Think fast: You’re going on vacation and you’ve reserved a compact crossover as your rental car. Which model do you definitely not hope you get? If you answered Chevrolet Equinox, you aren’t wrong, but you may want to reconsider in the near future. There’s a new 2025 Chevrolet Equinox on the horizon and it looks like a massive upgrade over the outgoing model. Keep in mind, this is completely unrelated to the Chevrolet Equinox EV we saw earlier, a branding decision that surely nobody thought was confusing in any way, shape, or form. Oh, GM.
The current Chevrolet Equinox is, let’s not mince words, near the bottom of its class. In the nearly seven years since the current Equinox was introduced, models like the Mazda CX-5, Hyundai Tucson, and even the current Mitsubishi Outlander have substantially evolved the art of sensibly-sized family transportation with nicer materials, more pleasant design, and better technology. However, despite being on the back foot, the Equinox closed out 2023 as Chevrolet’s second-best-selling vehicle. This new generation ought to give hundreds of thousands of people a significant bump in style and tech.
Now, this doesn’t seem to be anything new for Chevrolet. If Toyota’s dramatically restyled Prius hadn’t landed first, the new Chevrolet Trax would’ve been the most spectacular butterfly transformation of last year. Likewise, the new Chevrolet Traverse looks seriously promising, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the new Equinox takes existing teachings and packages them in America’s favorite compact crossover form.
As you’d probably expect given the way the compact crossover field has gone, the new Chevrolet Equinox has cast off amorphous blob styling in favor of a more chiseled, more angular appearance. Sure, it feels a bit like Chevrolet is pulling the German “same sausage, different length” styling routine, but it works alright if the fundamentals are good. This new Equinox looks a lot like the more expensive Traverse, a good thing for Equinox buyers even if Traverse drivers might not be pleased.
Let’s be honest, though. You don’t drive cars from the outside, and interiors matter in an everyday vehicle. While the new Equinox doesn’t exactly go full luxe, a smattering of stitched textiles that don’t appear to feature a scrotal texture elevate what would otherwise be a relatively ordinary experience. Column shifters are making a big comeback due to the prevalence of electronic shifters, and Chevy has followed suit here. The Equinox uses the opportunity to carve out more center console space, but doesn’t entirely allocate it for the typical detritus the average person accumulates in their vehicle. Instead, a giant drive mode selector sits exactly where you’d expect a shifter to be on RS and Activ trims, an odd ergonomic choice for a mainstream model. Still, there appears to be plenty of storage between the seats, from a wireless smartphone charger to a big open cubby with USB-A and USB-C sockets. Also, that’s one wide armrest, an underrated interior feature on long trips.
Speaking of upgrades, the tech in this new model is a visual step up compared to what Equinox buyers are used to. We’re talking about an 11.3-inch infotainment system, with an 11-inch digital instrument cluster providing key driving information. Unfortunately, there’s no word on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, even if Android Automotive OS is built-in. However, a standard heated steering wheel and heated front seats may make up for the annoyance of having to onboard your personal profile to the vehicle.
Interestingly, 2025 Equinox buyers will get different transmissions depending on how many wheels they want driven. Front-wheel-drive models get a continuously variable transmission, while all-wheel-drive models gain a traditional eight-speed automatic. Regardless of transmission, a 1.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine is the only choice. With 175 horsepower on tap, it doesn’t sport the outright numbers available in most competitors, but I don’t see any obvious reason why it wouldn’t provide adequate propulsion.
The big news here is that the 2025 Chevrolet Equinox looks like it won’t suck, which is a big upgrade over the current Equinox. These things sell like Big Macs, so expect to see them out on the road as soon as they hit showrooms later this year.
(Photo credits: Chevrolet)
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It’s less appealing than my 2016 Cherokee
Cool.
Now, can you make it less… um…
Cheaper?
It’s a fucking Chevy Equinox.
Note to car companies: Please stop pandering to an imaginary glut of humans who believe TV show apartments are realistic.
I think the first generation looks better.
It’s more honest at least.
(great write up and writing btw)
WTF with the C pillar?
Not that the world isn’t full of ugly C pillars but this looks like the weird C pillars on the Chevy Bolt.
Weird ugly C pillars are a distant second to fake really dark windows that are really small and are tinted so that everyone thinks you are an asshole even though the factory doesn’t even offer windows you can see through, but still they are so very ugly.
That idiotic oversized fake grill is simply of the moment I guess. At least it doesn’t look like a cat’s anus like the Lexuses (Lexi?)
I wish I could bring myself to scroll up and check out the photos you’re referencing, but let’s be real.
Until I opened this article, I didn’t realize the Equinox was still a thing. And then, while reading the article, I also learned that the Traverse is also still a thing.
I think it’s a bit much to critique the style choices on a car that I just learned actually exists, so I’ll count it as a win for GM that I learned a few things about their crossover offerings today.
