The advent of new model-year cars and SUVs means we too have gotta move ’em out, so here’s a scattershot roundup of recent Genesis brand drives — the high-end Hyundai luxury label that’s gradually grabbing a few more owners from German and Japanese brands, even here in Colorado. I just had a pleasant re-experience with the 2025 version of the very first Genesis I ever drove, the large GV80 SUV, a Prestige-level trim priced at over $81,000. A new, swept-roof Coupe model arrives this year, to directly compete with similar German models.
Ours was the traditional SUV shape, with room for five and more quilted Nappa leather and suede headliner than you can imagine possible. As I noted, it’s the nicest automobile interior this side of a Lincoln, with a beautiful cabin layout, simplified but glossy controls and seats that perch you in a posture-forward position, and then electronically enhance that each hour that you’ve been on the road. There are also automatic cologne dispensers – happily depleted before my drive and satin-glass-touch infotainment and HVAC controls like a new phone, plus interesting multicolored wood grain on the dash.
The two oversized knobs are indeed either infotainment or transmission controls; learn which is which quickly. You’ll have to decide if mirror-styled exterior highlights seem a little gauche to you, but the 22-inch wheels, the crosshatched wire grille and Bentley-esque face are all very imposing touches, as well as exhaust ports that are happily not puckered inside the rear bumper, as they are in the smaller GV70. The twin-turbo 3.
5-liter V6 engine sounds suspiciously like a flat-six when it’s tootling along at full throttle, and its 375 horsepower is effective at moving the big vehicle, though at not quite an AMG-styled pace. My guess is a 90-series, three-row version of the SUV is somewhere on the horizon. Right in the middle, and aimed at actual car fans, was the 2024 G70 sedan, in this case a rear-wheel-drive, $49,000 Sport Prestige model with a 300-horsepower 2.
5-liter four-cylinder turbo and 19-inch wheels. If Audi designed a four-door Mustang, the latter of which I hear may actually happen, you’d replicate the G70’s looks, complete with twin double-decker, low-profile LED lamps and a broad mesh grille. Depending on who you ask, it either has nothing or everything in common with the high-power, four-doored Kia Stinger.
They’re both sleek cruisers, with mine gaining Brembo brakes, a Lexicon audio system and ventilated front seats; all-wheel drive is optional. Even more Stinger-like is the higher-end 3.3-liter turbo edition, with 365 horsepower; the 2.
5-liter will get you going as fast as you’d like, with 28 highway MPG as a nice tradeoff. As with the rest of the family, G70 gets comfortable quilted leather seating and door inserts. The infotainment system is a smallish, 10.
25-inch horizontal screen high on the dash, plus hard control buttons and touch-sensitive HVAC inputs, as well as a slightly peculiar back-and-forth gear lever. An eight-mode drive selector gives you plenty of choices (Sport+ being maybe a little too aggressive for public roads). Finally, we spent some time many months ago in the 2024 GV60 EV, largely unchanged from a similar model I drove a year earlier.
For those seeking another relatively short-range, extremely high-powered SUV that’s a little smaller than the GV70 we drove last fall , the $71,000 Performance model of the GV60 is a glossy, twin-motor cruiser that’ll hit 60 mph in under four seconds. It is available as a simpler, 225-horsepower rear-wheel-drive model that’s rated at nearly 300 miles of range, but the high-output version – 429 horsepower, with a 10-second overboost of 483 hp for cavorting – is more in the 230-something-mile range of a car like the Kia EV6 GT . Or far, far less, if you drive it like it has almost 500 electric horsepower on tap.
The 77.4 kilowatt-hour battery supports fast charging, if you know where to find fast charging. It is kind of an odd little car, with 21-inch wheels and only 178 inches of body, but that combination helps make it a totally silent, perfectly smooth and highly capable cornering machine.
It’s also loaded up with the full range of Genesis prestige features like Nappa leather and a Bang & Olufsen audio system. That includes the wonderfully bizarre “crystal sphere” shifter which looks like you’re about to have your fortune told, then rolls over to become yet another mildly disorienting Genesis knob-style shift knob. There’s also fingerprint biometric scanning and even facial recognition to leave your key fob behind, forever.
Andy Stonehouse’s column “Mountain Wheels” publishes Saturdays in the Summit Daily News. Stonehouse has worked as an editor and writer in Colorado since 1998, focusing on automotive coverage since 2004. He lives in Golden.
Contact him at [email protected]..
