Unapologetically and unequivocally, Hyundai has taken off its gloves. Its new Genesis is a no-holds-barred assault on luxury and near-luxury sedans from Japan, America, and Europe. Seriously, folks. Oh, we know what you’re thinking. You’ve heard that the second-generation Hyundai Santa Fe is a decent little competitor to the Honda CR-V, and you’ve read in these pages that the Hyundai Veracruz mid-size crossover introduced last year need not hide from the Toyota Highlander, the Honda Pilot, or even the Lexus RX350.

But front-wheel-drive-based people movers are one thing, and rear-wheel-drive sedans that might actually quicken your pulse are another. After all, cars like that have never been the province of the Korean automakers.

But now they are. My heart rate was certainly above its normal level as I circled Hyundai’s test track at 150 mph in a Genesis equipped with Hyundai’s advanced new 375-hp, 4.6-liter V-8 engine. The big sedan was composed, predictable, and vigorous as the high banks dumped us onto the long straights and the scenery blurred. Yes, I was driving a Hyundai. What is this world coming to?

“We set a number of high development goals for ourselves,” admits Bong-hwan Lee, executive vice president of Hyundai’s Vehicle Development Center. “We wanted to achieve the same scores as other premium sedans, including Lexus, in the J. D. Power Initial Quality and Vehicle Dependability Surveys.

Another priority was to attain the highest level of crash protection. We benchmarked the BMW 5-series, the Lexus GS and LS, and the Mercedes-Benz E-class.” Although Hyundai says that the Genesis’s body-in-white (the basic body structure, without paint, powertrain, suspension, or interior) is larger than those of the Lexus LS460 and the Mercedes S-class, the automaker claims that it is lighter than them and stiffer in torsion and bending properties.

In terms of size, the Genesis is bigger and roomier than most mid-size luxury sedans (see chart) and, in fact, is classified by the EPA as a “large” sedan. Its wheelbase is 115.6 inches, compared with 113.7 inches for the BMW 5-series, 112.4 inches for the Mercedes E-class, and 113.4 inches for the Cadillac CTS. With an overall length of 195.9 inches, it’s several inches longer than those three cars and only 2.5 inches shorter than a short-wheelbase 7-series. Although rear-seat room falls short of what you’d find in a long-wheelbase 7-series or a Lexus LS, the rear seats in the Genesis are still very accommodating, with plentiful legroom that outpaces the 5-series, the E-class, and the CTS.

Design editor Robert Cumberford delivers his verdict on the Genesis’s styling in the August issue of Automobile Magazine, but there is no question that the car has real road presence. If Hyundai’s designers borrowed from the Mercedes S-class, the Infiniti M35/M45, and the 5-series-and they most certainly did-the net effect is at worst benign, the car assuming a kind of generic upscale visage. At the Namyang test track, jumping among V-6 and V-8 Genesis models and also among competitor cars, I would peer across the sprawling slalom course, trying to figure out which car I’d drive next, and would continually do double-takes as the Genesis test cars were wheeled back onto the course, because from fifty yards away I mistook them for Mercedes-Benz E-classes.

Inside, the Genesis also plays to widespread notions of luxury, with a big sweep of an S-class-inspired dash, pleasingly lit instruments, and substantial, cushy seats astride a center console with a BMW iDrive-style spinning knob sprouting from it. There are lots of hits in here, plus a few misses. Fit and finish and material quality are very good, both in the plastics and in the standard leather seating. The instrument panel can be fitted with stitched leather as an option or with standard faux wood, but the former would be more convincing if it were French stitched, with two rows of stitching rather than one, which leaves a tiny flap of folded-over hide that’s ripe for collecting dirt.

Tradition dominates in the Genesis cabin, as there is no aluminum or aluminum-look trim. The headliner, a familiar polyester-knit fabric, is largely inoffensive, but it’s a long way from Alcantara. Double-glazing for the windows in the driver’s and front-passenger’s doors is a nice touch, though, as are fold-out map pockets in the doors and the available brown-and-black interior color scheme. The trunk is large, with a low liftover and sheathed hinges, but the interior grab handle for pulling the lid closed is mounted too far inward, making it awkward to use. And the cheap trunk lining is old-school Hyundai; surely they noticed the richly trimmed trunks in the cars they benchmarked?

