Genesis GV80 _ No Longer a Copycat

The Genesis GV80: A Review of its Unique Identity and Features

We discussed the GV80 with someone who is not on the sportier side, and they pointed out that their mentality was different from the G80. They noted that the design of the GV80 was much different from the G80, but still impressive in its own right. However, if you're looking for a cruiser and are in the $50,000 price range, there aren't many competitors that can match the GV80's body control. The suspension tuning is close to the Q7's, with great wide isolation.

The GV80 also features a four-cylinder engine, which is not bad at all - it's actually great. This is particularly true if you're getting into this trim level and want an economical option. However, as we move up in price, the twin-turbo V6 becomes a necessity. The twin-turbo V6 makes more sense than the four-cylinder engine, especially when the price tag exceeds $60,000.

One of the main attractions of the GV80 is its unique identity. This is one of the first Genesis products that has truly stood out on its own, rather than copying and pasting from previous efforts. The interior design is uniquely Genesis, with a bold and flashy aesthetic that's sure to turn heads. However, some may find this "gaudy" quality off-putting.

The GV80 also excels in terms of features and value for money. When you're in the $50,000 price range, the GV80 offers an impressive list of standard features that rival those found in more expensive German SUVs. The interior is luxurious and refined, with plenty of premium materials and attention to detail.

However, as we move up in price, some compromises are made. One notable exception is the Lexicon audio system, which performs very well compared to other audio systems found in similar vehicles. This is particularly true when compared to generic Harman Kardon systems found in Audi, BMW, and Lexus products. The only downside to this system is that it can be a bit bass-heavy, but this can be tweaked out with the EQ.

When it comes to ride quality and refinement, some may find that the GV80 doesn't quite live up to its German counterparts. This is likely due to the fact that the GV80 has been raised on stilts, which has required some concessions in terms of suspension tuning and materials. However, this is unlikely to be a major issue for most drivers.

Finally, there's the elephant in the room: dealership experience. Hyundai and Genesis have struggled to provide a seamless customer experience since launching this brand three or four years ago. Dealerships often struggle to treat customers with the same level of professionalism as their competitors. However, Genesis is working to address this issue by introducing its concierge service, which allows customers to have a new car delivered to them for test driving and then picked up from them when they're finished. This service has been implemented by around 80% of dealerships and also applies to service, making it easier for customers to interact with Genesis vehicles.

