2022 Genesis G80 Electric
Discussion
I've just collected my new(-ish) car, this rather handsome Genesis G80 Electrified:
I'll start with the obvious questions:
What's a Genesis?
Hyundai's attempt at 'doing a Lexus', recognisable by their distinctive 'two horizontal lines' light signature. Their marketing strategy seems to be:
1. Rename the Scottish Open Golf tournament "The Genesis Scottish Open"
2. ????
3. Profit
Maybe it would work better if they made it clear they were selling cars rather than Bibles or prog rock albums? Anyway, in the same way Citroen capitalised on the reputation of the Citroen DS and spun it off into a higher-end brand and Seat capitalised on the sporting reputation of the Cupra, Hyundai looked at the success of the 2015 Hyundai Genesis (UK sales: 48) and spun it off into a luxury brand. They seem to do be doing well in China, the US and their home market and have shipped over 1.5m vehicles worldwide, but expansion into the UK market hasn't exactly matched Jaecoo for sudden market domination. HowManyLeft says there are 4862 Genesis cars on UK roads, which is either a bit disappointing or over 100x more than before, depending on how much of a glass-half-full person you are. The GV60 SUV dominates UK sales figures, being a slightly more luxurious platform-sharing cousin of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6.
What's a G80?
A South Korean Bentley if you're being kind (or spotting the influence of the designer Luc Donckerwolke who also did the Bentley Flying Spur, Lamborghini Diablo, Audi A2 and Hyundai Elantra), an Aston Martin from Temu (according to someone who nearly got thrown off the Facebook group for that oner) or in the words of one YouTuber "The Best Grandad Car in the World", which is the description that I prefer.
One thing Genesis do brilliantly is understandable model designations. "G" means saloon "GV" means SUV and 60, 70, 80 or 90 indicates how big it is. Sportier models used to be designated "Sport", but nowadays they use "Magma" to mean performance (usually coupled with a lot of painfully orange paint). The G80 is therefore a non-sporty saloon that's roughly the same size as an E-class Merc ('midsize' if you're American, or 'I'm not driving that, it's way too big' if you're my other half). It's also the range-topper here in the UK where we don't get the S-Class sized G90.
My car is a MKII G80. We didn't get the MKI over here, but in 5.0 V8 form it went down pretty well in America. We also didn't get the chrome-heavy 2024 facelift until 2025, at which point Genesis UK decided that the slightly slower LWB version should no go from being an option you can't get in this county to being the only type they sell. This leaves the UK with no MKI, but with two quite visually distinct MKIIs.
So far so confusing. What's a G80 E?
E stands for "Electrified" and indicates an EV. I told you they were good at understandable model designations. They are also pretty hot at hiding charging flaps - can you spot it?
Press the diamond with a G in it. Anyway, rRather than spend billions on developing an EV-only luxury platform like Mercedes did for the EQE/EQS, Genesis saved a few bob and stuffed motors and batteries into their existing ICE car. The result is a noticeably compromised car.
Despite the long bonnet there's no frunk, there's a big motor-housing shaped lump in the boot that both compromises the luggage space and stops the rear seats folding down and the floor is 3 inches higher than in it's ICE counterpart, resulting in a disappointing lack of headroom that probably was a dealbreaker for a lot of potential customers. Was this the wrong call? I guess you'd have to ask a Mercedes accountant that one.
Sales figures for the pre-facelift G80E were reportedly 217 in the US and about 65 in the UK, so I've joined a pretty exclusive club, especially as not that all the ones that are registered in the GB are necessarily sold, as I'll explain in a bit.
How did I end up buying one?
I've always been a fan of a luxury barge (my first car was an XJ-S V12, and I had a fully loaded Granada Scorpio when my mates had Astras), and a bit of a gadget freak. I was an early EV adopter having picked up a near fully loaded ex-demonstrator BMW i3 for a bargain price in 2017, because BMW dumped a whole load of demonstrators on the market when they brought out a bigger battery. Nine years of near trouble-free motoring later the i3's interior was starting to show its age and I could afford something nicer. I'd had my eye on some German depreciation monsters for a while, and about 6 months ago when my car budget and used EQS/Taycan prices started to overlap I decided it was time to start looking.
Given that I'd rather walk than own an SUV, that Elon Musk gives me the ick and that Lucid haven't got round to doing RHD cars my initial shortlist was:
Mercedes EQS
Mercedes EQE
Porsche Taycan
Audi E-tron GT
MG Cyberster
Ok, that last one doesn't quite fit, but having a mid-life crisis at 57 ought to guarantee I'll live to 114, right? Sadly not quite fitting was something of a theme with the Cyberster, as I later found out that at 6ft0 I literally do not fit in one with the roof up - but I'm jumping ahead...