Hyundai calls its iDrive-style controller DIS, or Driver Information System. The Koreans have had time to digest similar setups from BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Acura and presumably have integrated what they thought were the best features of those systems while avoiding many of their pitfalls. We’ll have to wait until we have more street time in the Genesis to render a full verdict on DIS, but it seems intuitive, the knob feels good in the hand, if perhaps with not quite enough tension in it as one might like, and it’s easy to scroll among menus to control navigation and the stereo. The iPod connection works well, and the touch-screen function is as good as anyone’s. An optional 500-watt Lexicon stereo might not be the equal of the Mark Levinson system offered by Lexus, but it will meet the expectations of all but the pickiest audiophiles, and there’s easy access to the equalizer function.

Originally, Hyundai planned to offer the Genesis with both its 3.3-liter and 3.8-liter V-6s, which currently serve in the front-wheel-drive Azera, as well as the Tau V-8. But then it came to its senses and realized that the choice of three engines is a bit much for a vehicle with a modest annual sales goal of 30,000 units in the United States and only 80,000 units worldwide. (It’s interesting to note that, although Hyundai eagerly apes European sedans with the Genesis, it is not offering the car in the hypercompetitive Western Europe market; it’s already on sale in Korea and will be sold in China and Russia, among other markets.) And the 3.8-liter DOHC V-6 powertrain, no slouch with variable valve timing, 290 hp, and a six-speed automatic, handily allows Hyundai to boast that the Genesis offers more standard power than the Infiniti M35, the Pontiac G8, and the Chrysler 300C.

“We’ve tuned the Genesis to fall somewhere between the Lexus GS and the Infiniti M,” explains Wendell Collins, Jr., engineering manager for the ride and handling group at Hyundai Motor America. “We definitely wanted it to be sportier than the GS, but not as brutal as the M.” The suspension is by unequal-length control arms at the front, with a multi-link rear setup. V-6 models get seventeen-inch tires as standard, with eighteen-inchers optional; eighteens are standard with the V-8. The Genesis made pretty smooth work of lane-change and slalom courses at Namyang, with body control well in check, but the V-6 model is let down by a disappointing lack of steering feel, an old Korean-car bugaboo. Thankfully, V-8 models have electrohydraulic power steering, “which allowed us to define the steering curve for a very linear feel,” claims Collins, and which we found to provide a far clearer line of communication between the front wheels and the palms of our hands. We’re not talking BMW-like steering here, but it’s a far cry from the Toyota Camry’s or, for that matter, the Hyundai Sonata’s.

Both engines are very refined, eager to rev, and work seamlessly with their respective transmissions (the V-6 unit is from the Japanese supplier Aisin, while the German company ZF supplies the V-8’s six-speed box). There’s a manual-mode shift gate for both, but there are no steering wheel paddles in sight. Hammer the V-8, and some pleasing induction and valvetrain resonances will drift back into the cockpit, but more impressive is the strong torque band and the nice whack of acceleration that the Tau provides. We’ll wait until we can drive a Genesis stateside before running performance numbers, but Hyundai promises a 0-to-60-mph time of well under six seconds. And even the V-6 model stormed around the high-speed oval with little drama, the speedo needle swinging around to 100 mph in no time and then rising steadily to 135 mph.

Unfortunately, the Genesis has not shed that layer of isolation that so characterizes Lexus cars and, of course, most Hyundais. This car, especially in V-8 guise, has the power and the presence to hold its own with cars costing much more. But those looking for pure tactility will be disappointed, as I was reminded when I ran the 530i and the M35 through the same paces that I’d driven the Genesis. Especially around the handling track, those two cars were far more in tune with the driver’s intentions and better at communicating what was happening at the tire’s contact patches. We’ll grant Hyundai that the Genesis is more involving to drive than the Lexus GS (and certainly more so than the ES350), but for a sedan that so unabashedly aims for the best from Germany, it still needs a more Teutonic tilt to the chassis tuning: more road feel and steering feel, please. And although the brakes in both V-6 and V-8 Genesis models were responsive and progressive, they could use a more positive-feeling pedal.

Hyundai has a lot of irons in the fire. Between it and Kia, its subsidiary, it controls 75 percent of the Korean home market, and its sales are burgeoning in China, India, and other emerging markets. In fact, the United States comprises only 20 percent of Hyundai’s worldwide sales, so it’s little surprise that Hyundai decided, at least for now, not to launch a luxury sales channel here like Toyota and Nissan did two decades ago.

