Genesis GV70: The Most Underrated Luxury SUV?
[Music] Now, percentages around the world vary, but I think it’s safe to say that there are a lot of people who really love SUVs. And I’ve had to remind myself and remind you what SUV stands for. for it was a term that was coined in an advert for the Jeep Cherokee in 1974, the sports utility vehicle. And it makes sense in America. It’s a huge country. There’s vast areas with no roads at all. So, you want a big vehicle with big wheels and high off the ground, four-wheel drive, so you can go off into the wilds, go camping, live in the wilds, and shoot animals. You know, they love shooting animals there. A great pastime for them. But then after a while they became very popular with people who live in cities. But SUVs made up 33%. That’s basically a third of all car sales in the UK in 2024. Really popular. It’s the most popular individual style of car. And 99% of those SUVs are petrol or petrol hybrid or diesel cars. And they’re immensely inefficient. and they use loads of fuel and they blat out loads of fumes out the back and that’s the reason I’m driving this. This is a big beautiful luxury SUV, but this one is 100% electric. That is the Genesis GV70 and this is everything electric cars. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean tech are funded by our fun-packed testtastic events in Farra, London, the Southwest, the North, Melbourne, and Sydney. And next up, everything electric farra, and new for UK viewers, you can now buy a battery EV and much more at everythingleelectric.store. Now, back to the episode. So, one of the things that I might be critical in this car is just the sheer level of of driver assistance, or you could call it driver interference, depending on how you feel. But, uh, the on the first long journey I did in the car, I hadn’t turned anything off. I just got in it and drove it and it did bing at me and bong and ding ding ding just like drives you insane. made me angry, made me stressed, made me, you know, less focused on the on the job of driving. So, it doesn’t work for me. There’s some people it does work for. So, I’m not saying it’s totally bad. I found it really annoying, and I think a lot of people would find it annoying. The good thing is you can turn all of that either right down or off altogether. But to do that, you need to stop. You need to stop where you’ve got a good signal on your phone or go through the manual on the car. takes quite a while and really go through the multiple levels of very sophisticated software, the multiple choices you have, the the the incredible um the sort of software tree of all the different things that this car can do is quite complicated. But the beauty of it is if you spend that time, so if you were going to buy or lease one of these cars, it’s really worth just sitting in it stationary off the road for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, going through all the settings and making it right for you. And then once you’ve done it, then it remembers and it knows. But the it is such a a a different car to drive when it’s not ponking and binging and donking at you. The really good things are like the lanekeeping assistance, which I’ve got a very neurotic about with my MG4, which has the worst lanekeeping assistance in the universe. This is brilliantly good. And I haven’t turned that off. I haven’t needed to. I haven’t been aware of it. It just helps you stay on the road. So, it just gently guides you around the corners. It wouldn’t steer you. It’s not like self-driving or anything like that, but it just gently eases you in. And if you go off the road too much, it goes but so unobtrusively that I really don’t mind about that. I I find that very very reassuring and uh doesn’t it doesn’t get get on my nerves. But it’s handling its power is really really impressive. I haven’t really used it in sport mode. It does have a sport mode. I’ve had a go in it and it’s you know it’s really fast but I don’t want to drive like that. And especially in a car like this which is a really comfortable car. It is so quiet. It is amazing. The road the the minimization of road and wind noise in this car is exceptionally good. It is really, really quiet. I mean, I know I can speak to you at this kind of level now. And you can still hear me. And I could probably go a little bit quieter and I think you’d still hear me. That is extraordinary. I’m in a car going along the road at 40 miles an hour. How did they do that? [Music] So, I’ve been driving this car for about a week and it’s been a really joyous experience. One of the little problems I had early on was how to charge it. So, I got it home and I think I’ll just plug it in. I’ve got to do loads of other things, but I’ll plug it in while I’m here. And I look for a charge port like there. No, there’s not one there. And I went around the other side looking for them exactly the same. That’s like blank. It’s kind of nice. There’s no little indentations. There’s nothing. I looked at the back. I could not work it out. I eventually had to literally look uh search for it online and I found that I had to look at all these little diamonds for a little indentation on the front and I found it. It’s just there. It’s tiny. You press that and there’s the charge port. That took me 15 minutes. So, Genesis is the luxury brand of Hyundai. And I have to say with all our experience on the show of Hyundai electric cars, they’re pretty good at making electric cars. Let’s leave it at that because this is effectively a converted petrol car. You know, you can get a petrol or and and maybe even a diesel version of this car, but this one is 100% electric, nothing else. Uh it it costs between £65,000 and £75,985. So, we’re not looking at a cheap econo box as we used to say in the old days. But it has a lot of pluses if you just ignore that for one moment. So, it has an 84 kWh usable