For many people, the idea of an EV that’s not also a connected vehicle full of information technology is unimaginable. This goes back a decade to the Tesla Model S, a vehicle that pioneered putting a huge touchscreen, with a Linux-powered computer to back it, in a vehicle. Some of the touchscreens didn’t fare well in hot car interiors, but the idea stuck.
But, things have come a long way in the last few years since I got rid of the Volt. Instead of only 40 miles of electric range, I have about 250 city/200 highway. Instead of a small touchscreen and enough buttons for a Space Shuttle cockpit, there’s a bigger touchscreen and a few buttons for critical functions .
It also has some ability to make trip plans using this charging station and range data. If you hit the magnifying glass icon, you can search for a destination and the app can then plot a series of charging stops at DC fast charging stations to get there. This issue could be fixed easily, even if GM thinks auto-saved passwords aren’t secure enough. Simply letting the app remain logged in for a number of days would be one good option. It could also be good to enable a PIN number and/or fingerprint scanning instead of entering a password. Security is good, but being so secure that the user doesn’t want to bother with logging in isn’t a good approach.