THE BURNING QUESTION
GETTING TO THE CRUX OF THE GENESIS IDENTITY CRISIS
THINGS you hear when collecting friends in a Genesis GV80: “Ohhh, is this a Bentley!? I’ve never been in a Bentley! Isn’t this fancy! Actually, is it an Aston? The grille is more Aston Martin… Oh I don’t know! What is it!?”
The giddy sense of expectation is so high as they scramble into the back seats and start cooing over the diamond-stitch leather that it feels a tremendous anticlimax to say, “Well it’s actually a… Genesis.”
Mostly this is met with perplexed looks, but they’re preferable to what happened when one group of friends included someone who knew their cars. “No, guys, cool your jets,” he proclaimed. “It’s just a Hyundai.”
I’ll admit to feeling slightly stung by that one (I shudder to think how I’d feel if I’d bought a GV80), although these interactions have taught me three things: that badge snobbery is alive and well in Australia, that the GV80’s perceived luxury and quality is the equal of more expensive rivals, and that Genesis still has a long way to go to achieve meaningful brand recognition in our market. Aside from that one know-it-all mate, everyone who has asked about the GV80 has led with, “So what’s a Genesis?”
But while the opinion of others might dip slightly on learning that the GV80 is a fancy Hyundai, my respect for this enormous SUV continues to grow. Driven straight onto my driveway after being poked, prodded and pulled during COTY testing, I barely had enough time to give it a quick wash before it was back on the road heading 1000km north to visit family.
This annual trek home for Christmas is a brilliant litmus test of a car’s cabin space and comfort, highway refinement and backroad handling. And, in the GV80’s case, it’s also a trip with a clear benchmark given I’ve completed this exact route in many of its direct rivals, including the Audi Q7, Mercedes
GLE and BMW X5. And against that
competitor set, the Genesis holds its own… with a few exceptions.
Cabin comfort and refinement are key strengths, helped by excellent NVH suppression and an active noise cancelling system (developed by Harmon) that further reduces unwanted tyre and road roar. Combine the hushed cabin with supportive seats and an airy and well-appointed second row with its own heated/cooled seats, multiple USB ports and climate control, and the GV80 really is a serene thing for a family to cover big distances.
No complaints about the boot space either. With the third row folded, the GV80 offers a sizeable 727L and is easy to pack thanks to a wide and low loading bay.
It wafts along the highway with aplomb, but while the soft, longstroke suspension is a key strength, fast and winding B-roads did expose some body control issues.
Pitching the GV80 into a tight turn brings more roll than you get in rivals, and if you hit a big mid-corner bump the dampers require two or even three strokes to regain composure. That’s not to say it feels wayward or uncontrolled, and once you learn to account for the body movement and weight transfer it’s actually quite fun to hustle 2.5 tonnes of SUV through a challenging sequence of turns (like watching a sumo wrestler deftly navigate a football agility drill), but it wasn’t long before my passengers started to complain.
Happily, there is a fix. Configuring the ‘Custom’ drive mode to set the dampers into Sport while keeping everything else is Comfort or Auto brings some much-needed control to the damping without introducing any unwanted harshness.
A bigger annoyance, though, fell to the cruise control. While the adaptive system was fine on the freeway, it was hopeless on undulating roads and would regularly drop into the low 90km/h bracket when heading up hills and speed beyond 110km/h on downhill sections. It became so frustrating that I eventually stopped using the system altogether.
So was the GV80 a match for its more expensive German rivals? On this particular route, yes it was. Body control and cruise control issues aside, we emerged from a 14-hour day in the saddle free of any aches or pains and with enough mental capacity to happily answer the inevitable questions: “Wow, this is nice! What’s a Genesis?”