After pouring over Autotrader for hours on end I found I couldn't pull off the 'bargain dealer demonstrator because there's a facelift' trick with the EQS or Taycan for budget reasons, or with the E-tron and EQE for 'they haven't bothered doing a facelift' reasons. As the months went on and and I grew more familiar with the intricacies of the Porsche and Mercedes options lists and it became obvious that I'd be either compromising on a low-spec car, settling for something towards the end of it's battery warranty or be in for a long wait to get the perfect spec. I cast the net a bit wider and poked around on Autotrader for other options, adding the BMW i5, DS 8, Polestar 2 and G80E as footnotes on my shortlist.
Eventually I decided the time was right for some test drives. Google maps found me a nice route that took in MG, Merc and Porsche in a pretty straight line. By chance I spotted a Genesis dealer on the same road and I knew they had the only used G80E within 90 miles of me, so that got added as a stop on the way.
Merc couldn't find their car, MG couldn't physically fit me into theirs but the G80E was lovely - I felt instantly at home. It reminded me a lot of my XJ-S, unnecessarily big, faster than it needed to be, sumptuously comfortable and a blend of tech and retro on the inside. The G80E is, in a word, tasteful.
Later, I drove a Taycan, which was technically outstanding in a lot of ways, and is probably my dream new car, but the baffling infinite option list, lack of one-pedal-driving and scary insurance/maintenance costs for the ones I could afford helped me make my decision, which was that an EQE in the top 'Exclusive Luxury' trim would be the perfect car for me - it's a gadget freak's dream luxury car, a bit more affordable than the Porsche and not quite as huge as the EQS. Job done! The test drive would be a formality and then it was just a matter of waiting for the right spec at the right price.
Next week I drove an EQE and I hated it. The haptics felt cheap. The interior looks great in photos but feels like it's trying too hard in person. I wasn't comfy. I found the HUD distracting and in the flesh the jelly-mould styling was at best acceptable (yes, I know, as a former BMW i3 owner I don't have a leg to stand on here, but this is my story so I'm allowed to bend the rules a bit). The EQE was, as an Islander would say, "Totally my type on paper", but I just didn't want to own one.
Cue the Top Gear meme where Clarkson says "This is brilliant... but I like this".
The G80E's drivers seat is simply a very pleasant place to be in. It can be fitted with all the gadgetry I could want (heated and cooled 18-way adjustable massaging seats - mmm!) without it all being in my face.
It also has the EQE300 beaten on performance (365hp AWD vs 242hp RWD), on price, on rear window visibility (appalling on the Merc) and on styling. The Merc wins on interior space, practicality and range, but why listen to your head when you could listen to your heart? Next question...
If I wanted an electric Hyundai, why didn't I save a fortune and get a cheap and cheerful one like the new Inster for example?
Because this was cheaper.
Cheaper?!?!
Yes. You don't have to go particularly wild on the configurator to get a Hyundai Inster Cross above the price I just paid for a G80E that's stuffed with over £10k of options and has just 1400 miles on the clock. Fair enough, this is a 2022 one previous owner car, but that previous owner was Genesis themselves, so I'm pretty sure the looked after it and kept the service history up to date. Here's where the perfect depreciation storm comes together...
Remember that golf tournament? Genesis had a fleet of approximately a third of the country's entire supply of G80Es that were entirely dedicated to ferrying Golfers around once a year. This February, following the LWB facelift, they seem to have dumped a pile of high-spec ultra-low milage cars onto a pretty much non-existant secondhand market all at once. At that point Electric G80s outnumbered Internal Combustion ones on Autotrader by 4:1, despite the sales ratio being 4:1 the other way. Since then their dealer network has been staring at hell of a lot of depreciating metal that's not been shifting, so there's been a race to the bottom on pricing. Being a complete geek, I've got the Autotrader price tracking plug-in and I used it to made a spreadsheet tracking all 22 cars that were on the market. A bit of crafty formula writing and I could see these cars were having their prices cut by an average of £2100 per car per month. They only really started moving off forecourts about 3 weeks ago.
I put in an offer on the last one that fit my perfect spec of dark paint, white leather and nearly all options ticked (I wasn't fussed about the £3k 'executive pack' that makes the back seat experience a lot more luxurious - read on to find out why), and thanks to a man at the dealership it was very simple to negotiate a deal I was very happy with.
Here's a Comparison:
Ok, that last one was close, but as a game of Top Trumps goes, it's pretty one-sided. The Inster does get a sunroof though, which isn't an option on the G80 E, because that coupled with the battery pushing the floor up would leave the car with Ford GT40 levels of headroom. What the G80 gets instead is the option of ...
