Google rolls Gemini out to millions of Volvo, Polestar and GM vehicles, but early feedback suggests all isn’t sweetness and light

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• Volvo, Polestar, and GM all recently announced Gemini in cars

• Reddit users have piled in to express their distrust

• Early feedback suggests the system can be slow and clunky

Volvo, Polestar, and General Motors have recently announced that they have begun rolling out Google Gemini to infotainment systems across their collective automotive portfolios, bringing free-flowing conversations and vehicle-specific information into vehicles with Google built in.

Gemini, which is the company’s much-hyped AI assistant, is pitched to go far beyond the typical clunky manufacturer voice assistants that a vast swathe of the driving population has come to despise.

Despite attempts to reduce driver distraction by enabling select voice commands to activate things like the air conditioning or change a radio station, they have often proven frustrating, as multiple commands need to be used, or the software simply gives up and admits it can’t help.

Gemini, on the other hand, is touted to allow for “natural conversation”, according to the tech giant, with the ability to search for the perfect pit stop with free-flowing conversation.

“I need to grab lunch, find some highly rated sit-down restaurants along the way. I’m not in a rush, oh, and I’d like to eat outside,” Google offers as an example, stating that it will pull in reams of data, including reviews, from Google Maps to help make a decision.

Drivers and passengers can then follow up with further simple prompts, or ask Gemini to summarize text messages, flip the radio to something “jazzier,” or reveal EV-specific data, like battery level upon arrival or how long it will take to charge to reach a destination.

However, not all customers are happy with the system, and a quick scan through the Reddit forums unearths a host of issues.

While it’s not a completely accurate source, a number of users have complained of in-car Gemini’s ponderous nature, the fact that it doesn’t understand voice prompts, its struggles with third-party app integration, and that it is overly chatty, burying useful information (such as opening and closing times) in reams of useless fluff.

But it is the concerns surrounding driver data that seem to be at the heart of most arguments against Gemini inside the car.

Analysis: GM customers seem particularly skeptical

General Motors has been in the headlines numerous times over its ‘questionable’ infotainment decisions, removing Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from all of its cars, choosing instead to lean into its native software so it could build out a system that can access vehicle data, rather than being siloed from it, as are those ‘plug and play’ solutions.

However, several skeptics believe that GM, as well as many other manufacturers, are doing so to take control of driver data, a market that is predicted to be worth between $300 and $800 billion by 2030.

One Reddit user posted: “The real story (and headline) should be: Google is Paying GM Billions for Driver Data”.

Other users state that they don’t trust a company with their “conversations”, seeing as GM and its OnStar service have already been banned from sharing certain consumer data with consumer reporting agencies.

With Stellantis also coming under fire for serving pop-up ads inside vehicles, it is easy to see why distrust is growing over the increasing number of connected technologies appearing in cars.

It’s still, though, early days in the in-car LLM-integration space. Like most AI, they’ll likely improve rapidly, and the experience people describe above now may be very different in six months. Have you tried Gemini in your car? Tell us about your experience below in the comments.