Instead, it is essentially dipping its toe into the luxury-car waters with the Genesis. If it is a success, more luxury products are likely to follow, and Hyundai co-chairman and CEO Dong-Jin Kim does not rule out the possibility of a luxury arm for the future: “Some day, when we are strong enough. But for now, we have concluded that a separate premium brand is premature.”

This means that, at least for the time being, the Genesis does without some of the baubles of the luxury-car establishment. No optional all-wheel drive. No direct injection or variable valve lift for the engines, no air suspensions or dual-clutch gearboxes, and more than likely, no special dealer treatment, just “a special, well-decorated corner [of the showroom] to display the Genesis,” says Kim. Hyundai Motor America will, however, take pains to ensure that salespeople more accustomed to pushing Elantras and Sonatas out the door are properly trained to sell the Genesis and to deal with its potential customer base.

That customer base, if Hyundai’s research proves accurate, will be a disparate group. “We will get people who normally graduate from an Accord type of car and make the leap to a luxury brand,” says Joel Ewanick, Hyundai Motor America’s vice-president of marketing, “but we’ll also get people coming down from the luxury brands. We already get buyers like that for the Azera, people who do a lot of research on cars who then realize, ‘this [a Hyundai] is a car that hasn’t been on my radar screen, but should have been.’?” As for pricing, Hyundai is positioning the Genesis squarely on top of the BMW 3-series and the Mercedes C-class, meaning the V-6 model starts at about $33,000 and stretches up near the V-8 model’s starting price of $38,000. Fully optioned, the V-8 will be priced in the mid-$40,000s. Bold strokes, these, since in reality the Genesis is also going to be cross-shopped with the Pontiac G8 and the 3.5-liter Chrysler 300C, which start at $27,595 and $29,290, respectively, and since Hyundai has yet to prove itself over the long haul in J. D. Power surveys and in resale values, although there has been recent progress on those fronts.

Hyundai might not be entering the luxury-car world with a new brand and shiny new dealerships, but there is nothing tentative about the Genesis itself, a car that represents the most ambitious engineering undertaking ever for the Korean automaker. Hyundai is a company that is very much looking forward but is also keenly aware of how far it has come. It didn’t even have the wherewithal to build its own engine until 1991, when it introduced its Alpha four-cylinder and no longer had to license engines from Mitsubishi. Now, here it is making its own, high-powered V-8 engine. The company insists that it will make money on every Genesis it sells, unlike Toyota, which sold its first Lexus cars at a loss to establish its luxury-car bonafides. In Hyundai’s case, it’s clear that, while the Genesis is a commodity product that will increase the bottom line, it’s also an emotional milestone for the company, a way to mark its place in the world. And there’s no need to apologize for that.

By Joe DeMatio
Automobile Magazine

Luxury by Numbers: On paper, the Genesis is all the luxury car you need

Numbers. It’s all about the numbers. Longer and wider, with a longer wheelbase and shorter turning radius than BMW 5 Series, Mercedes E-Class, and Lexus ES. Lower coefficient of drag, 0.27, and better fuel economy than most. A stiffer body than those of the Bimmer, Benz, and the Lexus LS 430 (Hyundai sees much of the Lexus range as its competition). Its optional Tau V-8 is “best-in-class,” making more horses (375) than V-8s in the 550i, E550, GS 460, or Infiniti M45 and does 0-to-60 mph in well under six seconds. It’s built in the world’s largest auto factory, Hyundai’s 1.62-million unit-per-year Ulsan plant.

7 Series size, 5 Series performance, 3 Series price, Hyundai says.

Hyundai’s first indigenous rear-drive sedan and in-house-developed V-8 comes 41 years after the company began assembling knock-down Ford Cortinas, 34 years after it built its own first car, 17 years after it began building its own engine design. And at least four years before Ford can return to the rear-drive sedan business in North America. Impressive, by those numbers.

Words paint a different picture, however. When Hyundai confirmed it was working on a rear-drive sedan a couple years ago, the motoring press leapt to the words “sport sedan.” Hyundai subsequently toned down the hyperbole, saying the Genesis (developed under codename “BH”) would offer Infiniti/Lexus-like luxury and performance at a typically cut-rate Hyundai price.