SOLARFREAKIN' ROADWA... sorry, Solar freakin' Roof Panels. These top the car's battery up by a claimed 'up to 2 miles a day'. Not quite into Aptera territory, but as my commute is about a mile and a half I might actually end up beating the Inster on fuel costs as well as everything else. Doing the maths on the £1360 original cost of this option reveals it's a bit of a gimmick, with break-even happening at about 11 years, but considering they seemingly add nothing to the car's secondhand price, why not? This leads me into sharing some pretty arcane knowledge I've gathered over weeks of staring at spreadsheets and ancient brochures. If you don't intend on buying a G80E, I recommend skipping to my 'first impressions' bit...
Still with me? Great. Here's everything I know about the options. Firstly, I should say that this is all very UK specific. For example we got an option to have screens on the back of the seats that Americans never had, but we never had the US option of 'murdered out' black chrome and badging. Secondly, you can tell a pre-2023 car from a newer one because the circular infotainment controller you can write on with your finger (which as an ex-BMW owner I think of as an iDrive controller) changed from a flat dinner-plate sort of thing to a raised controller that's confusingly similar to the nearby circular drive selector. The rather smart 20-spoke 19" alloys on my car are the only choice for an Electric G80, but you did get the option of paying £250 to have the brake callipers that are nearly totally covered up by those wheels painted white. The rest of the car could be one of three of greenish-blue colours if white, sliver, grey or black didn't appeal, G80Es being denied the rather attractive metal flake red you could have on the internal combustion Sport model. There were black, white and tan leather options, and several different wood grains to choose form including an odd composite grey one called "forged real wood" that seems to be the dead tree equivalent of that chopped up carbon fibre stuff Mansory seem rather too fond of.
There's only one electric power train (a 365hp dual motor all wheel drive 800 volt system) and standard features include double glazed side windows, Lexicon sound system, moderately intellignet cruise control, dual zone climate control, lots of physical buttons including a dedicated one on the steering wheel that turns EU-mandated lane departure bongs off, radar assisted suspension that reacts to the road ahead, active noise cancelling and a pleasant lack of piano black bits in the interior.
In the UK options were grouped together in take-it or leave it 'packs', so you couldn't for example have blinds on the rear passenger windows without also having soft close doors. Here are the options, with their 2022 prices:
Innovation pack £3,840
- 12.3" dashboard cluster 3D TFT display
- Head-up display
- Highway driving assist II
- Quad LED headlamps with Intelligent front lighting system
- Blind-spot view monitor
This last one is pretty cool - when you indicate one of your dials is replaced with that side's blind spot camera view. Tesla copied this idea pretty quickly.
The 3D display is odd. It uses head tracking to feed different images to each eye, and gives the dials a bit of depth, but the effect doesn't show up if you point a camera at it... nobody can be told what the 3D display matrix is, Neo, you have to see it for yourself.
Solar roof pack £1,360
• Solar Roof
• Overhead Reading Lamps
V2L Pack £250
• Vehicle-to-load adapter
Or you could just pick up an off-brand one on Amazon for half that. There's also the Hyundai branded and therefore sort-of-OEM option too.
Convenience pack £1,170
• Heated Leather steering wheel
• Electric rear tailgate opening
• Rear air condition: Auto temp. control (3rd zone)
• Premium air filter
Comfort seat pack £1,580
• Memory function for driver seat
• Ergo motion seats for driver and passenger (massage function)
• Ventilated seats (front)
• Touch power seat adjustment switch
Bio Nappa leather pack £2,310
• Quilted leather seats
• Naturally dyed leather upper console
• Velour headlining and sunvisor
• Real wood interior trim.
It's always fun to watch a brochure writer struggling to find a tasteful way to articulate the fact that their pricey optional upholstery has genuinely been scraped off a dead cow rather than being made of something that the marketing department insist qualifies for the word 'leather' despite all logical and indeed etymological evidence to the contrary, without dissing the stuff you get if you don't cough up for peeled cow. Genesis settled on "Bio Nappa leather" for the real stuff and conveniently forgot to describe the default seat covering in any way at all. The 'real wood' trim in mine is called 'Metal Silver Ash', for reasons that I can only assume involve some sort of translation error.
Executive pack £3,020
• Soft close doors
• Heated rear seats
• Laminated rear glass
• Dual rear monitors
• Centre armrest with control box
• Electric rear glass curtain
• Manual rear side curtain.
The monitors look expensive (and they are) but they are not really much use - there's no Netflix, iPlayer, Disney+ apps, or indeed any optional apps at all. You do get an .mp4 player, so watching the aforementioned, or ITV, YouTube or Hollywood content would require the illicit assistance of the Pirate Bay and a memory stick. You do however get a weather app to save you looking out the window, a live feed of golf and basketball scores and the ability to digitally battle with the driver and the other rear passenger for temporary control of the stereo (by the way, the winning move is to use the 'move forward and fold up' buttons that all G80s have on the side of the passenger's seat back to crush the front passenger).