battery pack, but it has 800 volt architecture, which means it charges really, really fast. I’ve done it once. I got it up to 220 uh kW. It was charging out off a off a Tesla charger. Um, which I mean it means in ideal circumstances you can charge from 10 to 80% in about 19 minutes. Not 20, not 18, about 19. And that is really good. Here’s a thing I like because one of the advantages that the other brand of cars that are designed in America uh has that when you put a charge point in the battery automatically starts warming up or cooling down to enable the maximum speed of charging. And it’s quite I haven’t seen other cars do that. This you can press a button and the battery starts to manually take itself either warmer or cooler for maximum charging speed which is a really really good thing. It has a 360 kW dual motor powertrain, four-wheel drive all the time, and it has about 500 horsepower, which means it’s not a sluggish car. It’s quite nippy if you want it to be. But it’s also really easy to drive it very, very smoothly. And there’s one reason why they’ve got that down to a fine art, and that is their regen braking. More on that in a moment. [Music] So, one of the really impressive things this car has is its uh ability to regenerate. And I’m now at the top of a very high road pass in West Wales. I can see the sea and loads of wind turbines. You can’t see those, but it’s an amazing view. And I’m starting to go down. So, I’m going to put the regen is controlled in different ways, but one of them is these paddles behind the steering wheel. So, I’ve got none on at the moment. And I’ve just driven 11 miles to get up this mountain at 2.3 miles to the kilowatt hour. And I’m now going down and there’s a 40 mph speed limit. So, I then put on regen. That’s taken me that’s slowed me down a little bit. And what it’s so basically I you don’t have to touch the brakes. And this is a really important aspect of electric vehicles in general, not just cars, that you can use the engine effectively, the electric motor as a brake. And when you apply uh more regenerative braking, you slow down. And I can show you here. I’m just avoiding a sheep. Um I can show you here that if I put it on to max. So that’s level three. Now we’re slowing right down. I’m just checking there’s no one behind me cuz it’s very annoying. that I haven’t touched the brakes, not once. My feet are nowhere near. And now if I let it off, it’s not just going to start rolling out. I’ve got actually got to give it a bit of well to get it moving. That is amazing. So I’m going down a hill and I can literally stop the car with the regen paddles. And you can because you’ve got effectively four levels from zero to max, you can really control the speed of the vehicle without ever touching the brakes. So there’s got numerous advantages. One, your brakes wear out much much slower in an electric car. That is a critically important thing when people say uh go on about wearing out your brakes because the car’s heavier. The whole point of electric cars is the tires last longer because there isn’t the sudden jolting acceleration going through gears rips tires to pieces. Combustion cars destroy tires really really quickly. They’re much much worse. That’s one. And two, brake brakes last way way longer in an electric car. And I’m going over the speed limit and it’s binging me. So I’ve got to slow down, which is so easy to do. And also there’s sheep around and I do not want to create mutton. So we have had an amazing day today driving around the Welsh hills. Uh it’s been incredible. We’ve met a lot of sheep and this car has proved itself beyond any argument to be supremely capable of just driving around for hours and hours and hours with what we’ve done today. Uh I just want to list the downsides of it. It’s a big car. It’s a heavy car. It’s an expensive car. It is really a kind of compact SUV, I guess you’d call it. It’s not one of the really big stupid ones with a massive diesel engine in. Uh I can’t help saying, you know, do we really need SUVs of any sort or cars this big. But the flip side of that is, well, if you’re going to get one, and they’re very popular, as I said early on, you know, if you’re going to get one, get an electric one. Get one of these. They It is brilliant. It can do everything a stupid dirty diesel SUV can do and it can do it better and it’s so much nicer to drive. There’s no argument. I won’t hear I’ve got to be able to tow 50 tons up a mountain. Shut up. Get a real life, get an electric SUV. If you can afford one, this is the one to get. It’s just it’s just stunningly good to drive. I I mean, I’ve now got to drive over 100 miles home and I honestly don’t care. So, from up here on the top of a Welsh mountain uh with my pals, the sheep are backing off a little bit now. Uh that’s it basically. Please do tell all your mates about uh everything electric cars. Please do subscribe yourself if you haven’t done already. If you get the chance to come along to one of our big live events coming up soon uh all over the place, well, Australia, Canada, and in the UK, then please do come along because they are amazing. One of these will be there, I’m sure. And uh as always, if you have been, thank you for watching. Now visit electric vehicles.expert where you can follow everything electric and keep current with clean technica, the driven electric and many more.
Robert heads to the Brecon Beacons to put the Genesis GV70 through its paces. As well as unearthing a few quirks from Hyundai’s premium brand, Robert takes full advantage of the Welsh mountains to see just how much he can squeeze out of this compact SUV’s battery pack – all thanks to some mighty impressive regenerative braking!
00:00 Genesis GV70
02:00 Driver assistance & Software
04:15 Handling & Power
05:00 Charging & Battery
07:50 Regenerative Braking
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