Google built-in frustrates this iPhone user

All right today I’m sitting behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado EV rst which is one of the new General Motors electric vehicles and you may have heard you may have heard unless you were living on a rock that General Motors did away with apple carplay in its electric vehicles so some of the old Vehicles still have apple carplay so the Cadillac Lyriq the work truck version of the Silverado EV they have apple carplay but all of the new um electric vehicles coming out from General Motors do not have it so the

Blazer EV, The Equinox EV the silverado rst EV no apple carplay so what I want to do in this video is I just want to walk you through the alternative so what this looks like for an iPhone user without Apple carplay because you can still do a lot of stuff this still has a lot of functionality um but it’s one of those things that you just you have to figure out and you have to get used to so my name is Jill Ciminillo and this week’s cardujour is a Chevy Silverado RST first edition EV and uh yeah let’s just let’s just

let’s figure out this Google stuff all right so the first thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to create a new profile in this vehicle for me and in order to do that I have to um I’m going to add a profile and uh I am going to add my phone to to this vehicle and I’m going to sync my Google account basically my Gmail Android is starting and I had a lot of people um on social media say well is this um Android auto no but yes this is an Android operating system it’s a Google operating system um so there is

no Auto or carplay this essentially is auto built-in it shouldn’t take up to three minutes but it may so I mean here’s the thing getting your vehicle set up for you takes time and a lot of times Auto reviewers don’t take the time to do that because it takes time but I want to show you this because I don’t think anybody else is really going through this and it is a little bit of a process so I’m G finish setting up my profile customize your car with Google this is where you are going to add your Google

account so now I have to to add in my stuff so now it um also has you open um the you know it says you know open the YouTube app on igel for um second party verification you know I get a thing on here that says are you trying to sign in yes it’s me so now it’s going to sign me into the car so once I’m signed in I can set all of my preferences from you know my audio settings to my setting for the seat and when I am in and I select my profile it will just automatically remember me and so once you sign into your Google account the

other thing that you can do is so included with the car you’ve got ways you’ve got Spotify that will automatically download and then you have some other um apps right here so I did have some questions is audible included audible is included audible is one of the apps that you can download onto the um screen so I’m going to go ahead and I’m just going to download all the things I’m going to hit install and it’s getting my apps ready again it’s going to take time you you know the first time you’re setting

up your vehicle it takes time your setup is complete you hit done and now this is my profile so I can set up up my screen I can do all of the things and when I log into my profile it will return to what I want so one of the really interesting things you can do is you can customize your menu up here so if you want to put different icons up here from this menu you just drag and drop and then it becomes a quick icon for you to be able to use so it allows you to customize and if I log out of my profile this changes to whoever profile

you log into so I think that’s kind of cool it’s customized to me all right so the other good thing that you’ve got going on here so it’s still downloading those other apps that we had said we were going to install but what they have right now are these two and when I go into ways and I’m going to point out you’re going to see an address Point pop up on here that says it’s my home address it’s not my home address I don’t give Google that information just so you know you’re

going to go to a bike shop if you go to that address you’re welcome B shop um all right while using the app and it says welcome to ways and then what it’s going to do it’s going to log into my ways um you do have to do a little again first time set up you sorry first time set up you do have to do the little QR code thing you’re trying to sign into ways in your car yes it’s me you are signed into to ways okay so start a new drive this gives you all the great wayss functionality so um cops on your

route um you know just like the traffic and all of those things and then um because this is my ways it also um has my save places so yeah I travel a lot I have O’Hare International Airport as one of my places um so it’s got all of the places in there saved because it’s my ways so I think that’s really cool that you can log in to your account your ways there now what you cannot do is um you cannot do Apple carplay things so you see it’s still downloading the apps we have two new apps there more apps are

coming um there’s no apple cardplay here so what you’re not going to get is you’re not going to get your Apple music you’re not going to get your iTunes account you’re not going to get your uh podcasts however we’ve played around with it a little bit so I’m putting my phone on the charger here and I want to give a little bit of an aside here this charger is one that actually works I’ve had my phone in here like all day long and it charged my phone and it didn’t overheat so thumbs up on that all right

so now that I have my um Google operating system set up sync to my my account the next thing I’m going to want to do is pair my phone so there are no phones paired well there’s phones paired but none of these are mine so I’m going to add a phone and in order to do that you do the regular Bluetooth setup where you go into your you know okay yeah I’ve got way too many cars in here um but you’ve got Chevrolet 786 or 7846 7846 so I’m going to click on that it’s giv me a code I’m going to pair I’m