As I am already the proud owner of a brace of cheap secondhand iPads purchased to keep the Grandkids quiet, I was fine with skipping this one. My car has everything except the Executive Pack.
About 1/3 of all UK cars have been on Autotrader in the time I've been looking and I've yet to see any without Nappa Leather or the Innovation Pack, so it's entirely possible that all UK cars have these options.
If you're looking at used ones, it's useful to know that Genesis UK only list one or 2 randomly picked packs on their used car site. If you want to know in full what's actually fitted, here's how to do it:
First, look for a big hole for the HUD in the dash behind the steering wheel. If you see that then the car has the Innovation pack.
Next, look at the row of buttons at the bottom of the climate control screen where you might or might not heated steering wheel button (evidence of the convenience pack) and seat fan icons (if the Comfort Seat Pack is fitted). Lastly look at the seat backs. If you see screens then that car has the Executive pack.
What are the drawbacks?
1) My 2022 car only has one year left on its warranty, its free servicing and its free roadside assistance. Genesis are pretty generous with all this and throw in free collection and courtesy car drop off if you're within 50km of a dealer, so of course it turns out that I'm 53km from the nearest one. At least as this is a 2022 car I won't be paying £540 VED.
2) The car has the potential to be be a repair and servicing nightmare, as it's both rare and obsolete, but on the other hand Genesis are trying to 'do a Lexus' here so they should be pretty incentivised to build something reliable and have their halo car user base singing their praises (as I appear to be doing now - high five to any Genesis marketing people reading this). Also any mistakes made on the MKI should have been ironed out in the MKII, and worldwide G80 sales are apparently over 500k so parts should be out there somewhere, even if I have to overnight them from Toyko (Yes, I know that's not South Korea, but I was trying to spare you a 'selling my Seoul' joke. Unsuccessfully.) As I personally own 1.8% of all the electric G80s they sold in this country, I imagine I might have some leverage if I ever needed to kick off on social media about things - but given the near zero problems I had with my i3 over 9 years, I expect this much more upmarket car ought to be pretty solid.
3) My car also has just 6 years of the original 10 year battery warranty left. Again, I'm not too worried, especially given the recent Swedish battery life survey of 10,000 cars that although it didn't feature Genesis did have it's cousins Kia and Hyundai taking all of the top 3 places between them with up to 97% capacity remaining after 10,000 miles, compared to the bottom half of the table which showed a lot of VW, Tesla, Audi and Skoda models ending up below 93%.
4) The internal combustion G80 has a well regarded 21 speaker Lexicon audio system as standard, but the sub woofers under the seats were sacrificed in during the EV conversion process leaving a 17 speaker system that's clear and refined but more polite than earth shaking. I may eventually do as a few US owners have and add a meaty Subwoofer in the boot, but this would mean disabling the noise cancellation tech so I'll at least wait for the warranty to run out first.
5, 6 and 7) Disappointing boot space, disappointing headroom, Disappointing lock of a frunk. All valid criticisms, but I can live with them, and on balance they won't keep me up at night, which worrying about high milage Taycan battery issues or Mercedes servicing bills might.
8) Catastrophic Depreciation. I've done the maths, and from a 2022 starting price (including options) of £76,815 this car has depreciated at just over a frankly staggering £32 per mile. At that rate, driving it home from the dealer has (in theory) just cost me over £3000 and my car ought to be worth less than zero well before it sees 10,000 miles. In reality I plan to keep and enjoy the car for at 5 to 10 years and look after it well, so residuals won't matter too much to me. The current dealer pice war is likely a temporary blip, as was the brief moment last week when We Buy Any Car suffered an infinite money glitch and told me they would give me 8% more for the car than the dealer was asking.
So, have I found the luxury bargain of the century, an appreciating future classic, a quirky footnote in automotive history or a 2.3 tonne money pit that will blight my finances eternally? Only time (and future posts on this thread) will tell.
I'll start with the obvious questions:
What's a Genesis?
Hyundai's attempt at 'doing a Lexus', recognisable by their distinctive 'two horizontal lines' light signature. Their marketing strategy seems to be:
1. Rename the Scottish Open Golf tournament "The Genesis Scottish Open"
2. ????
3. Profit
Maybe it would work better if they made it clear they were selling cars rather than Bibles or prog rock albums? Anyway, in the same way Citroen capitalised on the reputation of the Citroen DS and spun it off into a higher-end brand and Seat capitalised on the sporting reputation of the Cupra, Hyundai looked at the success of the 2015 Hyundai Genesis (UK sales: 48) and spun it off into a luxury brand. They seem to do be doing well in China, the US and their home market and have shipped over 1.5m vehicles worldwide, but expansion into the UK market hasn't exactly matched Jaecoo for sudden market domination. HowManyLeft says there are 4862 Genesis cars on UK roads, which is either a bit disappointing or over 100x more than before, depending on how much of a glass-half-full person you are. The GV60 SUV dominates UK sales figures, being a slightly more luxurious platform-sharing cousin of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6.