The Genesis is no sport sedan. It is luxurious, yes, and the V-8 is strong. Heck, the base 290-horsepower, 3.8-liter V-6 is really good in this car, and it’s coupled, as is the Tau V-8, to a ZF six-speed automatic transmission that ticks off smooth up- and downshifts. It also provides better balance, 52/48 front/rear versus 54/46 for the V-8, an engine that makes good, if overly muffled, sounds under full throttle.

A limited first drive at the Namyang Research & Development Center revealed Hyundai hasn’t strayed from its cushy car roots. You may have read about the Korean journalists who criticized the car as too soft when it launched in its home market last January. Hyundai’s American engineering team, led by ex-GM guy Wendell Collins Jr., reworked the sedan’s multilink front and rear suspension for our market, with stiffer springs, shocks, and damping. It’s worked, to the extent that extracting cushiness out of a suspension inherently designed for comfort can work. It’s no 1960s American floatmobile, having been stiffened up about as much as possible without sending the ride/handling equation off-kilter. Damping is especially good, reminiscent of a Honda Accord’s.

On Namyang’s tight handling course, the Genesis’s suspension handles transitions reasonably well. Push it hard, though, and the front tires scrub into the pavement. It’s not the kind of treatment you expect a large luxury sedan to take, but you do expect to try it on a sport sedan. The car is biased considerably toward understeer, and there’s no steering with the throttle, electronic stability control on or off. As with most any Lexus or Mercedes, you can’t turn ESP off completely.

The speed-sensitive rack-and-pinion steering is a bit numb and on the light side, offering less feedback than an Infiniti M35 provided for comparison, and requiring small corrections on the banks of Namyang’s high-speed oval. The Genesis V-6 tops out at a tire-limited 130 mph on the oval, and the V-8 will do an autobahn-friendly 155. Germany’s autobahn will not be the Genesis’s natural habitat, however. While smaller Hyundais and Kias have successfully attacked European rivals on their turf, Hyundai says it won’t export the Genesis to Western Europe as long as Lexus flounders there. The Genesis will be available in North America and much of Asia, Africa, and Russia.

It’ll be a hit with drivers who value maximum comfort and a modicum of prestige over handling dynamics. The Genesis is nicely trimmed, with the right amount of chrome and a two-tone interior featuring a leather-wrapped dash (which serves to minimize the unconvincing fake wood appliques), door panels, console lid, and seats. Its long list of features includes high-fidelity Lexicon Logic 7 audio (only the second car with that brand, after the Rolls-Royce Phantom) and a navigation system with backup camera. You control the HD radio, navigation, climate, and iPod with the Driver Information System, which looks like BMW’s iDrive button. Fortunately, it works much better, with controls duplicated elsewhere on the dash.

Fit and finish is generally good, with consistent stitching for the leather dash along the panel breaks. Hyundai didn’t sweat the details, though, because elsewhere they’re less impressive. The hood gap is a bit too wide. The Genesis has plastic-finished gooseneck hinges (not bad, but they’re not gas-filled shocks) and parcel shelf speaker and subwoofer bottoms of that high-end Lexicon system are left exposed. A $21k Chevy Malibu’s trunk is finished better.

Hyundai has big plans for its rear-drive platform, including the upcoming BK sport coupe. And it has big plans for its somewhat ill-timed V-8. Dong-Jin Kim, Hyundai’s vice chairman and CEO, says 4.6 liters is the small end; the engine can be bored and stroked up to 5.5 liters, which will serve nicely in the not-for-U.S. long-wheelbase Genesis, eight inches longer than the standard sedan and two inches longer than the front-drive Equus V-8 it replaces. The 4.6 will get gas direct-injection in a couple of years, pushing horsepower past 400, Kim says. Hyundai would have to raise the BK coupe’s hood to fit the Tau, “and why would we?” he asks. The BK V-6 “leaves a lot of room for the tuning guys.”

Finally, Hyundai has added the Chrysler 300C and Pontiac G8 GT to the Genesis V-8’s competitive set. This makes infinitely more sense than comparing the car with Mercedes and Lexus-the American cars are scratching and clawing for respect in their own country, where German icons and Japanese perfectionists rule the big luxury-car segment. The Hyundai Genesis will do well in a new, little sub-segment heretofore to be called “value-priced luxury cars.” Next to the Yank tanks, though, its bigger numbers don’t feel big enough to propel the car past your expectations of the Hyundai brand.

