2016 GMC Terrain Denali tech test

We take a critical look at the smartphone integration, in-car WiFi, and more, in this 2016 GMC Terrain Denali.

By: James Bradbury

Apr 5, 2016 at 5:59pm ET

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Despite being on the market for more than six years, the GMC Terrain still sold more than 100,000 units in 2015. That’s not much compared to some other small crossovers – it’s a hot segment – but still leaves a huge number of cars on the road.

So when we got our hands on this top-of-the-line Denali tester, we decided to take a critical look at the infotainment system to see how it stacked up in a modern context.

Turns out that underneath the older Intellilink graphics, the Terrain actually packed in a lot of functionality. Our tester had the available 4G WiFi through AT&T, so we ran some tests to see what effect channeling a data connection through the in-car network would have on the available bandwidth.

Despite being hooked into the same cellular network, the Terrain’s WiFi was able to consistently demonstrate download speeds between two- and four-times faster than a phone hooked into the network directly.

What do you think?

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Comments

There’s some weirdness when trying to use your smartphone as a music streamer via the USB connection; namely you’ll have to have music files on your phone, or the system won’t recognize it. Not exactly seamless media integration, though workarounds exist.