What's a G80?
A South Korean Bentley if you're being kind (or spotting the influence of the designer Luc Donckerwolke who also did the Bentley Flying Spur, Lamborghini Diablo, Audi A2 and Hyundai Elantra), an Aston Martin from Temu (according to someone who nearly got thrown off the Facebook group for that oner) or in the words of one YouTuber "The Best Grandad Car in the World", which is the description that I prefer.
One thing Genesis do brilliantly is understandable model designations. "G" means saloon "GV" means SUV and 60, 70, 80 or 90 indicates how big it is. Sportier models used to be designated "Sport", but nowadays they use "Magma" to mean performance (usually coupled with a lot of painfully orange paint). The G80 is therefore a non-sporty saloon that's roughly the same size as an E-class Merc ('midsize' if you're American, or 'I'm not driving that, it's way too big' if you're my other half). It's also the range-topper here in the UK where we don't get the S-Class sized G90.
My car is a MKII G80. We didn't get the MKI over here, but in 5.0 V8 form it went down pretty well in America. We also didn't get the chrome-heavy 2024 facelift until 2025, at which point Genesis UK decided that the slightly slower LWB version should no go from being an option you can't get in this county to being the only type they sell. This leaves the UK with no MKI, but with two quite visually distinct MKIIs.
So far so confusing. What's a G80 E?
E stands for "Electrified" and indicates an EV. I told you they were good at understandable model designations. They are also pretty hot at hiding charging flaps - can you spot it?
Press the diamond with a G in it. Anyway, rRather than spend billions on developing an EV-only luxury platform like Mercedes did for the EQE/EQS, Genesis saved a few bob and stuffed motors and batteries into their existing ICE car. The result is a noticeably compromised car.
Despite the long bonnet there's no frunk, there's a big motor-housing shaped lump in the boot that both compromises the luggage space and stops the rear seats folding down and the floor is 3 inches higher than in it's ICE counterpart, resulting in a disappointing lack of headroom that probably was a dealbreaker for a lot of potential customers. Was this the wrong call? I guess you'd have to ask a Mercedes accountant that one.
Sales figures for the pre-facelift G80E were reportedly 217 in the US and about 65 in the UK, so I've joined a pretty exclusive club, especially as not that all the ones that are registered in the GB are necessarily sold, as I'll explain in a bit.
How did I end up buying one?
I've always been a fan of a luxury barge (my first car was an XJ-S V12, and I had a fully loaded Granada Scorpio when my mates had Astras), and a bit of a gadget freak. I was an early EV adopter having picked up a near fully loaded ex-demonstrator BMW i3 for a bargain price in 2017, because BMW dumped a whole load of demonstrators on the market when they brought out a bigger battery. Nine years of near trouble-free motoring later the i3's interior was starting to show its age and I could afford something nicer. I'd had my eye on some German depreciation monsters for a while, and about 6 months ago when my car budget and used EQS/Taycan prices started to overlap I decided it was time to start looking.
Given that I'd rather walk than own an SUV, that Elon Musk gives me the ick and that Lucid haven't got round to doing RHD cars my initial shortlist was:
Mercedes EQS
Mercedes EQE
Porsche Taycan
Audi E-tron GT
MG Cyberster
Ok, that last one doesn't quite fit, but having a mid-life crisis at 57 ought to guarantee I'll live to 114, right? Sadly not quite fitting was something of a theme with the Cyberster, as I later found out that at 6ft0 I literally do not fit in one with the roof up - but I'm jumping ahead...
After pouring over Autotrader for hours on end I found I couldn't pull off the 'bargain dealer demonstrator because there's a facelift' trick with the EQS or Taycan for budget reasons, or with the E-tron and EQE for 'they haven't bothered doing a facelift' reasons. As the months went on and and I grew more familiar with the intricacies of the Porsche and Mercedes options lists and it became obvious that I'd be either compromising on a low-spec car, settling for something towards the end of it's battery warranty or be in for a long wait to get the perfect spec. I cast the net a bit wider and poked around on Autotrader for other options, adding the BMW i5, DS 8, Polestar 2 and G80E as footnotes on my shortlist.
Eventually I decided the time was right for some test drives. Google maps found me a nice route that took in MG, Merc and Porsche in a pretty straight line. By chance I spotted a Genesis dealer on the same road and I knew they had the only used G80E within 90 miles of me, so that got added as a stop on the way.
