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Cadillac says it made CUE infotainment a lot better

We've never been huge fans of CUE, the Cadillac User Experience infotainment interface. It's been around a few years now, and the best thing we can say for it is that it now supports Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, making it easy enough to replace most of the interface with a familiar smartphone-based system. Now Cadillac has made some big upgrades to the system that should address at least some of our concerns. First and foremost, the system is claimed to be more intuitive, with a more logical interface design. Cadillac has added a Summary View that gives an overview of the climate, media, navigation, and phone all at the same time. The system will also be able to receive over-the-air updates, allowing Cadillac to make improvements more often and push them out to owners' cars, mush like Tesla and other automakers already do. The 4G LTE connection will also be used to connect the car with the cloud, where drivers can store and modify their own personalized set of settings. This My Driver Preferences profile will include things like contacts, navigation preferences, and recent destinations, and will also follow them from one car equipped with the system to another. That should come in handy for anyone subscribing to the $1,500-a-month Book by Cadillac vehicle subscription service, which allows participants to swap between cars when they choose. The cloud connection will also carry over to a new available navigation function, which Cadillac claims has a more intuitive, smartphone-like interface. It uses its data connection to provide current destination info and is supposed to learn a driver's habits, such as their preferred routes and frequent destinations, which the system will then attempt to offer up predictively – so the car should be able to know that you're heading home at 5:00. Additional apps for the system will be available through Cadillac's new Collection app store. And it's still compatible with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. One sore spot that appears to have been improved is the digital gauge package, although Cadillac hasn't offered details on that extension of the system. The current iteration's ability to over-customize the interface (our personal favorite is the option to display a total of four speedometers between the head-up display and the gauge screen; see video below) and unintuitive controls make it difficult to use and learn, while the simulated gauges don't look particularly realistic.

GM delivers best Q3 sales since 1980, 2.4M vehicles sold

People are a weird sort. Even after registering over 70 recalls through the first three-quarters of 2014, General Motors saw its best Q3 results since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, registering over 2.4 million global sales between June and September on the back of strong results in the US and China.
US sales were marshaled by good results for GM's pickups, the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, which bumped the manufacturer's truck market share to 35.6 percent, up nearly three points from Q1 2014. Buick has seen healthy growth as well, with the Encore dominating its segment for the sixth month running.
It was China, though, that really bolstered GM's sales, as the company's efforts to top last year's record-setting 3.16 million units continued apace. Small SUV sales saw massive growth, with Encore, Chevrolet Trax and Captiva figures jumping 90 percent in Q3. Brand-wise, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Buick all saw sales gains in the PRC, with each recording double-digit year-over-year jumps. Cadillac sales alone were up 63 percent compared to the first nine months of 2013.

Trucks and tidbits from GM's earnings report

General Motors announced this morning that 2018 was a good year for it financially, thanks in large part to the company's performance in North America, which was predicated, according to the company, on "strong pricing, surging crossover sales, successful execution of the company's full-size truck launch, growth of GM Financial earnings, and disciplined cost control." GM reported full-year income of $8.1 billion and EBIT-adjusted income of $11.8 billion. Crossover sales in 2018 were 1,034,808, an increase of 7 percent compared to 2017 deliveries. Throw in the body-on-frame SUVs and the ute number is a total 1,295,700. But let's face it: It is the trucks that really matter. The Chevy Silverado and Colorado, the GMC Sierra and Canyon. Altogether, GM sold 973,463 pickups in the U.S. in 2018. Although Ford gets bragging rights for F-Series sales, GM gets to point out that it has a greater aggregate number. An important factor regarding the trucks and the reported income is that during the last quarter, more than 90 percent of the new 2019 trucks were crew cabs (which have a higher sticker), and at GMC more than 70 percent were Denali and AT4 models (which have even higher stickers). According to reporting by Bloomberg, GM's pickup trucks combine for $65 billion in annual revenue. Clearly when the 2018 sales of the Silverado — 585,581— dwarf the combined sales of both Buick (206,863) and Cadillac combined (154,702), pickups are what matter to the overall health of the company in a way that it is difficult to otherwise achieve. The "disciplined cost control" is something that is very much in the public eye right now, as the company is taking out thousands of its workers, and there is still the "unallocated" plant situation and other plants that will remain under capacity. The numbers in GM's earnings report probably made Unifor members' heads explode in consternation, coming fresh off their Super Bowl ad: " GM, you may have forgotten our generosity, but we'll never forget your greed." But there are a couple of curiosities in the full GM earnings release. One is that so far as its autonomous efforts go, it mentions only that (1) in the first quarter of 2018 Cruise introduced a production-ready autonomous vehicle, and (2) Cruise attracted $5 billion in external capital from SoftBank and Honda. Not a whole lot of love for autonomy. Good thing they have the trucks to fund the program, to say nothing of the external capital.