As all attention moves over to Gemini, the experience of Google Assistant just continues to crumble, and that’s getting especially bad for Android Auto users as of late.
Google announced in November 2025 that Gemini would start rolling out to Android Auto “over the coming months.” And it has indeed arrived for quite a few people, with mixed reactions thus far. Personally, I’ve found it useful that Gemini on Android Auto is more interactive than Assistant, acting as a good sounding board or brainstorming tool while driving, but there are some clear issues as well. For instance, Gemini doesn’t interact as directly with Android Auto apps, leading to experiences where you might ask Gemini to navigate to a location and, after you complete the task with the touchscreen, the AI keeps babbling on until you manually stop it.
But the simple fact is that, even nearing two months after Google’s announcement, Gemini still isn’t widely available on Android Auto. The upgraded assistant is still rolling out bit by bit, and that’s a problem as it seems that Google Assistant on Android Auto is just getting worse.
A recent thread on r/AndroidAuto gathered together a lot of user frustrations over the experience of Google Assistant, and it’s clear that things are falling apart. “I didn’t understand that” is an overly-frequent Assistant reply for even the most basic commands, with other tasks simply failing to execute entirely.
Assistant, being on the back burner, just seems to be treading water. There have been similar issues with smart speakers and other iterations of Assistant over the past year, to the point where Google publicly acknowledged the shortcomings a few months ago.
Top comment by GoldGuitar
At this point I'm pretty much certain that Google has been crippling Assistant to push people into migrating to Gemini. There are simple questions and requests it no longer understands and there's no explanation for functionality declining except for the constant negative me to switch over to Gemini.
At this point I've started looking into my own self-hosted automation solutions, but I don't know what I'm going to do about Android Auto.
On Android Auto, these problems just take on a new level of frustration because, behind the wheel, the alternatives are not exactly ideal. Drivers are either left poking around their car’s touchscreen in the hopes they can accomplish the same task in 5x the time, or just sent to pick up their phone and do it manually, in either case taking their eyes off the road and putting themselves into some level of danger.
A voice assistant in the car is important, and one of the core reasons people use Android Auto (and CarPlay) in the first place. With Gemini, Google is addressing a lot of the complaints of Assistant on Android Auto, but the slow rollout, combined with Assistant just falling flat on its face, is putting users into a frustrating limbo.
Let us know in the comments below if you’ve been able to move to Gemini on Android Auto, or if you’re still struggling with Assistant.
More on Android Auto:
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- This clever car charger delivers fast charging while using wired Android Auto & CarPlay [Gallery]
- Android Auto update hints at Cast support, Material music player redesign [Gallery]
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