2016 CHEVROLET COLORADO Z71 DIESEL UPDATE 1: PERSONALITY CRISIS

One of my favorite New York Dolls songs is the 1973 track “Personality Crisis,” and there’s a line that I think our long-term 2016 Chevrolet Colorado Z71 Duramax diesel can relate to:

“That personality everything starts to blend
Personality when your mind starts to blend
Personality impression of a friend,
Of a friend, of a friend, of a friend, of a friend”

That friend, my friends, is the GMC Canyon.

Our 2016 Colorado was far from perfect when it was first delivered. For those who missed the arrival story, after our Chevy was delivered, I fired up the 2.8-liter turbodiesel and was greeted with a GMC logo in the instrument cluster’s Driver Information Center (DIC). And, once the GMC logo cleared, the DIC’s color theme was red too, as opposed to the turquoise it’s supposed to be.

Basically, my Chevrolet Colorado thought it was a GMC Canyon.

I wonder if somewhere out there there’s a GMC Canyon that thinks it’s a Chevy.

As I drove home from the office, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So once the Colorado was parked safe in front of my apartment, I sought to fix it. I fiddled with the DIC’s display menus to see if I could find something buried in the settings to change the color or theme, but no dice. Then I started digging into the Chevy MyLink infotainment display in the center stack (which proudly displayed the correct logo), to see if I could somehow fix it from there.

I couldn’t, but in doing so I did find something else wrong with our Colorado—the rocker switches on the bottom portion of the center stack were poorly mounted. Four of the five buttons (including the hazards, thankfully) worked, but there was about a half-inch of play on all of them. The button that didn’t work was the button we at Motor Trend press the most—the traction control button.

I was not pleased.

With a vacation road trip only a few days away, I wanted the Colorado, as Michael Scott from The Office once said, fixed “ASAP as possible” even if none of our truck’s issues affected how it drove.

The next day, I drove to our local Chevy dealer to end our Colorado’s personality crisis. They were as perplexed as I was about the GMC logo on the DIC as I was; I was assured it was an uncommon issue. Nevertheless, they said they could re-flash the Colorado’s software with the correct version within an hour. As for the broken switches, our dealer didn’t have the parts on hand so I opted to hold off on the fix until after my trip. True to their word, the Colorado was returned to me 40 minutes later with the DIC now proudly displaying the Chevrolet Bowtie.