Merc couldn't find their car, MG couldn't physically fit me into theirs but the G80E was lovely - I felt instantly at home. It reminded me a lot of my XJ-S, unnecessarily big, faster than it needed to be, sumptuously comfortable and a blend of tech and retro on the inside. The G80E is, in a word, tasteful.
Later, I drove a Taycan, which was technically outstanding in a lot of ways, and is probably my dream new car, but the baffling infinite option list, lack of one-pedal-driving and scary insurance/maintenance costs for the ones I could afford helped me make my decision, which was that an EQE in the top 'Exclusive Luxury' trim would be the perfect car for me - it's a gadget freak's dream luxury car, a bit more affordable than the Porsche and not quite as huge as the EQS. Job done! The test drive would be a formality and then it was just a matter of waiting for the right spec at the right price.
Next week I drove an EQE and I hated it. The haptics felt cheap. The interior looks great in photos but feels like it's trying too hard in person. I wasn't comfy. I found the HUD distracting and in the flesh the jelly-mould styling was at best acceptable (yes, I know, as a former BMW i3 owner I don't have a leg to stand on here, but this is my story so I'm allowed to bend the rules a bit). The EQE was, as an Islander would say, "Totally my type on paper", but I just didn't want to own one.
Cue the Top Gear meme where Clarkson says "This is brilliant... but I like this".
The G80E's drivers seat is simply a very pleasant place to be in. It can be fitted with all the gadgetry I could want (heated and cooled 18-way adjustable massaging seats - mmm!) without it all being in my face.
It also has the EQE300 beaten on performance (365hp AWD vs 242hp RWD), on price, on rear window visibility (appalling on the Merc) and on styling. The Merc wins on interior space, practicality and range, but why listen to your head when you could listen to your heart? Next question...
If I wanted an electric Hyundai, why didn't I save a fortune and get a cheap and cheerful one like the new Inster for example?
Because this was cheaper.
Cheaper?!?!
Yes. You don't have to go particularly wild on the configurator to get a Hyundai Inster Cross above the price I just paid for a G80E that's stuffed with over £10k of options and has just 1400 miles on the clock. Fair enough, this is a 2022 one previous owner car, but that previous owner was Genesis themselves, so I'm pretty sure the looked after it and kept the service history up to date. Here's where the perfect depreciation storm comes together...
Remember that golf tournament? Genesis had a fleet of approximately a third of the country's entire supply of G80Es that were entirely dedicated to ferrying Golfers around once a year. This February, following the LWB facelift, they seem to have dumped a pile of high-spec ultra-low milage cars onto a pretty much non-existant secondhand market all at once. At that point Electric G80s outnumbered Internal Combustion ones on Autotrader by 4:1, despite the sales ratio being 4:1 the other way. Since then their dealer network has been staring at hell of a lot of depreciating metal that's not been shifting, so there's been a race to the bottom on pricing. Being a complete geek, I've got the Autotrader price tracking plug-in and I used it to made a spreadsheet tracking all 22 cars that were on the market. A bit of crafty formula writing and I could see these cars were having their prices cut by an average of £2100 per car per month. They only really started moving off forecourts about 3 weeks ago.
I put in an offer on the last one that fit my perfect spec of dark paint, white leather and nearly all options ticked (I wasn't fussed about the £3k 'executive pack' that makes the back seat experience a lot more luxurious - read on to find out why), and thanks to a man at the dealership it was very simple to negotiate a deal I was very happy with.
Here's a Comparison:
| Inster Cross | G80E | |
|---|---|---|
| 0-60: | 10.6 | 4.9 |
| Range | 229M | 323M |
| Top Speed | 93 | 140 |
| Battery size | 49kwh | 87kwh |
| Max charging speed | 85kW | 187kW |
| Horsepower | 119 | 365 |
| Boot | 351 l | 354 |
Ok, that last one was close, but as a game of Top Trumps goes, it's pretty one-sided. The Inster does get a sunroof though, which isn't an option on the G80 E, because that coupled with the battery pushing the floor up would leave the car with Ford GT40 levels of headroom. What the G80 gets instead is the option of ...
SOLAR
Still with me? Great. Here's everything I know about the options. Firstly, I should say that this is all very UK specific. For example we got an option to have screens on the back of the seats that Americans never had, but we never had the US option of 'murdered out' black chrome and badging. Secondly, you can tell a pre-2023 car from a newer one because the circular infotainment controller you can write on with your finger (which as an ex-BMW owner I think of as an iDrive controller) changed from a flat dinner-plate sort of thing to a raised controller that's confusingly similar to the nearby circular drive selector. The rather smart 20-spoke 19" alloys on my car are the only choice for an Electric G80, but you did get the option of paying £250 to have the brake callipers that are nearly totally covered up by those wheels painted white. The rest of the car could be one of three of greenish-blue colours if white, sliver, grey or black didn't appeal, G80Es being denied the rather attractive metal flake red you could have on the internal combustion Sport model. There were black, white and tan leather options, and several different wood grains to choose form including an odd composite grey one called "forged real wood" that seems to be the dead tree equivalent of that chopped up carbon fibre stuff Mansory seem rather too fond of.
