2024 Chevy Equinox 1.5T AWD Rental Car Review

[IveBeenRued]

Interior good: Comfy seats, decently quiet on the highway except on grooved pavement, good amount of space when rear seats folded down. I really like the backup and 360 cameras; they are phenomenal. Heated steering wheel and seats are great.

Interior bad: Over reliance on touch screens. No headlight switch, have to go into a menu for it. No trip reset button, have to go three levels deep into menus for that. Over reliance on piano black materials. Impossible to read HVAC controls with sunglasses on during the day. Most switches in steering wheel are nonsensical and have no labels; it even has a low gear button on the steering wheel but at least it has an L on it. Windshield wiper switches are tiny and on the signal stalk; cannot be used while wearing gloves. The center screen which has the speedometer and whatnot has four modes; three of these modes lack a gas gauge, only giving you distance to empty. Base radio is pretty cruddy. You cannot use gloves with the touch screens; my 5 year old Toyota lets me use the touch screen with gloves on.

Driving good: Engine is very quiet and smooth. Good acceleration under most driving conditions. Blindspot protection was nice and provided ample warning. It also had cross traffic and pedestrian movement alerting when you are backing up which is really nice. I am legit impressed by the auto start stop; it’s flawlessly implemented, good job GM. Good turning radius; very easy to make city U-turns.

Driving bad: Horrendous acceleration in emergency/I need to move now moments; the transmission is set up for fuel economy so it takes about .75-1 seconds for the robots to figure out what you want and by then, you’ve missed your opportunity to go. It’s not quite dead-peddling, but close.

Fuel economy: Pretty bad. 22.7 MPG over roughly 470 miles with just two adults in the car. It had a 2WD/AWD mode button; I ran it in 2WD mode to get the most fuel economy but it was still bad. My prior rental RAV4 on this exact same trip, last February, had better acceleration and averaged 31 MPG with colder temps and similar driving conditions. I’d agree with Car and Driver’s assessment when they said “uncompetitive fuel economy”; Chevy is about two decades behind in this area.

Privacy: Really really bad. You have to submit to a bunch of Google services and other telemetry data collection to even use Apple CarPlay. My gut tells me that this thing will spy on you and report to many many data collection agents.

My own personal overall assessment: Comfy and good for rental service. I would not personally spend my money on buying one. The interior oddities are just a bridge too far for me and the fuel economy figures that are very reminiscent of the 1990s. There are better choices in the market if you are in the market for this size of vehicle. If the car was $22-24K range compared to the RAV4 at $29K, then it would may be competitive but with both in the $29K range, nope. My guess is that GM is going after loyalists with this one and not trying to win new customers.

Funny note: Something tells me that Chevy is ashamed of the fuel economy. When you click on “Fuel Efficiency” on their specifications page (at least on mobile) all it says is “Fuel Tank Capacity 15.6 Gal”. You have to go the fueleconomy.gov to get the figures. 24 city, 29 highway, 26 combined. My guess is that the 22-36 degree temps are what brought us down below 23 MPG on the highway.

 

[D1dad]

Nice review. I spend half the year in rentals and hertz has a nice variety of suvs in the presidential circle. I ended up in an equinox (2022) a few years back and the battery was completely dead leaving a clients at 5pm. There’s really no way you can leave anything on. I haven’t grabbed a GM since. Superstitious. I did just spent a few weeks in a rogue sl and walked away impressed, plastic oil pan and all. The 1.5 sounded very throaty for a 3 banger and averaged 34mpg on the highway. My favorite rental was a hellcat Durango that ended up in presidents circle by mistake, but they let me keep it due to their error. My wife didn’t enjoy it, but I sure did.

 

[dogememe]

So, our Prologue has the "headlight controls on screen" thing and although reviewers gripe about it I've never actually had a problem with it. I'm curious what you're doing where you need to turn the headlights on/off manually so often?

• No matter what headlight setting you had selected every time you turn the car on it reverts to AUTO
• Auto headlights work well, it doesn't turn them on the second a shadow hits the windshield or turn them on and off a bunch of times when driving through shaded trees or something which would be annoying.
• If you turn the wipers on, the headlights come on.

Occasionally I'll be sitting in my car on my lunch with the car on and if it's dark out I'll just tap the light icon and tap Off. Yes, it's two taps on the screen, vs a single rotation of a physical knob like on the Bolt, but really, it's not a big deal. This is an extra half a second?

Again, I'm not arguing that you're right or wrong for disliking the setup, I'm just curious how having the headlights be on the screen is actually a real world problem. Maybe if you are renting a car and have to figure out how to use it, it's annoying for like three seconds, but most people just drive the car and let AUTO do the rest.