Overall, the GV80 is an impressive first SUV from Genesis, particularly in its lower price range. While it may not be perfect, it offers a unique identity, plenty of features, and great value for money. If you're willing to look beyond some minor compromises, the GV80 is definitely worth considering - especially if you're in the market for a luxury SUV that can rival German counterparts without breaking the bank.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe brand new genesis gv80 much like the g80 sedan we did a video on this is all new and unlike the previous products in their portfolio this was designed from the ground up to be a luxury car not shared with any other hyundai and kia product so this is truly the launch of a new generation vehicle from the outside to the inside there's far less copying and pasting from other pre-premium brands more so on the interior space and i'm going to get right into that when you look at the door panel for example this is always a great entry into the car you see the leathers the cross stitching on the leather how they have these smooth flowing geometric lines there's use of alloys matte wood trim that's real wood soft leather on the upper door and the bottom plastics don't look like they're out of a 20 000 car and this is something you see in the mid-level luxury cars that's a difficult pill to swallow this does not look cheap at all and this isn't even the highest trim level i'm looking at the 3.5 t twin turbo motor that is the advanced plus trim for 65 thousand now the base price starts at forty nine thousand for the four popper turbo and rear wheel drive let's start with the driver area seats feel good the leather feels soft and supple and one of their engineers decided on a long road trip that he was no longer going to have fatigue in his driver's seat so he created the ergo motion design which is not a massager it follows the function of more of a medical bed that has air bladders if someone is bedridden for quite a while the bed adjusts itself to prevent pressure or bed sores and that's what this seed is also trying to emulate moving your shifting your pelvis or your hips moving your back around just a little bit so those pressure points don't settle in and create fatigue so this will turn on based on a preset time to make sure that it's moving you around on longer trips certain things like the steering wheel heater the seat heaters and the seat coolers are all right in front of you easy to turn on and off the physical controls in here are some of the best that hyundai has or genesis has ever done it's easy to interact with there's a good solid clicky feel there's just enough physical controls without you having to constantly interact with the touch screen now this does have the same rotary dial that we found in the g80 and while i understand what they were trying to do they wanted it to be something for everybody to avoid all the complaints people want touch screens they want a touch pad they want a rotary dial they want a d-pad it has all of it and while genesis says that they did design all of these inputs for the ui there's still a disconnect there between trying to get from one menu to the other sometimes you have to use the d-pad sometimes you have to use the rotary knob and it takes a while for your brain to get adjusted to which input am i going to use next we're going to look at the gauge cluster on the lower trim levels you have physical a physical speedometer that has a bezel around it and then for the tachometer and multi-information screen you can see a screen and kind of configure however you want when you get to the upper trim levels you get to the 3d auto stereoscopic display which has three layers to it when you turn on the 3d layer it switches itself to give you more depth of field so it can bring up to the forefront certain parts of the gauge cluster that are important to see and then background other things it's not trying to be gimmicky it's trying to be more usable but one of the side effects of this technology is you have to combine an ultra high resolution screen which this kind of is and you have to have your head in one place so they use eye tracking sensors infrared eye tracking sensors to make sure that it's trying to keep everything in focus based on where your eyes are at but you do lose brightness you do lose luminosity when it's on so and you also lose resolution and that's a byproduct of this type of display technology so it's one of those if you don't like the blurry effect that the 3d gives you you can turn it off but it is an interesting implementation again this car doesn't have it but you can opt for that everything else in here is much like the g80 the dashboard's a little bit different but it's ultra high quality everything feels so well screwed together the textures are great the infotainment screen is amazing the black levels contrast everything is quick feels good the space and the back is very usable great for two adults and the hatch space is also excellent for an enlarged sedan if you want more than what the g80 has this is more americanized and we're going to talk about that more in the shop so let's head in there oh boy mark here's a little taste of soul this is the gv80 and we just got done doing the g80 as well however since then we spent a lot of time with our north american genesis rep jared who's helped fill in some of the gaps that we didn't have covered prior so let's talk about the business first genesis as a brand so most people have this concept with the korean cars is that they are cheaper because they can use inferior products however the reality is the way they save you money is that they are vertically integrated because of the korean government and the way that they own every facet of their car business they own the ships they're being shipped on they own the the robotics the manufacturing processes and the actual raw material hyundai is one of the largest manufacturers of steel in the world that's how they're saving you money yeah and that that does have a huge trickle-down effect they can keep things in-house and that also should also help them in terms of quality and integration of other products so when you look at this things like gearbox engine most of the suspension parts braking systems usually are all made by hyundai including all the things that you mentioned which helps save the end user money the next thing to talk about is unlike the g80 the gv80 was designed for the north american market the g80 is a car that they designed for korea in fact it's one of the best selling cars in korea so a lot of the suspension tuning which does differ slightly for north america and some of the design objectives were tailored for a korean buyer where the gv80 because the suv craze here in north america is tailored for us yes and that's where the big differentiator is here from genesis from where they were to where they are now