I recently spent time with a 2024 Chevy Colorado ZR2 Bison. It’s an excellent small-ish truck with otherworldly off-roading capability and enough creature comforts to make it a great daily driver. While the Colorado ZR2 Bison is a very good vehicle, it isn’t perfect. No, ma’am. The one thing hindering the ZR2 Bison from greatness is its headlight controlls. I know, I know. That sounds very pedantic, but just hear me out, OK?
You see, the Colorado’s lighting controls are like no other vehicle (outside a few other GM and, annoyingly, Honda products). There’s no physical button, knob or switch for controlling the truck’s headlights and taillights. Instead, the controls are baked into the infotainment screen. This is simply too shitty of an idea to ignore.
I know General Motors and some other dummies will argue that this is fine because you’ll just leave the headlights on automatic mode, but it’s not. Sure, most of the time it’s fine, but say you’re entering a work zone that requires the headlights to be on. Now, you’ve gotta find the fingertip-sized headlight icon at the top of the screen, tap it, find the fingertip-sized “headlight on” icon and tap that. Ope, you just ran over an entire construction crew. Whoops.
Matters get even stupider when you want to turn on your fog lights or automatic high beams. For whatever reason, those controls live in a different menu in a different part of the infotainment screen. There’s a lot of scrolling involved. I do not have any idea why. The car also forgets you selected them every ignition cycle, so you’ve got to do it every time. Just to piss me off even further you cannot have auto high beams and fog lights on at the same time. Every other car I’ve driven with these features will seamlessly toggle between the two headlight settings, but not the Colorado. Maybe it hates me, I’m not sure.
To make matters even worse, at one point my screen went completely black and I had to do a factory reset of the truck. While this was happening, I had zero access to the headlight controls. That’s, uh, less than ideal.
It’s really confusing to me why General Motors decided to do this. I mean, I suppose it could be a cost-cutting measure. After all, software is cheaper to engineer than hardware, but that doesn’t really make sense here. I’d get that argument if the Colorado didn’t have many buttons, but it does. The interior is littered with them, but the automaker still decided to skip these vital controls.
I just don’t get it, man. General Motors is such a weird company. It can make a brilliant piece of machinery like the Colorado ZR2 Bison, but it can also saddle it with such a weird design choice.