I’m not sure this is an improvement. The old one was bland but honest. These “tough” looking updates always look out of place on cars this small.
This just looks like a Bronco Sport (itself not a looker) and 4 years too late to compete.
A Bronco Sport? Huh? That’s a really weird point of comparison, and not one that this looks much like – the Bronco being much more square and having a very different set of styling cues.
I’d also argue that the Bronco Sport IS a looker – friends of mine have one and it’s one of the rare CUVs that wouldn’t be sad to own.
I had a 2023 GMC Terrain as a rental about two months ago. Surprisingly, I didn’t hate it. It was by no means an aspirational car, but that little turbo-four was peppy, the normal automatic transmission went about its I’m-not-a-garbage-CVT business without any complaints. As a commuter car, I can see why people buy them, especially at the price point you can get a decently equipped model at. Too bad GM kept the awful floating C-pillar on the redesign, as it looked like crap on the previous Equinox/Terrain and still looks like crap on this new generation.
I wonder what the price difference is between the (current gen) Terrain and Equinox? I think the GMC version actually looks decent, while I hate the bland, melted looks of the Chevy. I can’t fathom why anyone would purposely choose the Chevy over the GMC version.
Looking at their respective websites, the Equinox starts at $26,600 while the Terrain starts at $29,200. With that said, the GMC starts with more options, so as soon as you move up to the LT trim in the Equinox to match, the prices are almost identical. It only further reinforces the confusion over why anyone would pick the Chevy over the GMC.
Big improvement styling wise. I want to say I read that in development of this generation, they made tweaks to the styling after it wasn’t well received in focus groups, so I shudder to think how it looked before. Maybe too minivanlike was one of the complaints. Something about the current one made me think of an updated Buick Rendezvous that got left in the sun. The Terrain styling I didn’t hate, and actually come to think of it this follows the GMC a bit in its looks.
Looks aside the current one is unexciting but a competent value as A-to-B transport in the class so I don’t expect that to be any different. I don’t foresee it overtaking any segment leaders though especially given the redesigned RAV4 hybrid is right around the corner.
Anyone notice GM is carbon copying Toyota these days? look at the pistol tail lights from the Camry and the stamping around the license plate from all toyota suvs. 2 tone roof ala rav 4, split floating roof in the d pillar, rogue and rx series? Maybe copying toyota’s ugly cars will telegraph perceived quality for a poorly made product that will fall apart like a chinese bicycle?
I don’t think anyone is going to look at this and think it looks anything like a Toyota. GM has been doing some of those design cues for years themselves, the Terrain has a similar D-pillar, the Trailblazer has a split too and has a 2-tone roof option. None of those design cues are really exclusive to either company or originated with them either.
The two-tone roof trend is fun. I’m glad several manufacturers are on board with it.
I agree, I always liked 2-tone paint schemes in general. I think Ford on the Flex was the first to make it kinda mainstream it in current designs. Black roofs tend to be more common from “blackout” packages and the like, as on the RS here; I don’t really want a black roof, looks good, but summer heat and all – but fortunately there are white options like the other one pictured, and some silver roofs out there too.
I don’t think the split D-pillar/floating roof look has ever worked that well, when it’s clearly there or there’s some piece of trim that gives it away, but it does help to break it up to allow for the contrasting roof. I am glad fake fender vents have faded away though.
I will make a bit of effort to pretend I would be happy with a CUV…
I like that it’s available in at least two colours – though the green isn’t really my jam. I like that there is a beige interior. Hopefully the seats are better and there’s more attention to detail than the outgoing one…
…but I can’t do it. If I walked out to see this in my parking spot every day I’d be sad.
This is perfectly beige. GM turbo engines tend to be tuned more for torque than power with a smaller turbo. That’s a great thing in a daily where most people do most of their driving. 175 hp is plenty with a good torque curve and a well geared/programmed transmission. But like a lot of other GM products, the 8 speed’s programming may need work.
As an aside, it’s weird that “beige” is still thrown around as a diss of a bland car when nobody even offers beige anymore – and I’d be delighted if I could get a beige interior instead of black.
Maybe we need to adjust to call it gray? The official color of both dull cars and cheaply made/flipped houses.
Or maybe even……
Greige.
https://www.clare.com/products/paint-greige
“Greige” is absolutely the diss to grayscale paint schemes that needs to catch on. And be rubbed in the face of automakers.
Automakers AND house flippers. Grey vinyl flooring and an excess of pot lights are ruining all of the character homes in my area. Maybe if we mock the greige curse it’ll stop.
Not dissing it. More like pointing out that it’s a tool for a job and will probably do that just fine.
I mean you can’t say “beige” is in any way a compliment.