this one is definitely thought about us and like canada so what that does is it makes some fundamental differences in exterior design and overall setup of suspension and how the car feels or suv feels so when we look at this we know that the gv80 and the g80 are now on the m3 architecture which is their code name or their code for their body structure the m2 is the previous generation and how it's evolved is this has gotten stiffer it's gotten lighter the gv80 uses five different types of high strength steels where the g80 only uses four they use high strength steels and hot stampings in the ring area and the back which is on the body and white it reinforces the moon roof or panoramic roof area in the back glass which also helps with nvh reduction they in the m2 architecture of the previous generation they had to use a lot of stiffeners and reinforcement braces that they no longer have to use because there's so much high strength steel there's also more aluminum here in terms of the hang on panels hood door panels things like that to save weight and then at least in the g80 there's way more aluminum in the suspension something that i'm very surprised to see disappear in the gv80 and to me when you look at it it's probably due to cost cutting and you know although they share the same architecture they don't share the same suspension architecture subframe in front is stamped steel all your suspension components in the front are now stamped steel or cast steel the only thing that's aluminum here that's a carryover is the knuckle and upper upper a-arm design and of course the aluminum shock towers are the same but the back is another huge change you don't have aluminum subframe in the back and most of your suspension components at least on the upper half are also steel so there's been weight reduction here but not in the suspension and i think that's kind of a big deal really and you notice when you're driving this as well the suspension tuning is not i mean it's similar but it's not they do feel like two distinct cars in the way they ride we were earlier talking about this you thought it was because of the like the increased basically traffic like the more compression that's in it but you notice that this there's a little bit more harshness and just i don't know i want to say it feels stiffer even though i don't think it is and some of this just could be the frequency or vibration that's transmitting through the suspension back into you but they still carry over a lot of the like frequency and vibration isolators and you see this this is really rare to see it on a brake caliper so if you get any vibration from the braking it's canceling out some of those unwanted frequencies there so they still put that here they still put all the nvh panels all the body adhesives that hyundai has gone crazy with there's so much body adhesive in those cars and it does it's very isolated on the inside i just don't think it drives as well as the g80 and now that we've kind of had them back to back now the other thing to talk about as we said in-house the gearbox we have the same gearbox in the gv80 and g80 and they were carried over from the last generation uh g80 car and they've gone through three different iterations of the gearbox they've shrunk them down they've made them lighter and now they're better they're more responsive than the previous generation not from mechanical design it's entirely software and like basically electronic tuning to get this to feel more like the eight speed zf or something a little bit more competitive however as we're going to talk about in the drive it's not quite there it's not quite there but it's way better than what it was like in the g80 sport with the 3.3 liter twin turbo that was on the previous generation the trans is way faster here and i think you're going to appreciate that if you've been in those cars the next thing to talk about is the engine options you have a 3.5 liter twin turbo which is up from the 3.3 in the previous generation cars and you have a 2.5 liter turbo which i've asked it is identical to all the other hyundai and kia 2.5 liter turbos the tuning is different however because this runs on premium fuel so they're able to to eek out a little bit more horsepower and they might have changed some things with like engine mounts and all that for for lower end ph but the last thing to talk about is this is a rear-wheel drive architecture first which means rear-wheel drive and then they can add on all-wheel drive which is still rear biased in the case of this you have open differentials across all the models there's no limited slip differentials on any of that they try to like make some you know like electronic locking yeah so it's a lot of like software stuff in terms of uh brake torque vectoring it's there's no real mechanical system i will say this feels more natural though than like the front-wheel drive all-wheel drive system found in something like a sorrento this is supposed to be the middle product in their portfolio where the gv80 and g80 isn't supposed to be quite the couch that the g90 is but it doesn't ride as harsh or as sporty i'm going to use the quotations as the g70 or the future gv70 will be but really i think that's about it for the underbody jack let's get into the drive and see how this thing handles all right mark we're in the v6 genesis gv80 and we've already spent time in the gv84 popper as well so we're gonna be talking about both in this drive i can't wait i'm gonna put this in sport mode with the checkered flag because i win we got enhanced engine noise on oh wow i feel like i'm in a mclaren all right first question is this worth the price delta over the four-popper yes let's just get that out there why because it's better it's a twin turbo v6 it's more refined it's got more natural power delivery it doesn't sound horrible and granted you can turn the fake engine noise off which i would 100 percent do but it's not that the four cylinder is bad though mark i want to say that you and i both throw the four popper first and i told you i didn't find v4 popper in this anywhere as offensive as i did in the g80 okay so let's cover the basics of that then that decision decision-making process you can get the 4-popper gv80 for right around 50 000. it's like 49.5 and at that price point you're competing with the acura mdx and what was the other one rx and the rx as well the rx license the rx 350 and the mdx which are both v6s unfortunately that would be where they kind of have an advantage but you're getting a lot more here this to me in terms of architecture it's not on a shared architecture with all their other kind of mainstream cars it's way quieter it's way more refined this feels like a luxury experience so it is a steal at 50 but we're not in a 50 000 one no we're in a mid sixty thousand dollar model which puts you in competition with the x5 q7 and gle and here's my here's my debate