LET’S SWEAT THE DETAILS
SMALL STUFF COUNTS AT THE BIG END OF TOWN
IN WHAT WAS an unsettling epiphany recently, I was alerted by a reader’s letter to the possibility that some of you are not nearly as fascinated by the minutiae of my motoring life as I am. You come to this section for car facts, dammit. Lots of pithy, irrefutable facts.
So, as I pointed the G70 west towards Bathurst for a media event at Mount Panorama recently, I made a vow: I would concentrate on nothing but the finer details of the Genesis owner/driver experience, and leave out all the fascinating bits about dogs, girlfriends, bicycles and ’90s rock.
Let’s start with the radar cruise.
It’s mostly very good, and holds the prescribed speed within a couple of km/h even in hilly terrain. If
I was calibrating it, I’d make the acceleration phase a bit quicker once a slower car in front has moved aside, but overall it’s supremely intuitive to set, adjusts in single-kay increments, and works about as well as you could reasonably expect from a camera and binary code.
I’m less enamoured with the lane-keep assist though. For starters, it’s not infallible, and I do what I do with every car: automatically hit the button to disable it, because phantom tugging at the wheel to admonish me creeps me out.
Let’s talk cabin liveability. The fundamentals of seat comfort, driving position, visibility, instrument clarity and HUD are all great. I’m less crazy about the too-small bottleholders in the front doors, while the centre console box is adequate, not generous. Overall, the cabin design feels utterly conventional, and leaves plenty of room for a bit more thoughtfulness and design flair in further iterations.
Of the five drive modes, I really only use two: Comfort, for 90 percent of my driving; and Custom, into which I’ve mapped the firm damper setting, aggressive engine and trans calibration, but retained the lighter, more nuanced steering weight.
That leaves me wishing for a manual hold mode for the transmission, which only retains a paddle-selected gear for 20 or so seconds.
Then there’s the aural performance in Sports mode. It’s pleasant, but just too tame. Given Comfort is so hushed and refined, surely there’s scope to calibrate Sports mode for louder, more invigorating aural fireworks?
Okay, now I’m nit-picking. To slap myself out of it, I rolled onto the Mount Panorama circuit as a soft twilight embraced the mountain, disabled the ESC and had a few runs up and down from Skyline to the Elbow. Oooh yeah.
Details count for plenty, but they lose relevance if the fundamentals don’t shine. The G70 has got this side of its game well sorted.