The culture at General Motors under Mary Barra’s more than 12 years of leadership has been to always be smarter by half.
The company’s privacy scandal, which garnered a formal rebuke from the FTC and a $12.75 million civil penalty in California and sparked dozens of class-action lawsuits, is but one example. GM lawyers knew they needed customers’ consent to collect and sell their driving data, and they maneuvered them into giving it without their knowledge or understanding.
From the Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit against GM for privacy violations:
“GM’s practice was to subject consumers who had just completed the time-consuming and stressful process of buying or leasing a vehicle at a dealership to an ‘onboarding’ process,” the lawsuit alleged. “To customers, the onboarding process appeared to be a mandatory pre-requisite to taking ownership of the vehicle; however, it was no more than a deceptively designed sales flow to ensure that customers would sign up for GM’s products and unwittingly be enrolled in GM’s Driving Data collection scheme.”
After The New York Times revealed that GM was harvesting driving data from unwitting customers and funneling it to data brokers and insurers to hike premiums on drivers deemed high-risk, Barra went into damage-control mode:
“We take our customers’ data security and privacy very, very seriously,” GM CEO Mary Barra told The Detroit News. “We’re going to work hard to be very transparent and be very privacy-focused with our consumers, and (we) learned a lot of lessons in this, and we’ll get better.”
The comment was another classic example of Barra thinking she was smarter by half. While Barra was publicly professing concern for customer privacy, GM’s legal team was arguing the exact opposite in court.
In an effort to dismiss a massive, consolidated class action in Georgia, GM argued that “states do not permit invasion of privacy claims that are based on public conduct,” adding that under Georgia law, observing someone “in a public place is not an intrusion upon one’s privacy.”
Put simply, in GM’s worldview, the moment your tires touch public asphalt, your reasonable expectation of privacy vanishes.
The federal judge in the Georgia case largely rejected GM’s motion to dismiss, preserving claims that the automaker violated the federal Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act by secretly collecting and sharing driver behavior data. The case involves a proposed nationwide class encompassing roughly 16 million drivers. With federal law providing for statutory and other damages, GM’s potential financial exposure is staggering.
Barra knows from experience that the automotive press will rarely hold her accountable, which is among the main reasons she has not been deservedly fired.
Despite vowing she was all-in on electric vehicles and promising that GM would “absolutely” be selling more EVs in North America than Tesla by the end of 2025, Barra now refers to EVs as merely a “north star” ambition. In 2019, when Barra killed GM’s beloved and pioneering plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt, she insisted customers simply were not interested in hybrids and claimed GM wanted to move straight to all-electric vehicles to help the environment.
Today, hybrid vehicles are selling at record volumes, accounting for roughly a fifth of new vehicle sales. As for GM helping the environment, EPA figures rank GM’s vehicle fleet second-to-last among major automakers for fuel economy.
Barra also halted commercial operations at GM’s driverless Cruise subsidiary, whose technology was once considered equal, if not superior, to Alphabet’s Waymo. Cruise burned through billions before GM pulled the plug on scaling its robotaxi fleet, while Alphabet’s Waymo was valued in February at $126 billion following a $16 billion funding round. GM’s entire market capitalization sits at roughly $75 billion.
Rather than be humbled by this near-unblemished record of failures, Barra remains undaunted. She is now defying mounting regulatory concerns, particularly in Europe and China, about vehicle infotainment screens creating lethal driver distraction.
GM this week unveiled the new infotainment screens for its cash-cow Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra light-duty pickups. The trucks don’t just get a screen; they get a digital wall. GM ditched smaller entry-level displays entirely to make a 16.3-inch center touchscreen and a 12.2-inch digital cluster standard across every Silverado trim.
And for the grand finale on the Silverado ZR2 and High Country: a dedicated 11.5-inch embedded passenger screen loaded with Disney+, YouTube, and Tubi, so the front passenger can tune out the vehicle’s other occupants. Barra sits on Disney’s board, singing for the $378,987-a-year supper the entertainment giant paid for her wisdom and guidance in its most recently reported fiscal year.
The “more technology, the better” mindset is a Silicon Valley conceit, which is where Barra has been migrating GM’s critical software operations, overseen by Dr. Sterling Anderson, who GM lured a year ago from his money-losing autonomous trucking startup with a hiring package worth as much as $40 million.
The executive responsible for GM’s dashboard cineplex is Sebastian Bauer, who joined GM 15 months ago as Executive Director of Human Interface Design. Bauer spent years directing and producing “visual stories” in film and television, worked in Apple’s Los Angeles office crafting video and motion content for Apple Media Products, and more recently served as Google’s head of Android and Pixel product design.
Bauer clearly still has video storytelling in his blood, and his comments suggest he aspires to be the Steven Spielberg of automotive infotainment displays.
“Good interface design is fundamentally narrative,” Bauer declared in a GM employee profile. “It has an entry point, a midpoint, and an endpoint. It guides you without forcing you. And good design should facilitate technology that adapts to you, not the other way around.”
Bauer, like many of his GM colleagues in Silicon Valley, is new to the automotive industry, so let’s cut him some slack while he figures out that a pickup truck is not an oversized smartphone.
According to J.D. Power, infotainment is the only major problem category in its 2026 Initial Quality Study that got worse, with mass-market vehicles registering 44.4 infotainment problems per 100 vehicles. J.D. Power’s latest Tech Experience Index found that 35% of owners who have a passenger display have never even tried to use it, while a minuscule 6% use it every time they drive.