and if you if you equip a x5 to the level that this is equipped with the same options it's nearly a ten thousand dollar delta and for once you and i different opinion you think people are still gonna buy the x5 yes where i think you could probably convince a suburbanite that this is the better vehicle not not a better vehicle the better purchase yeah and there we had this debate i don't know what car it was in where you know i basically knocked you out but the reality is once you get 65 000 plus so you can max this out around 73 which is a lot of money for for a brand like this you know you look at the japanese brands when they came out and they they did a lot better for cheaper and they're trying to do the same thing here but you brought this up like in your neighborhood everybody's john premium and everybody by default it's like grand theft auto everybody either has a mercedes or a bmw if you're like hey you are npc characters they're all white silver gray bmws mercedes audis it's going to take them a long time to penetrate that premium market buyer that has over 65 000 because when you're spending over 65 you're no longer cost conscious you're not as cost conscious as you are when you're like spending 25 to 30. so if you have bmw and audi mercedes monies or money not monies you're gonna put one of these badges in your garage because you mean if they're an affluent character and mummy yeah so there's nothing wrong with this in many ways it's better than the x5 in terms of ride isolation quietness refinement um it lacks in other areas which you can tell me all about so the first i'm going to bring up is this v6 let me let me floor it when you leave it in pure automatic the shifts are really really smooth however unlike the zf found in the audi and bmw when you take any sort of manual control like we talked about in the g80 it lacks that crispness and same with the v6 it does not have the smooth butteriness that the b58 has in the x5 or even the three liter turbocharged application in the audi i think most people are not going to notice that to be fair i feel like this is pretty close more closer to audi bmw is definitely on another level because their drivetrains can go from full soft or i'm sorry they can go from luxury cars to almost sports car feeling and that's the benefit that they have they can have a better dual personality than the genesis is and the genesis main thing is this is just a pure jeep more gt luxury car feel it's not on the sportier side we talked about it in the shop how their their mentality in the design of the gv80 was much different than the g80 but i think if you're looking for a cruiser and you're looking at that fifty thousand dollar price range there are very very few competitions much better body control than a mdx or rx the suspension tuning is close if not very similar to the q7's it's got great wide isolation and if you're getting this in a four cylinder the four cylinder is not bad it's in fact no it's not it's great i really think it's a really strong product in the lower 50s range yes it's a no-brainer yeah no if you're spending 60 it's not though like after that you have to go to the twin turbo v6 here that that makes a lot more sense i don't know i'm kind of mixed on this i think it's great i'm just trying to think of it from the buyers perspective that is looking at this like what they would pick apart and i'm i've really struggled to kind of to really find any faults with this other than kind of its quirkiness this is one of the first genesis products that has their own unique identity at least on the inside this is uniquely them there's far less copy and pasting that they've done in here from their past efforts and i i feel like they're starting to get a really strong identity and i think people are going to like that they're just not going to buy this over the german counterpart i think what this does well is it has that bellagio glo gaudiness about it where it's really in your face i sort of have money lots of chrome and blingy and it's it's better for it particularly in that 50 000 price range i don't have a lot of problems with it really at all when you're getting it cheaper and i think people will probably enjoy this product let's get into the final thoughts jack we'll talk about some of the pros and cons here all right final thoughts on the genesis gv80 their first suv and much like the g80 that it shares a platform with this is one of the best in its segment for around fifty thousand dollars in terms of isolation refinement and luxury car ride you can throw the sporty experience that's not trying to be that and even though this suv was more designed for the american market they've still blended a lot of the things that you want from an upper end luxury car it's a huge value and when you look at the features that they pack in here compared to the german brands it makes a lot more sense now when you start moving up in price that's where you have to make a decision what do you really need and around 60 grand the big thing is the lexicon audio that you can add it performs very well compared to some of the other generic harman counterparts in the audi machines and the bmws and it's even better than most of the mark levinson audios in the lexus products the only thing is base performance it's a little bass heavy but you can tweak some of that out with the eq but we'll throw up the graphs here i've already done a video on how to read these and explaining audio tests now this to me does not overall ride and it doesn't feel as fine refined as the g80 and i don't know if it's just because they raised it up they've had to make some concessions and stripping some of the suspension parts all the aluminum stuff out of the gv80 but again most people are not going to notice that unless you drive them back to back the last thing is the elephant in the room the dealership experience this is something that hyundai and genesis have frankly not done a good job with since they've launched this brand three or four years ago they've been fighting with dealerships the hyundai dealerships don't know how to treat customers like the competitors do one of the big things that hyundai corporate is trying to do while they're fixing that is introducing their concierge service which means they drop a new car off to you to test drive it and then pick it up from you so you can bypass that dealership experience completely and that's the way that i would do it there's about 80 percent of the dealerships participate in this but they also do that for service so if you want to experience the genesis product or you're thinking about shopping for it really cuts through a lot of the red tape or the phobia that a lot of people have about this brand but anyway overall the gv80 is a great first suv for them if you're not spending over 65 70 000 i think you're gonna really like this thing thanks for watching i'll see you next time you\n"