Idk I find most GM transmissions are tuned pretty well for daily driving. They usually tune them to slur the gears together and use the torque converter. Which tbh I enjoy. I honestly hate the way some modern vehicles lock up the torque converter at every opportunity. It makes the vehicle feel super sluggish and like it lacks low end power. The good thing is that this 8 speed is different from the problematic one from the trucks. It’s based off of the older 9 speed. They got rid of one of the gears for less mass to rotate. Plus first and second were insanely close together in the 9 speed which made it feel like a cvt from a dig.
You’re going to wave that flag in front of a bunch of crazy Autopians?
I’d be embarrassed to be run over by this. You do that from the outside right?
Mr. Bean would like a word…
https://images.app.goo.gl/zmWuMwXSGo2rnGsw7
Kind of weird there’s no hybrid option. You’d think “hybrid all the things” would be in vogue by now.
Edit: Ope, I spoke too soon. Hopefully, this development also comes stateside. https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/12/images-of-upcoming-2025-chevy-equinox-phev-leaked-in-china/
Chevy has had competitive hybrid technology for over a decade, they just don’t put it in anything.
The problem with chevy’s latest crossovers is that if you took the chevy logos off or otherwise obscured them, you can’t tell that it’s a chevy.
Seriously, try covering the logo with your cursor or a finger.
To me they look like Nissans. Or maybe a Chinese brand that does styling close to mainstream vehicles.
They lack distinction on their own.
On top of that, the Juke-inspired and KL Cherokee-reinforced motif of the turn signals being eyebrows to headlights being inset to the bumper area is still bad. Yes, it’s good that they’re low enough not to blind drivers of sedans and such. It doesn’t change the fact that the vehicle looks like an angry constipated robot crying/screaming for help.
I actually disagree with that, I can spot a Chevy from a mile away and I can’t do that with most other brands. They’ve got a few pretty distinctive brand hallmarks at this point – horizontal bars, lighting shapes, surfacing decisions – that the brand is pretty easy to recognize.
GM has given Chevrolet a cohesive brand look without it being terminally boring like VW.
I’ve always been a VW guy, all I’ve ever owned so far. Never would have thought I’d see the day where I might just like Chevrolet’s styling better than VW (I’m excluding the Golf R/GTI here).
And credit where credit’s due, it was the oft-maligned Camaro that really provided it.
Yeah, if there’s one thing GM has done well in the past few years, it’s the “visual language” used through the brand. The hugimongous trucks, the Camaro, and these are all clearly cousins.
You also might see a lot more chevies and be more familiar with them. I see nearly every major make and model on a daily basis, and until I see the badge I can’t always tell some of the newer chevy and Buick products from a Nissan or Hyundai/Kia, for instance. Which injures my pride, as I’ve been able to identify cars from just their headlights since before I was in kindergarten.
I was thinking the same thing – take off the logo and it could be almost any brand.
That lack of distinction could be because us automotive aficionados tend to overlook such pedestrian, homogenized tall wagons/CUVs because there are so very many of them, they are practically identical and none of them are interesting. In other words, they are boring and uninspiring.
“Interestingly, 2025 Equinox buyers will get different transmissions depending on how many wheels they want driven. Front-wheel-drive models get a continuously variable transmission, while all-wheel-drive models gain a traditional eight-speed automatic.”
What if I just want one wheel driven? What do I get then?
And what if I want 5 wheels driven… meaning I want the spare tire to be spinning in the trunk too… just because. What transmission to I get then?
You get a King Midget like the rest of us.
Two-speed automatic it looks like.
You can have one – just buy the 2WD version and wait for something to break.
Or put one front tire on ice… I doubt there’s any kind of limited slip diff besides traction control in these
> What if I just want one wheel driven? What do I get then?
It’s a Chevy, you’ll get your wish eventually
Looks great, in a similar vein to the new Traverse. Their current SUV lineup feels very Subaru. Not trying to be off-road juggernauts but just more capable versions of a standard road-going crossover. I’m digging the pragmatism.
This may be silly, but I’m a big fan of how Chevy’s been doing the white roofs on some of its current SUV offerings. I really like ’em.
IMO it’s exactly the way to do retro now – subtle nods to the past done in a contemporary manner, not wholesale replications.
Heck yeah column shifter. Get that thing outa my way.
The best solution. Meanwhile ford has a bound to be expensive when it breaks folding shifter option. Talk about complex solutions for simple problems.
I get visibly excited when I get to drive a heavy-duty Chevy truck. They still have column shifters and a split front bench. I can’t even list all the ways that setup is more useful than a center console.
Hey! It’s alright! They definitely cured it of it’s case of blah blobitis. IMO, the current Equinox is the saddest looking car available, if only because the Trax was redesigned before it.
However, while I like boxy, I am getting a little concerned with all the crossovers starting to mimic truck front ends. It’s bad enough that half the vehicles on the road are trucks, and none of those drivers can see anything in front of them. Adding crossovers to that demographic and it feels like the future is going to look like an unintentional version of Death Race 2000.
