2025 Chevrolet Trax: What to check before buying

Screens go black while driving. The digital gauge cluster and center display blank out at highway speed, taking the speedometer with them for about a minute before coming back. Some cars do it within the first month or at about 400 miles. Apple CarPlay and Bluetooth drop out, and a radio replacement has not fixed it for some owners. Driver aids also act up. Lane Keep Assist steers toward another lane, forward collision braking triggers falsely, and blind-spot alerts appear with nothing there. One report describes an engine bay fire minutes after parking. Dealers often cannot reproduce or fix the faults.

Check engine lights come on within days of delivery. One case at 156 miles was traced to the fuel rail system, and the car then sat at the dealer because parts had no arrival date. The AC evaporator also fails early, leaving the cabin with no cold air, and replacement parts are back-ordered. Other reports describe an engine-bay squeak that dealers call normal under a service bulletin. One report describes a broken connecting rod that destroyed the engine at 11k miles and nearly caused a crash.

Airbags fail to deploy in serious collisions. All 4 reports in this category involve crashes, with 6 injuries in total. Non-deployment is reported in a front impact at 55 to 60 mph and in a chain collision that began with a rear-end hit. In the highway crash, the brake pedal also felt soft and no warning came on before impact. In a separate low-speed impact, forward collision braking did not react, and the airbag threw fragments that cut the driver and broke bones.

Smoke and fire from under the hood follow a check engine light in one report, and the owner suspects the fuel system. Pinched sunroof drain lines in the pillars cause a loud gurgling noise at 35 to 50 mph after rain or a car wash when the sunroof is vented. Engineers have identified the cause but have not supplied a fix, and the same problem appears in a 2024 model. Another report describes a rear frame that bent in a collision at about 5 mph, and the car was totaled.

The car steers itself or drifts with no input from the driver. Reports describe the lane-keeping system fighting the driver during a turn and pulling the car into a ditch. Another driver reports sudden swerving between lanes at about 70 mph for roughly 10 seconds. A third describes a pull to the right under acceleration at 1,035 miles. No warning lights come on, and dealers have not been able to reproduce the drift. All of these are loss-of-control events, and one ended in a crash.

Phantom braking is the main complaint. The system sees pedestrians or vehicles that are not there and brakes hard. Adaptive cruise control also shuts off at random and brakes on an empty road. In one car, a new radar unit installed by the dealer did not stop the false alerts. One crash report describes the opposite problem. The automatic braking seemed to override the driver's own pedal input, and the car did not stop quickly enough to avoid impact.

Fuel injectors fail within the first weeks of ownership. The failure sets a check engine light and can cause a sudden loss of power on the highway that feels like an unwanted downshift. The repair replaces the injector along with a pipe, seal, gasket, and retainer, and some cars sit at the dealer waiting for it. Evaporative system codes also come and go. Dealers point to a service bulletin to replace the fuel filler neck and quote a 3-week wait for the part.

The transmission jerks and shifts hard when pulling away from a stop and when coming to one. In one report the car slammed to a stop several times at about 3000 miles, knocking the steering wheel out of the driver's hands. In another, a transmission warning light came on at about 139 miles. Dealers have trouble finding a cause. A required ECM software update did not cure the jerking in a car with about 5,000 miles.