While competitors like Hyundai and Volkswagen have publicly admitted their touchscreen obsession was a mistake and are scrambling to bring back physical buttons, GM is doubling down on its dashboard acreage.
There is compelling empirical evidence of the dangers of screen-heavy automotive cockpits. A study conducted by the University of Washington and the Toyota Research Institute directly tested how drivers perform when using dashboard touchscreens while driving.
Researchers tracked participants’ gaze, finger movements, pupil dilation, and electrodermal activity as they drove in a simulator, operated a 12-inch touchscreen, and performed memory tasks designed to mimic additional mental demands on drivers.
The results were alarming. When drivers interacted with the touchscreen, they drifted side to side in their lanes 42% more often. Touchscreen accuracy and speed fell 58% while driving, then declined another 17% under high cognitive load.
Worse still, the study directly undermines GM’s rationale for its bigger screens. Colin McCormick, GM’s group product manager for Google built-in, projection, and profiles, told The Verge that bigger displays allow for larger buttons and tap zones, making touchscreen controls easier to operate while bouncing over Michigan’s notoriously lousy roads.
“The buttons can be larger and make it easier to do,” McCormick said. “Living in Michigan, the roads are terrible, so I’m trying to tap on a very small tap zone while hitting a bunch of potholes. These larger displays give you better functionality in that standpoint.”
The University of Washington and Toyota researchers found that increasing the size of touchscreen targets did nothing to improve performance. The problem wasn’t merely finger precision. As UW researcher Xiyuan Alan Shen explained, “the thing that takes time is the visual search.”
The researchers also documented what they called a “hand-before-eye” phenomenon, in which drivers reached for a touchscreen control before looking at it. That behavior increased from 63% to 71% as memory tasks were introduced.
European regulators understand and have responded to infotainment safety issues.
Euro NCAP, Europe’s influential vehicle safety watchdog, overhauled its 2026 rating protocols to put greater emphasis on the placement, clarity, and ease of use of essential controls, including the availability of physical buttons for commonly used functions. Euro NCAP explicitly says consumer feedback indicates physical controls can reduce driver distraction.
The regulatory backlash against infotainment screens in China is even more telling. The country that pioneered turning car cockpits into hyper-digital living rooms has pumped the brakes. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has moved toward requiring fixed physical buttons or switches for critical functions including turn signals, hazard lights, gear selection, and emergency calling, rather than allowing automakers to bury them exclusively in touchscreens.
It should come as no surprise that Toyota, with its longstanding focus on automotive safety, hasn’t embraced elaborate infotainment screens.
The company offers an 8-inch base unit or an optional 14-inch display in high-trim Tundras and Tacomas, but their purpose is strictly functional. The displays are used primarily for navigation maps, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto projection, and multi-terrain trail camera feeds, such as underbody views and trailer hitch lines.
You will not find an extra monitor embedded in the front passenger dash of a Toyota truck running Tubi or Disney+. Toyota treats the passenger dash as a place for an airbag, storage cubbies, or a sturdy structural grab handle.
There are other reasons why Toyota won’t adopt Barra’s dashboard cineplex ambitions.
“One of the things we talk about, mainly because we’re in Michigan and it’s really cold sometimes, we wear gloves,” Benjamin Jimenez, general manager of Toyota’s Calty Design Research studio in Ann Arbor and a lead designer on the 4Runner, told The Drive. “But also, buttons are immediate. You’re driving down the road and it’s cold, you want to get that heat turned on. There’s no menus—it’s instantaneous. So yeah, we kept the buttons for those kinds of reasons.”
Because we’re in Michigan?
Jimenez’s background explains why he gets it: based in Ann Arbor at Calty, he has been with Toyota for more than 21 years, having joined the Japanese automaker after an eight-year stint at General Motors. While Jimenez stayed rooted in real-world Midwestern driving realities, his former employer abandoned them to chase Silicon Valley screen and other fantasies.
Toyota’s North American headquarters was once in Southern California, but the company has since relocated it to Plano, Texas, where its suburban Dallas campus spans 100 acres and encompasses 2.1 million square feet of office and technical space. While Barra has maintained that the best technologists are on the West Coast, Toyota manages to find the talent it needs in Texas and Michigan.
Those who know GM’s history are familiar with Plano. It’s the city where entrepreneur Ross Perot built Electronic Data Systems into a technology powerhouse.
Forty years ago, then-GM CEO Roger Smith spent $2.55 billion buying Perot’s Plano-based EDS, convinced that tech outsiders and software would magically solve Detroit’s operational failings. That misadventure ended with GM paying Perot $743 million in hush money in 1986 just to buy out his stock, remove him from the board, and silence his public critiques of GM’s mediocre products. GM spun EDS off a decade later.
Barra continues to accelerate GM’s West Coast migration. The company reportedly has signed a lease for 43,000 square feet of prime office space in downtown Seattle, which it says will house about 200 employees. It also has agreed to lease a massive 340,000-square-foot campus at Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto and plans to consolidate hundreds of Bay Area employees there as early as next year. The campus, which includes an amphitheater, can accommodate 1,500 workers.
Roger Smith gave GM the Cadillac Cimarron and malfunctioning factory robots. Mary Barra is giving us an $80,000 work truck that doubles as an OnStar telemetry dragnet and a passenger-seat movie parlor.
Roger Smith isn’t fondly remembered in Detroit. In due course, Mary Barra won’t be either.