    in reply to: Super Cruise on the Lyriq Debut Edition: end of year #90257
    Vaughan
    Participant

    Today I received a reminder about the Debut Edition of the Lyriq which says the following. “When your LYRIQ is produced, it will be equipped with Super Cruise driver assistance technology+ and Surround Vision hardware. An over-the-air vehicle software update will be necessary to activate these features. Cadillac will contact you directly when these updates become available, expected late 2022.”

    Is Surround Vision the same thing as 360 degree birds-eye view (a feature we’ve had on both our Bolt Premiers since 2017). If so, does the above mean that if we upgrade from the Bolt to the Lyriq we will be without birds-eye view until late 2022?

    in reply to: Super Cruise on the Lyriq Debut Edition: end of year #90243
    Vaughan
    Participant

    On second thoughts it occurs to me that if Super Cruise is installed but not yet activated, adaptive cruise control might not work. Anyone know if ACC works on a Lyriq with SC not yet activated? If it doesn’t then without even ACC I’d be better off with a Bolt EUV with SC activated, which is available today. However much nicer BEV3 is over BEV2, that can’t make up for no ACC.

    in reply to: Super Cruise on the Lyriq Debut Edition: end of year #90140
    Vaughan
    Participant

    Thanks, Alex. Your scenario (GM just needs more time to test SC on the Lyriq) is the one at the most optimistic end of my possible scenarios. My most pessimistic one (GM announcing they couldn’t get SC to work on the Lyriq) seems sufficiently unlikely that I’m ok taking the risk of it actually happening.

    While waiting for SC to come online on the Lyriq, at least I’ll have ACC during those six (?) months, which is what I had on my Toyota Mirai during 2016-2019 and which I sadly gave up when I switched to the Chevy Bolt. And maybe some other nice things about the Lyriq that aren’t on the Bolt, like more comfortable seats maybe? (I deal with that Bolt problem with big foam cushions that helped enormously on drives longer than an hour.)

    Main downside of the Lyriq over the Bolt for me is its 196″ length compared to the Bolt EV’s 164″ length, which will barely fit in my garage. What I don’t understand at all is how the Lyriq’s cargo capacity is almost identical to the Bolt’s. How is it possible that GM was unable to use even one inch of that extra 32″ of length to give the Lyriq even one more cubic foot of cargo capacity than the Bolt EV?

    in reply to: Super Cruise on the Lyriq Debut Edition: end of year #90118
    Vaughan
    Participant

    Thanks, Alex, that seems like an excellent approach.

    My one concern would be, what if in December GM announces that subsequent testing has revealed that for unforeseen technical reasons Super Cruise can’t be safely used on the Lyriq after all, and therefore won’t be available? While that might seem unlikely, it seems equally unlikely to me that Super Cruise has been in use on other GM vehicles since 2017 and is available today on the Bolt EUV, but won’t be available on the Lyriq for another six months. Has GM encountered some unexpected obstacle, and if so is it guaranteed that they’ll be able to overcome whatever that obstacle might be?

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