Opinion: Hyundai Genesis Sedan
So, you’re shopping for an upper class luxury sedan. You’re looking at the usual $50,000+ suspects: 5-series, E-class, and such. At what point do you say to yourself, why don’t I just get the Hyundai? It has everything the others do for half the price. Brilliant!
Seriously, do you think that someone spending $60k on a car wants an appliance with bells and whistles? No, that’s why they buy Jaguars, Land Rovers, Maseratis, Bentleys and such. They’re willing to overlook the reliability, functionality, and cost for some of style developed and polished over time, they want soul, a personality. They want the car to represent who they are or who they’d like to be. When was the last time you heard someone say that they want to be a Hyundai?
Along with the above, people simply want a status symbol. Here Hyundai should have really looked at the VW Pheaton. A very nice car, essentially an Audi A8 with only one problem – the VW badge. They could have cut the price of in half and still no one would have bought it.
The Asian car makers don’t seem to get that. Infiniti comes closest to having substance and style, but it is still heavily borrowed. Acura has a thing with the smart, money-wise type-A personality types (hell, I’ve owned several of those myself). Lexus is slowly morphing into being something else than a different Mercedes, but all in all they’re still ways off.
So, the question is who is going to buy the Hyundai Genesis?
Is it someone who says “oh, look at me, I really wanted a 5-series, but got this instead. I also have a Man’s Warehouse suit and a Seiko watch.”* Yea, those will look good to those who don’t know what they’re looking, but really, they’re just a lower cost imitation of the real thing. And that is what the Hyundai Genesis is, and frankly, that is what Hyundai has always been – a generic imitation of the real thing. It all started with the ’86 Excel being a cheaper Civic… and it failed miserably. Now, Hyundai is trying to imitate the cars that imitate others cars. Fail.
To date, I have only seen three Genesis on the road; one had dealer plates on it. Out of curiosity, I stopped by the Hyundai dealership to check out the car. It’s nice, but nothing I haven’t seen before. The Genesis Coupe looks much better in life than in pictures, and I predict that it will sell well to the import crowd. What I really want to see however, is how these will hold up over six years or 100k miles.
*Yes, I have a Man’s Warehouse suit and a Seiko watch and both have served me well.