Also, as far as the wipers go, pretty much all modern GMs use the same stalk and it works the same way. I don't mind it either way (the Bolt is old enough that it has an actual wiper stalk on the right). Also, here, the intermittent setting is really more of an "AUTO" setting (at least on the Prologue, and this IS an option in the infotainment vehicle settings, but I leave it on because it is on by default and works GREAT) where if you put it on intermittent it will detect the rain and move the wipers accordingly. It'll sort of base its wipe speed off what you have selected but then it'll do it's own thing. This, too, in my experience, works GREAT and I can basically just put it on intermittent and let it do whatever it wants. If you turn the wipers all the way on it'll just wipe like you'd expect it to, no automatic behavior, so you can override it if you need it without digging through the menu to turn that feature off. The auto wipers is definitely a feature I miss when I drive the Bolt.

 

[IveBeenRued]

So, our Prologue has the "headlight controls on screen" thing and although reviewers gripe about it I've never actually had a problem with it. I'm curious what you're doing where you need to turn the headlights on/off manually so often?

• No matter what headlight setting you had selected every time you turn the car on it reverts to AUTO
• Auto headlights work well, it doesn't turn them on the second a shadow hits the windshield or turn them on and off a bunch of times when driving through shaded trees or something which would be annoying.
• If you turn the wipers on, the headlights come on.

Occasionally I'll be sitting in my car on my lunch with the car on and if it's dark out I'll just tap the light icon and tap Off. Yes, it's two taps on the screen, vs a single rotation of a physical knob like on the Bolt, but really, it's not a big deal. This is an extra half a second?

Again, I'm not arguing that you're right or wrong for disliking the setup, I'm just curious how having the headlights be on the screen is actually a real world problem. Maybe if you are renting a car and have to figure out how to use it, it's annoying for like three seconds, but most people just drive the car and let AUTO do the rest.

Also, as far as the wipers go, pretty much all modern GMs use the same stalk and it works the same way. I don't mind it either way (the Bolt is old enough that it has an actual wiper stalk on the right). Also, here, the intermittent setting is really more of an "AUTO" setting (at least on the Prologue, and this IS an option in the infotainment vehicle settings, but I leave it on because it is on by default and works GREAT) where if you put it on intermittent it will detect the rain and move the wipers accordingly. It'll sort of base its wipe speed off what you have selected but then it'll do it's own thing. This, too, in my experience, works GREAT and I can basically just put it on intermittent and let it do whatever it wants. If you turn the wipers all the way on it'll just wipe like you'd expect it to, no automatic behavior, so you can override it if you need it without digging through the menu to turn that feature off. The auto wipers is definitely a feature I miss when I drive the Bolt.

I frequently have to go through military checkpoints. If it is dark out, we have to dim our lights on the way through. It is much easier flicking a physical switch than poking through virtual menus. Especially while zig zagging through the vehicle barriers.

 

[dogememe]

I frequently have to go through military checkpoints. If it is dark out, we have to dim our lights on the way through. It is much easier flicking a physical switch than poking through virtual menus. Especially while zig zagging through the vehicle barriers.

OK, well in that case, I understand, but I hadn't thought of that haha.

 

[JTK]

I don't know what GM did to the latest version of the 1.5T. LSD version came out in 2023. All 1.5T's 2018-2024 Equinox use the old school 6AT. You see a lot of fuel economy complaints with it compared to the previous LYX version (2018-2022). I know the major change is no more exhaust cam driven vacuum pump for the brake booster. Seems like a benefit, but then there's the all electronic brakes (no vac booster). The "all new" 2025 Equinox with the LSD 1.5T and new 8spd automatic seems to do worse yet in terms of MPGs.

Aside from being one of the most generic and common jelly beans on the road, I love my 2021 Equinox LT 1.5T, AWD. Mine doesn't have any of the fancy touch screens or cameras. It does have auto climate control, heated cloth seats, leather wrapped wheel, etc. It's roomy, comfortable, super versatile and for me, it's just overall nice to be in and drive. With my usage, I average 32-34mpg in the summer tank to tank and a few MPG less in the cold weather. For the DIYer BITOG type, they are nice vehicles for fluid changes and basic maintenance. Easy access to most everything. To me, vehicles like this are only somewhat of a value when purchased used. I bought mine in June 2024 w/ 34K miles on it for $18500. It was a lease return sitting all dusty and sad in the back row of a Mazda dealer lot.

 

[Brons2]

I frequently have to go through military checkpoints. If it is dark out, we have to dim our lights on the way through. It is much easier flicking a physical switch than poking through virtual menus. Especially while zig zagging through the vehicle barriers.

Unfortunate for your use case.

For most people I'm glad they buried it because there seems to be an epidemic (at least in my area) of people not having their ever loving headlights on! It's so (expletive) dangerous! I've started going beyond flashing people and started laying on the horn. Yes, it's that bad.