Driving the Genesis G70
Aug. 31st, 2022 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI'm still catching up on stuff from my backlog, trying to clear it out by the end of the month. It's the 31st, so I'm down to the last few hours... but also the last few blogs. One of them is about the rental car we had on our trip to the Pacific Northwest a few weeks ago, a Genesis G70.
Genesis is a luxury sub-brand from Hyundai. After Hyundai established itself in the US market as first a brand making cheap but reliable cars, then a brand making inexpensive but comfortable and reliable mid-market cars, now it's looking to establish itself as a luxury player as well. For that it markets its luxury cars under the Genesis name, not Hyundai. It's similar to how Honda, Toyota, and Nissan created the Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti marquees back around 1990.
I drove the Genesis V70 3.3T model equipped with a turbocharged 3.3-liter V6 engine. It's rated at 365 hp and 376 lb-ft torque. Those are pretty big numbers on paper. On the road, the car's power delivery system has a bit of a split personality. At part throttle and especially at lower speeds there's not a lot of power there. It feels like a typical entry luxury car. Dig deeper into the throttle, though, especially when already at highway speeds (45+ mph) and the car rockets forward. Mid-range acceleration is absurdly strong after the kinda-weak initial acceleration.
On the luxury side this car seems to tick all the right boxes. The sculpted sheet metal is handsome. I got unsolicited compliments from strangers on it. Inside everything's covered with quality materials and works tightly. The informatics system was fussier than it needed to be. Too many functions are buried underneath too few buttons with hieroglyphic labels or require navigating through hierarchical menus in the nav system. That's a common design weakness in modern cars.
The G70 was comfortable. I drove it 670 miles in three days. When I said it was a rental I didn't mean I just drove it between the airport & the hotel a few times. I really put it to the test. In that time it was always easy to live with. ...Except for that one weird time when the dashboard display switched itself into Korean for no reason I could imagine (I hadn't changed any settings), didn't reset when I stopped and restarted the car, and mysteriously changed itself back to English 20-30 minutes later.
Would I buy a Genesis? Well, I'm not really in the market for this kind of car. But if I were it'd be a contender. I'm definitely turned off by the lack of low end acceleration comparable to its explosive midrange power. The thing is, compared to its competition— which includes everything from a Lexus ES to a BMW 3-series to a Mercedes Benz C-class— it's a lot of car for the money. I haven't priced everything out, but I expect that the G70 3.3T's starting MSRP in the mid $40k range, $40k with the base 2.0T engine, way undercuts what the others charge. So as always with Hyundai, it may come down to getting something nice though not the best at a compelling price.
Genesis is a luxury sub-brand from Hyundai. After Hyundai established itself in the US market as first a brand making cheap but reliable cars, then a brand making inexpensive but comfortable and reliable mid-market cars, now it's looking to establish itself as a luxury player as well. For that it markets its luxury cars under the Genesis name, not Hyundai. It's similar to how Honda, Toyota, and Nissan created the Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti marquees back around 1990.
I drove the Genesis V70 3.3T model equipped with a turbocharged 3.3-liter V6 engine. It's rated at 365 hp and 376 lb-ft torque. Those are pretty big numbers on paper. On the road, the car's power delivery system has a bit of a split personality. At part throttle and especially at lower speeds there's not a lot of power there. It feels like a typical entry luxury car. Dig deeper into the throttle, though, especially when already at highway speeds (45+ mph) and the car rockets forward. Mid-range acceleration is absurdly strong after the kinda-weak initial acceleration.
On the luxury side this car seems to tick all the right boxes. The sculpted sheet metal is handsome. I got unsolicited compliments from strangers on it. Inside everything's covered with quality materials and works tightly. The informatics system was fussier than it needed to be. Too many functions are buried underneath too few buttons with hieroglyphic labels or require navigating through hierarchical menus in the nav system. That's a common design weakness in modern cars.
The G70 was comfortable. I drove it 670 miles in three days. When I said it was a rental I didn't mean I just drove it between the airport & the hotel a few times. I really put it to the test. In that time it was always easy to live with. ...Except for that one weird time when the dashboard display switched itself into Korean for no reason I could imagine (I hadn't changed any settings), didn't reset when I stopped and restarted the car, and mysteriously changed itself back to English 20-30 minutes later.
Would I buy a Genesis? Well, I'm not really in the market for this kind of car. But if I were it'd be a contender. I'm definitely turned off by the lack of low end acceleration comparable to its explosive midrange power. The thing is, compared to its competition— which includes everything from a Lexus ES to a BMW 3-series to a Mercedes Benz C-class— it's a lot of car for the money. I haven't priced everything out, but I expect that the G70 3.3T's starting MSRP in the mid $40k range, $40k with the base 2.0T engine, way undercuts what the others charge. So as always with Hyundai, it may come down to getting something nice though not the best at a compelling price.
