The risk factor is where the honesty lives, and in the case of the 2024 Cadillac Lyriq it lives in two separate NHTSA recall records that describe the same underlying vulnerability from different angles: a screen that can simply go dark. The newest is campaign 26V082000, opened in February 2026, in which General Motors reports that on certain 2024 Lyriq vehicles "the rearview camera screen may turn gray with no camera image." The consequence statement is blunt — "an inoperative rearview camera can reduce the driver's rear visibility, increasing the risk of a crash" — and the defect puts the vehicle out of step with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 111 on rear visibility. The fix is a software update to the vehicle cockpit unit, or VCU, delivered by a dealer or over the air. GM's reference number is N252542530, and the affected VINs became searchable on NHTSA.gov on February 12, 2026.
Taken alone, that is a routine rear-visibility recall with a clean OTA remedy. What elevates it is the company it keeps. Less than a year earlier, GM filed campaign 25V356000 against the 2023-2024 Lyriq for a related but broader failure: "the driver video display may go blank while driving." The consequence there was more sweeping — "a blank video display can result in a loss of critical safety information, such as the speedometer, warning lights, and rearview camera image" — and the remedy was, again, a software update, this time to the video display control module. Owner letters for that earlier campaign were expected to be mailed July 14, 2025, under GM reference N252500680.
One car, two ways for the screen to fail
The two recalls are not duplicates. The 2025 campaign describes the entire driver video display going blank while the car is in motion — speedometer, telltales, and camera feed all at once, at any speed. The 2026 campaign is narrower in symptom, a gray rearview screen with no camera image, and it targets the reverse-gear case specifically. Different control units are named — the video display control module in one, the vehicle cockpit unit in the other — so these appear to be distinct defects rather than one recall reissued. But they point at the same architectural reality: the Lyriq, like most modern EVs, has consolidated nearly all of its driver-facing information onto large reconfigurable displays. There is no analog speedometer behind the digital one, no separate mechanical gauge cluster to fall back on. When the screen fails, the information fails with it.
That consolidation is a deliberate design choice, and a defensible one — large curved displays are central to the Lyriq's premium positioning and to GM's software-defined-vehicle strategy. But the boring incumbent it replaced, a physical instrument cluster, had one virtue the screen does not: it could not go blank from a software fault. The two Lyriq recalls, read together, are a tally of what that trade-off costs when the software does fail. In the worst case described by the 2025 recall, a driver moving at speed could lose the speedometer and every warning light simultaneously. The 2026 recall is lower-stakes by comparison but more directly a rear-visibility compliance issue.
The Super Cruise context
The Lyriq is one of GM's flagship platforms for Super Cruise, the company's hands-free highway driver-assistance system and the most credible rival to Ford's BlueCruise and Tesla's Autopilot in the hands-free-driving category. Neither of these recalls implicates Super Cruise's driving function directly — a gray rearview screen is a reverse-gear, parking-speed event, and the blank-display recall is about the information surface rather than the driving automation. But Super Cruise is a system that depends on the same display stack to communicate its state to the driver: the steering-wheel light bar and the cluster graphics are how the car tells the human whether it is engaged, whether it wants hands back on the wheel, and whether it is about to disengage. A display architecture that has twice been recalled for going dark is the same architecture that a hands-free system relies on to keep the driver in the loop. The recalls do not allege a Super Cruise failure, and it would be unfair to imply one — but they do underline how much safety-relevant communication now flows through a single screen.
The pattern worth tracking
The fair reading of both campaigns is that GM responded appropriately: each defect was identified, filed with NHTSA, and addressed with a software update deliverable over the air, which is the right tool for a display-software fault. Neither recall describes injuries, and the remedies are free of charge. The value in pairing them is not to indict the Lyriq as uniquely flawed — display-software recalls are increasingly common across every brand that has moved to large reconfigurable screens — but to make a pattern legible. As vehicles consolidate gauges, warnings, and camera feeds onto a single software-driven surface, the failure modes consolidate too. A car that once had a dozen independent indicators now has one screen whose blanking can take all of them down at once.
For owners of 2023-2024 Cadillac Lyriq vehicles, the practical guidance is to confirm both recalls are addressed: 26V082000 (GM reference N252542530) for the gray rearview screen, and 25V356000 (GM reference N252500680) for the blank driver display. Both fixes are software and can be applied over the air or at a dealer. And the broader takeaway for anyone tracking autonomous and assisted-driving systems is to treat the display as a safety component in its own right — because in a single-screen vehicle, it is.