Inside Hyundai’s ‘poshly pleasant’ foray into luxury with the Genesis GV70

First Toyota delivered its luxury offshoot Lexus and now Hyundai is joining the party with its up-market Genesis. Driving it makes me think it’s time to launch a premium version of myself.

Genesis GV70: Handsome and subtle with stolen touches of Aston Martin

I’ve been thinking of launching a more premium version of myself, just as Toyota did with its luxury offshoot, Lexus, and Hyundai is now doing a little more quietly, with Genesis. The new me will attempt to be less slovenly, and wear better clothes; I even intend to work out what a pocket square is (I always assumed it was a very small pet nerd).

I will also use more $100 words, like brocade and peripatetic, and will compare the vehicles I review to Russian ballet and cognac rather than AC/DC and beer. This will, I trust, allow me to charge significantly more for my work, and lead people from the higher echelons of society to want to show me off to their friends.

This poncey plan was hatched while I spent a week being intermittently bemused and impressed by the Genesis GV70, a vehicle that feels like it could be, or should be, an EV, because sometimes it is. Allow me to elucidate. The GV70 is a medium-sized SUV that looks poshly pleasant, as long as you don’t stand behind it. Handsome and subtle with stolen touches of Aston Martin about it at the front (the sharp headlights are particularly stylish), it is let down entirely by a big wedge of not-posh plastic skirt below the rear tailgate, one that suggests Genesis was doing really well with designing a car that looked more expensive than its sister Hyundais, but then ran out of money. Or ideas.

Speaking of filthy lucre, if you’ve got a lot you can have the very best version of the GV70, the Electrified – a fully electric car with 360kW, 700Nm, a range of 445km, a 0 to 100km/h time of 4.2 seconds, and a price tag of $127,800. I’ve driven the Electrified and it genuinely is one of the more impressive efforts to make a capacious family SUV out of an EV. It feels effortlessly quick and suitably silent.

The GV70 I’m driving here, however, is the entry-level $68,786 all-wheel-drive variant, powered by a turbocharged 2.5-litre engine that feels and sounds the opposite of effortless (224kW and 422Nm, and a zero to 100km/h time of 6.1 seconds).

Inside the Genesis GV70.

This is a problem, because if you’re going to try to sell people on the idea that your brand is premium there are certain things your cars must do. First, they must look expensive from a distance, a feat Genesis manages across the board. Then they must also feel pleasant to the touch inside, with soft places to rest your elbows, a steering wheel of supple leather and an air – indeed a scent – of rich sweetness, like newly printed US dollars.

In terms of driving, it’s vital that a vehicle from a premium brand rides properly, which the GV70 does, and by properly I mean that it should deal with a rough road surface the way that politicians deal with the truth, encouraging you to feel like it doesn’t exist.

On top of that, and most importantly, a high-end, high-dollar car should make driving feel easy-breezy. The engine should provide prodigious shove with barely a shrug (as the Electrified version of the GV70 does) and while it’s OK for the power plant to sing and shout when encouraged, it should never moan, whine or complain like a heavy smoker trying to run up Everest, which, I’m afraid, is very much the kind of noise produced by the overworked four-cylinder engine here (there’s also a mid-spec twin-turbo V6 option at $83,276, which I’m sure does a better job).

’The design is let down entirely by a big wedge of not-posh plastic skirt below the rear tailgate.

I tried switching the Genesis to its Sport and Sport+ modes, more in optimism than hope, but that made it sound like there were two robots beating each other to death under the bonnet, with one of them crying.

Now, it’s possible that I’m being a bit harsh, and I’ll admit that, driven gently, this GV70 is a fine enough companion and represents some kind of value at its price (I liked the way the aircon automatically blows cold air on your back on a hot day, although the seat massage function is just weird and feels like someone is making forceful balloon animals under your butt) but I feel that any vehicle like this has to be compared to the German triumvirate of BMW, Mercedes and Audi, all three of which simply do this kind of thing better.

It did also strike me that the average motorist might not note all, or any, of the criticisms I had, particularly about the engine noise, because late in our week together I was driving my almost-licensed son around when he said, perhaps trying to engage me with a sudden interest in cars, that the GV70 felt quite fast. So fast, in fact, that he thought it was an EV.

Fortunately I will forgive him anything, at least in part because he strikes me as a new and improved version of myself with much better hair, a kind of Corby Genesis, in fact.