going to pair I’m going to Lo and so now it’s pairing my phone so I’ve synced my Google account and now I have paired my phone you can see I am connected um but again now um you don’t have an easy way on your screen to be able to access your music your uh podcast or things like that so you might think if you want to access this stuff you can go into your little music button and it gives you these options here you’re going to go into your Bluetooth and um it’s going to play my music which I don’t want it to do at

just this moment um but it gives you the options of you know going into your music there was a way that you can I’m like where were my podcasts there we go so I Jill so now we have my music my playlist my radio and my podcasts so I can I mean this isn’t a attractive I’ll be honest I don’t like this interface it doesn’t look good but these are all of the podcasts that I regularly listen to and so then you can click into the podcast and then it will show you a list of the recent podcast well here’s the

thing I don’t know what dates these are this is kind of a difficult part for me too so I don’t know which one of these is the most recent um so that’s slightly problematic uh you know it’s the same so this is the the daily they’ve taken me back to January where are my um podcasts from May okay May 10th I know they’ve had more recent podcasts than that so that’s slightly problematic you can do it but it’s slightly problematic the other thing that you can do and um you can you can say something like you can

ask Siri to do something so you can say Hey Siri play so here is by Nathaniel riff and the night sweats so if you know what song you want to hear you can ask Siri to play that specific song If you know what podcast you want to listen to Hey Siri play podcast Ted Talk playing podcast Ted Talks daily on Apple podcasts so then it will um in theory switch over it did not switch over but you you have some options you can interface with Siri but it’s not going to be as easy or as intuitive or as interactive as apple carplay is this is

a workaround it’s functional it’s functional one of my uh journalism friends said you shouldn’t have to make it work it should just work and that’s kind of that’s kind of a really good summary for how I feel about this system it’s not awful there’s a lot of good things here being able to connect my ways account being able to you know go into the Google Google Play Store and download things I like all of that stuff you know it houses my information it’s my profile it stores my stuff but the

fact that I can’t interface with my iPhone the way I want to means I’m going to go like this I would like to listen to a podcast so while I’m driving mind you I’m going to be driving and I’m going to be swiping through my phone going into this going into my podcast and then I’m going to be looking at what the podcasts are available now um and you know these are the on ones that are recent not the ones that were showing up in you know the interface so I I think that’s a little bit of a Miss um I think

it’s something that General Motors and Chevrolet need to work on there are workarounds but it’s a thing so the other thing that you are not going to be able to do on this is you’re not going to be able to access your text messages so as you can see I have four text messages and seven voicemail messages right now you can’t um easily access those either so if I got a text message while I was um driving it would show up through here so I’m driving if um somebody sent me a text message it would

pop up I could read it I could reply to it I can even say Hey Siri send Tim Esterdahl a text message what would you like to say to Tim Esterdahl hi period testing the voice to text in the Silverado it says hi testing the voice to text in a Silverado send it send it done I can also say something like hey Google send a text message to Tim Esterdahl to do that you’ll need to check your iPhone’s bluetooth settings for this car and make sure show notifications is turned on if it already is try disconnecting your phone from the

car and then reconnecting it okay so what it’s telling me to do is go into here and then you go into the vehicle go into the information and it says show notifications I didn’t have that on so I turned on the show notifications now hey Google send Tim estr doll a text message to do that you’ll need to check your iPhone’s bluetooth settings for this car and make sure show not notifications is turned on if it already is try disconnecting your phone from the car and then reconnecting it no wonder if

I do this so I’ve disconnected I’m reconnecting again disclaimer it takes a while to get things set up if you’re doing this for the first time which thank you for being on this journey with me my cameraman is yawning um all right so now let’s try hey Google send Tim Esterdahl a text message who do you want to text Tim Esterdahl sorry who do you want to text Tim Esterdahl Tim Esterdahl show what’s the message hi period another test message period thanks for playing period I got hi another test message

thanks for playing ready to send it send it I got hi another test message we’re just going to hit that button sending your message so you have a couple of options for sending a text message now um let’s see if I can get it to read my text messages hey Google read my text messages there aren’t any new messages okay so we know I have four messages on there hey Siri read my most recent text message you’ll need to unlock your iPhone first okay phone unlocked hey Siri read my text me read my text messages you have new messages in three