By Todd Lassa
Motor Trend

Genesis. Sounds like a great new beginning, and it is. The 2009 Hyundai Genesis sedan is the first V8-powered rear-wheel-drive luxury sedan from the Korean carmaker for our market, and it’s a game-changer in many ways. As with the Sonata and Azera that preceded the Genesis, Hyundai is taking the fight to the establishment.

This time, however, it has taken aim at the Germans. In its own words, Hyundai says of the 2009 Hyundai Genesis V8, “It’s the size of the BMW 7 Series with the performance of the 5 Series and at the price of the 3 Series.”

It’s an imposing goal, yet we have to admit that the Korean company has missed the target only slightly. Instead we’d say what Hyundai has actually produced is a car that’s the size of the first-generation Infiniti Q45 with the performance of an M45 and at the price of a G35.

That’s still pretty darn good in our book. And that isn’t even accounting for the budget-friendly 2009 Hyundai Genesis V6 that will also be available this summer.

Free the Korean Eight
At its core, the top-line Genesis is powered by an all-new, ultra-clean-running, DOHC 4.6-liter V8 that produces 375 horsepower at 6,500 rpm while running on premium fuel (or 368 hp with regular fuel). It produces 333 pound-feet of torque (324 lb-ft on regular fuel) at 4,500 rpm.

Power is routed through a ZF-built 6HP26 six-speed transmission to the rear wheels. While shift-paddle control for the six-speed is being developed for this transmission as we write, the car now features a shift lever mounted on the console.

This car looks substantial in person, measuring 195.9 inches long, 73.4 inches wide and 58.3 inches tall. The wheelbase is commensurately long at 115.6 inches, while the front track is 62.0 inches and the rear track is 62.2 inches. It weighs in at 4,006 pounds. Just as you’d expect from a sport sedan, a multilink suspension with coil springs is featured at every corner, as is a P235/50R18 Dunlop SP sport 5000M tire.

Proving Grounds

We were given the opportunity to put our test instruments on a KDM (Korean domestic market) version of the Genesis V8 (which has already gone on sale there), right on Hyundai’s elaborate proving grounds not far from Seoul. It’s an impressively modern facility, meant to be a real showcase of the company’s capabilities just like the rest of Hyundai HQ.

Even while running on regular fuel and thus producing just 368 hp rather than the full 375 hp, the Genesis V8 stopped the computerized clock of our VBox test equipment at 5.9 seconds to 60 mph (5.6 seconds with 1 foot of rollout as on a drag strip), confirming Hyundai’s claim of breaking the 6-second barrier to 60 mph. The quarter-mile marker flew by at 103 mph in exactly 14.0 seconds. These fleet figures put the Hyundai Genesis V8 in the company of any V8-powered Audi, Benz or BMW sedan, a significant accomplishment.

While a stopping distance of 124 feet from 60 mph isn’t what we’d call world-class, that’s still pretty good for a 4,000-pound sedan wearing all-season tires. And while we didn’t pack all of our test gear required to time the car through the slalom, we did set up a standard course for a slalom evaluation and made a number of runs. The car surprised us with its neutral handling balance. It felt a little soft and slow as it made the transition from one slalom gate to the next, but it always was obedient.

We’ll have to wait a couple more months to get a U.S.-specification car here in the States for an official track day, but these numbers and early impressions should only improve.

High Roller
Inside the cabin, the Genesis V8 is outfitted like a true luxury sedan. Spacious, richly appointed and fully decked out with a comprehensive list of convenience features, this Hyundai looks and feels very much like a top-line Lexus. The seats are as comfortable as they appear, although they lack the kind of firm, highly bolstered Germanic treatment a sport sedan enthusiast might enjoy. The instrument panel’s white-on-black electroluminescent gauges look like they came straight out of a Lexus.

The soft curves of the sweeping dashboard architecture are complemented by an elegantly adorned center stack with numerous HVAC/audio buttons, many of which are thankfully made redundant with more ergonomically friendly controls on the steering wheel or by the multimedia controller on the center console just aft of the shift lever.

Nearly all the electronic conveniences are connected by a fiber-optic network, the latest thing to improve the speed and reliability of an automobile’s electronic nervous system. Hyundai has dedicated more than $160 million to bringing such advanced electronics to its automobiles, and has entered into a long-term agreement with Microsoft to co-develop a next-generation infotainment system for both Hyundai and Kia.