There's only one electric power train (a 365hp dual motor all wheel drive 800 volt system) and standard features include double glazed side windows, Lexicon sound system, moderately intellignet cruise control, dual zone climate control, lots of physical buttons including a dedicated one on the steering wheel that turns EU-mandated lane departure bongs off, radar assisted suspension that reacts to the road ahead, active noise cancelling and a pleasant lack of piano black bits in the interior.
In the UK options were grouped together in take-it or leave it 'packs', so you couldn't for example have blinds on the rear passenger windows without also having soft close doors. Here are the options, with their 2022 prices:
Innovation pack £3,840
- 12.3" dashboard cluster 3D TFT display
- Head-up display
- Highway driving assist II
- Quad LED headlamps with Intelligent front lighting system
- Blind-spot view monitor
This last one is pretty cool - when you indicate one of your dials is replaced with that side's blind spot camera view. Tesla copied this idea pretty quickly.
The 3D display is odd. It uses head tracking to feed different images to each eye, and gives the dials a bit of depth, but the effect doesn't show up if you point a camera at it... nobody can be told what the 3D display matrix is, Neo, you have to see it for yourself.
Solar roof pack £1,360
• Solar Roof
• Overhead Reading Lamps
V2L Pack £250
• Vehicle-to-load adapter
Or you could just pick up an off-brand one on Amazon for half that. There's also the Hyundai branded and therefore sort-of-OEM option too.
Convenience pack £1,170
• Heated Leather steering wheel
• Electric rear tailgate opening
• Rear air condition: Auto temp. control (3rd zone)
• Premium air filter
Comfort seat pack £1,580
• Memory function for driver seat
• Ergo motion seats for driver and passenger (massage function)
• Ventilated seats (front)
• Touch power seat adjustment switch
Bio Nappa leather pack £2,310
• Quilted leather seats
• Naturally dyed leather upper console
• Velour headlining and sunvisor
• Real wood interior trim.
It's always fun to watch a brochure writer struggling to find a tasteful way to articulate the fact that their pricey optional upholstery has genuinely been scraped off a dead cow rather than being made of something that the marketing department insist qualifies for the word 'leather' despite all logical and indeed etymological evidence to the contrary, without dissing the stuff you get if you don't cough up for peeled cow. Genesis settled on "Bio Nappa leather" for the real stuff and conveniently forgot to describe the default seat covering in any way at all. The 'real wood' trim in mine is called 'Metal Silver Ash', for reasons that I can only assume involve some sort of translation error.
Executive pack £3,020
• Soft close doors
• Heated rear seats
• Laminated rear glass
• Dual rear monitors
• Centre armrest with control box
• Electric rear glass curtain
• Manual rear side curtain.
The monitors look expensive (and they are) but they are not really much use - there's no Netflix, iPlayer, Disney+ apps, or indeed any optional apps at all. You do get an .mp4 player, so watching the aforementioned, or ITV, YouTube or Hollywood content would require the illicit assistance of the Pirate Bay and a memory stick. You do however get a weather app to save you looking out the window, a live feed of golf and basketball scores and the ability to digitally battle with the driver and the other rear passenger for temporary control of the stereo (by the way, the winning move is to use the 'move forward and fold up' buttons that all G80s have on the side of the passenger's seat back to crush the front passenger).
As I am already the proud owner of a brace of cheap secondhand iPads purchased to keep the Grandkids quiet, I was fine with skipping this one. My car has everything except the Executive Pack.
About 1/3 of all UK cars have been on Autotrader in the time I've been looking and I've yet to see any without Nappa Leather or the Innovation Pack, so it's entirely possible that all UK cars have these options.
If you're looking at used ones, it's useful to know that Genesis UK only list one or 2 randomly picked packs on their used car site. If you want to know in full what's actually fitted, here's how to do it:
First, look for a big hole for the HUD in the dash behind the steering wheel. If you see that then the car has the Innovation pack.
Next, look at the row of buttons at the bottom of the climate control screen where you might or might not heated steering wheel button (evidence of the convenience pack) and seat fan icons (if the Comfort Seat Pack is fitted). Lastly look at the seat backs. If you see screens then that car has the Executive pack.
What are the drawbacks?