conversations first Cherise said Hey Jill Rebecca Lindland dropped out of the rally this morning Kelley asked me to let you know would you like to reply no next in the group with you and Jon landlord Matt said I won’t be there for about 30-45 depending on traffic okay if I go in and take a quick look which bathroom and Jon said first one handle doesn’t work at all reply to the group. so maybe may maybe don’t do that with other people in the car or on camera um but uh so yeah just in case you wondering the first message is my

roommate for the mama spring rally just cancelled um second message toilet broken so um yeah there you go more information than you wanted about me but okay so you can do it through Siri by um asking Siri a question you can send text messages through Google and through Siri and but you have to do it all handsfree there’s no you know swiping or accessing anything through a menu um maybe something you would get used to as an owner but personally I find this a little bit cumbersome I’m currently at the Midwest Automotive media Association

spring rally and I have the opportunity to sit behind the wheel of the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV and this has the same operating system that was in the Silverado EV so I’m kind of adding this into the video that I already have because I want to continue talking about this a little bit more previously I’d focused on talking about the things that you can’t do without apple carplay and I figured I should give a little bit of space of to some of the things that you can do without Apple carplay so I’ve

paired my phone I have created a profile here so I’ve created a profile which means I’ve logged into my Google account I have um paired my phone um which by the way my mother just called me and so it’s depositing a text message into my account I don’t know what she said so I’m not going to go through this again and have um her read um some kind of personal message but um so the text message showed up and you can see if I wanted to play it I can hit the play button so while I’m in the car

if somebody text messages me there is the ability to go in and to play or reply to text messages now the other thing that I’ve done is I have downloaded some apps and so I had talked previously about the idea of how unattractive the screen looked when you were using the Siri commands with your phone and trying to access things through your Bluetooth connection well I went ahead and I downloaded the Google podcast app and I created a Spotify account so to use this vehicle and to listen to your music without Apple music

and to make it look pretty that this is one of the things that you have to do so I go into my podcast I can go into my subscriptions and I went ahead and added a couple of things in here um this is not all the podcasts I listen to but it has some of the subscriptions you can go in it shows you the date it shows you um you know the the title it gives you um the accurate picture of the um podcasts that are here okay so that’s easy and it’s attractive and it’s pretty um and I could do something like hey

Google play podcast today explained okay here’s today explained on Spotify doesn’t like the podcast app apparently um but I mean there’s a learning curve i’ I’ve been behind the wheel for like playing with this system for 4 hours you’re not going to get a 4 Hour video but I’ve been playing with this system for 4 hours so I’m still learning um about what this system does how the voice commands work but there is a way to do the voice commands this does show up it’s playing through Spotify

rather than the podcast app um which wasn’t my intention but hey I’m listening to the podcast I want to listen to so um the other thing you can do like i’ I’ve already showed you I’ve logged into my ways account you know like I said I created the Spotify account you can go into the podcast casts and I can do this fairly easily by just you know touching and swiping through the different menus so here’s another text message this is about most likely rain checking tonight let you know if that

changes apologies do you want to reply no okay so the text message came in I was able to um play the text message and then I was able to reply to the text message if I wanted to that is very much like the Apple carplay system it’s just through the Google operating system now I will say the one place that I did run into problems with this system was when I was trying to use Google to send a text message to my husband it kept misspelling his name and for whatever reason Google couldn’t find him how however if I went into Siri so if I said

h e y s i r i which I’m not going to do because she listens um and then said send a text message to my husband then it would send the text message to my husband so you’re going to have to find multiple ways to interface with the system is the end of that story but at the end of the day there is still no apple carplay I would love to know what you think how do you feel about not having apple carplay on a vehicle is that a deal breaker for you um could you get by maybe you’re one of those Android people who are like yeah I don’t care

you’re making a mountain out of a mo Hill maybe you’re one of those people um so I I don’t know I is this a big deal i’ I’ve had a lot of people tell me it is I’ve had some people tell me it’s not comment below and um yeah so that is just a very really long rambling look at how this system operates um thank you for um sticking with me through it I hope you found it interesting I hope you learned something and um let me know is this a Jailbreaker all right that’s what I have for you on the not Apple carplay

system in the Chevrolet Silverado rst EV first edition mouthful um I’ll see you next time with a new cardujour.