It looks like a RAV4 clone from the rear, and a Hyundai Tuscon clone from the front.
The Trax seems to be a hit and it looks like they’re following the same formula here, offering popular features standard (you can’t even get a heated steering wheel on so many cars) in a reasonably attractive package.
Every trim comes with available heated rear seats. That’s a compelling choice in the snowy areas of the country
Yay?
With only 175hp it probably will not offer a particularly engaging driving experience, but maybe it will offer above-average fuel economy as a tradeoff.
As an aside, I wish US manufacturers would embrace the heated windshield.
the current Equinox gets like 25/30, not particularly great
It is funny how this is basically the contemporary version of a malaise-era station wagon.
Yet Chey’s warranty sucks. I’m not buying a new model year with the 3/36,000 warranty
If you think their warranty sucks, wait until you try to actually USE it.
Oh, your one year and 11,000 mile old Silverado is visibly burning oil? Well, too bad. Because “all new cars burn oil” and “it’s not burning ENOUGH oil to qualify for service.” (Both ACTUAL things said to me both by the Chevy dealership and GM customer support)
I fought for months to try to get them to do something about it before giving up and trading it in on a Hyundai. The kicker? Turns out a couple years later GM quietly issued a TSB on a bunch of engines including what was in that truck because OOPS they built the engines with faulty or incorrect rings, and they’d burn oil.
To be fair, that is something extremely common to read about in the Mazda, BMW, Subaru, Kia/Hyundai, and even Toyota forums and has been common in a lot of new cars in my experience. My wife’s 2018 Subaru has belched blue smoke for the first few minutes of every startup and burns almost a full quart of oil every 6k miles since new. All totally acceptable per Subaru. My 2023 Mazda burns just under a 1/2 quart of oil every 5k miles, and again, is deemed normal from Mazda. Toyota said it was normal for my 2017 Tacoma to consume up to a quart of oil ever 10k miles and said it was due to the low viscosity oil new cars typically come with.
I also at the time had a Chevy Sonic Turbo that had about 25k miles and never burned or leaked a drop. My Hyundai doesn’t burn or leak. None of the sub-100k mile cars I owned prior to the Silverado burned or leaked.
The rate of burn on this was 1 quart every 2500 miles. The last car I owned with that rate of oil consumption was a 200k mile Saturn that had a bad VC gasket.
Also if it was completely normal, a TSB wouldn’t exist that says they screwed up the rings at the factory.
Current Equinox is perfectly fine for what it is. Have had multiple as loaners and have had no issues. Exciting? Not at all – especially once the LTG was discontinued. But a relatively competent compact CUV? Yep.
Terrible seats though.
I’d be pretty disappointed if my rental had a 1.5L 4 banger, a CVT, and no carplay/android auto.
It has CarPlay/Android Auto (per Autoblog)
AWD comes with an 8-speed, not a CVT.
And if the CVT is anything like that in the Malibu with the same engine, it’s not obnoxious.
The carplay thing is good. That’s such a lifesaver with rentals, as you don’t have to learn every OEM’s stupid touchscreen menus and always have GPS.
My comment was more a poke at Thomas’s opening paragraph. It’s perhaps not the worst car on the lot, but nothing in the specs would really make me excited to rent one.
Is it just me, or is the floating pillar look getting a bit played out these days though? I liked it on the Citroën DS3, but that was in 2009. I don’t know, not like it’s going to stop anybody from buying it, the Ford Escape has been a miserable penalty box for ages, and they sold like hotcakes until the Bronco Sport came along. I’d expect this Equinox to be better than that
Agreed. The floating pillar had it’s moment, and that moment has passed.
Nah… I think we can squeeze just a bit more juice out of that styling trend…
You have my support in this. There aren’t a lot of things styling-wise that grind my gears into wild, verbose anger and loathing – but that goofy floating C-pillar think looked like crap Citroen did it, looked worse when Nissan and Jaguar copied it, and has somehow managed to look worse and worse with each iteration since. I absolutely hate it and wish it would go away.
I agree, but I’m kind of perversely wanting to see how they eventually marry it with the trajectory they are on of making the entire body out of black plastic cladding. I figure it won’t be long before they all look like rubbermaid bins with mismatched lids.
Floating roof equals f off in my book.
Dial shifter 4 cylinder CUV isn’t a punishment?
What dial-shifter?
This has a shifter on the column.
My bad, upon zooming in it appears to be the mode selector.
I kinda like dial shifters. Though the only shifter that would ensure I didn’t buy the car is GMC’s godawful pushbutton setup, but luckily I don’t think that is infecting the rest of GM.
I’d rather have a lever of some sort. A guy on the Maverick Truck Club forum put an F-150 shifter in his Maverick and it looked like a pretty easy job.