1) My 2022 car only has one year left on its warranty, its free servicing and its free roadside assistance. Genesis are pretty generous with all this and throw in free collection and courtesy car drop off if you're within 50km of a dealer, so of course it turns out that I'm 53km from the nearest one. At least as this is a 2022 car I won't be paying £540 VED.
2) The car has the potential to be be a repair and servicing nightmare, as it's both rare and obsolete, but on the other hand Genesis are trying to 'do a Lexus' here so they should be pretty incentivised to build something reliable and have their halo car user base singing their praises (as I appear to be doing now - high five to any Genesis marketing people reading this). Also any mistakes made on the MKI should have been ironed out in the MKII, and worldwide G80 sales are apparently over 500k so parts should be out there somewhere, even if I have to overnight them from Toyko (Yes, I know that's not South Korea, but I was trying to spare you a 'selling my Seoul' joke. Unsuccessfully.) As I personally own 1.8% of all the electric G80s they sold in this country, I imagine I might have some leverage if I ever needed to kick off on social media about things - but given the near zero problems I had with my i3 over 9 years, I expect this much more upmarket car ought to be pretty solid.
3) My car also has just 6 years of the original 10 year battery warranty left. Again, I'm not too worried, especially given the recent Swedish battery life survey of 10,000 cars that although it didn't feature Genesis did have it's cousins Kia and Hyundai taking all of the top 3 places between them with up to 97% capacity remaining after 10,000 miles, compared to the bottom half of the table which showed a lot of VW, Tesla, Audi and Skoda models ending up below 93%.
4) The internal combustion G80 has a well regarded 21 speaker Lexicon audio system as standard, but the sub woofers under the seats were sacrificed in during the EV conversion process leaving a 17 speaker system that's clear and refined but more polite than earth shaking. I may eventually do as a few US owners have and add a meaty Subwoofer in the boot, but this would mean disabling the noise cancellation tech so I'll at least wait for the warranty to run out first.
5, 6 and 7) Disappointing boot space, disappointing headroom, Disappointing lock of a frunk. All valid criticisms, but I can live with them, and on balance they won't keep me up at night, which worrying about high milage Taycan battery issues or Mercedes servicing bills might.
8) Catastrophic Depreciation. I've done the maths, and from a 2022 starting price (including options) of £76,815 this car has depreciated at just over a frankly staggering £32 per mile. At that rate, driving it home from the dealer has (in theory) just cost me over £3000 and my car ought to be worth less than zero well before it sees 10,000 miles. In reality I plan to keep and enjoy the car for at 5 to 10 years and look after it well, so residuals won't matter too much to me. The current dealer pice war is likely a temporary blip, as was the brief moment last week when We Buy Any Car suffered an infinite money glitch and told me they would give me 8% more for the car than the dealer was asking.
So, have I found the luxury bargain of the century, an appreciating future classic, a quirky footnote in automotive history or a 2.3 tonne money pit that will blight my finances eternally? Only time (and future posts on this thread) will tell.
outnumbered said:
Excellent writeup, looking forward to future updates.
Seems like you must have paid around 30K if I reverse engineered the depreciation correctly ?
Thanks. Pretty much spot on with the price, I was trying to keep it a little vague for the sake of the dealers trying to shift the other dozen or so Golf-fleet cars. Seems like you must have paid around 30K if I reverse engineered the depreciation correctly ?
Very well written!
I've been on a reverse ish type journey than yours and I see that in the past we have both owned I3s!
Up until January I had the smaller Genesis Gv60, service support and the car was excellent. Also got chance to try other Genesis models whilst mine was collected and returned for service.
I actually changed my Genesis for a Mercedes EQE 500 AMG haven't regretted it but do recognise some of your comments about it.
I think you have yourself a superb car and I would be interested to see how you get on!
I've been on a reverse ish type journey than yours and I see that in the past we have both owned I3s!
Up until January I had the smaller Genesis Gv60, service support and the car was excellent. Also got chance to try other Genesis models whilst mine was collected and returned for service.
I actually changed my Genesis for a Mercedes EQE 500 AMG haven't regretted it but do recognise some of your comments about it.
I think you have yourself a superb car and I would be interested to see how you get on!
Grant Urismo said:
What's a Genesis?
Hyundai's attempt at 'doing a Lexus', recognisable by their distinctive 'two horizontal lines' light signature. Their marketing strategy seems to be:
1. Rename the Scottish Open Golf tournament "The Genesis Scottish Open"
2. Loan one to Tiger Woods, let him crash it
3. ????
4. Profit
EFA.Hyundai's attempt at 'doing a Lexus', recognisable by their distinctive 'two horizontal lines' light signature. Their marketing strategy seems to be:
1. Rename the Scottish Open Golf tournament "The Genesis Scottish Open"
2. Loan one to Tiger Woods, let him crash it
3. ????
4. Profit
Good write up, though.
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