Other than the Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Genesis is the only car that presently offers a Lexicon-brand 7.1 discrete audio system with HD radio, 17 speakers and more than 500 watts of power. If the 40-gigabyte hard-drive-based navigation system is ordered, the dashboard of the Genesis is enhanced with an 8-inch color display and XM NavTraffic, plus digital music storage and a back-up camera. Like all 2009-model Hyundai cars, the Genesis comes standard with XM Satellite Radio and USB/iPod connectivity.

Firm and Quiet

The Genesis is built from a rigid unibody that’s received as much CAD work as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Double-laminated glass, anti-vibration pads and acoustic sandwiches in its design and construction only begin to tell the whole story. We’d be negligent if we didn’t say that Hyundai Genesis is one of the quietest cars we’ve ever driven.

World-class crashworthiness is also expected from this car due to special attention to its construction, as well as a full complement of active and passive safety features such as fully integrated electronic stability/traction/braking systems and airbags a-plenty.

As you’d expect, the Genesis rides softly on an aluminum-intensive suspension to enhance ride quality by minimizing unsprung weight. The electrohydraulic steering assist leaves the rack-and-pinion steering feeling more isolated from the tires than we’d prefer, but the steering itself is still precise and appropriate given the scale and mission of the car. Nobody will ever mistake the Genesis for a BMW when it comes to steering, but Infiniti or Lexus owners will find it familiar.

There’s Room To Grow
During our visit to Hyundai HQ, company brass forthrightly addressed several pertinent issues about the new car for us. The new V8 doesn’t feature direct-injection technology to attain its lofty horsepower figures. Is D.I. a future possibility? Absolutely, but this is only the first iteration of the all-new 4.6-liter Tau engine family and it’s meant to be relatively affordable to build, and it already features an elevated 6,500-rpm redline, fully variable valve timing, a variable-volume intake plenum, cast stainless-steel exhaust manifolds and ULEV-II level emissions. There’s more to come.

We noted that the KDM Genesis on sale in Korea has an adjustable air suspension. Could future U.S. Genesis sedans be so equipped? Again, as a cost-cutting measure, Hyundai chose to introduce the car to the U.S. without it to be more competitive on price. It may become an option next year.

All-wheel drive? Diesel or hybrid powertrains? Hyundai says it has no current plans for the Genesis to evolve in these directions.

Finally, the elephant in the room was recognized by the Hyundai executives. Why didn’t Hyundai kick off a premium channel in its model lineup with a truly premium car rather than a luxurious sport sedan, something more in keeping with Lexus rather than Audi? The Hyundai execs gave this possibility serious attention, but concluded it would not only cost the company too much (about $2.5 billion), but it would also put undue stress on the current dealership network. Hyundai estimates that the gains it has taken 13 years for Lexus to enjoy would take something like 20 years for Hyundai to recoup. But it still might happen someday, they admit.

Instead, Hyundai has dedicated a special area within its nearly 800 dealerships in the U.S. to the sale of the Genesis sedan in its V8 and V6 iterations, and it has specially trained those who will be charged with selling the Genesis sedan.

It’s a Bottom Line Business
If we take Hyundai at its word that the price of the Genesis V6 will mirror those of either the BMW 3 Series or Mercedes-Benz C-Class, it would mean a bottom line between $33,000 and $39,000 depending on equipment. Hyundai predicts 70 percent of Genesis sedans will fall into this category.

Our estimate for the base price of a 2009 Hyundai Genesis V8 is $40,000-$45,000, or $7,000 less than a Lexus GS 460 and a whopping $15,000 less than a base Mercedes-Benz E550.

While we don’t for a minute believe anybody shopping for an E-Class or 5 Series would even consider a Japanese luxury sedan, much less the Korean-built Hyundai Genesis, those looking at Lexus or Infiniti would do well to visit a special little corner of a Hyundai dealership. One test-drive might begin to tip the scale. The clincher would be the sticker price and amazing warranty terms.

The 2009 Hyundai Genesis might not be here yet but, like those first few raindrops that precede a slow-moving thunderstorm on the horizon, there’s going to be a thorough soaking before it runs its course. This is just the beginning.

By Chris Walton, Chief Road Test Editor
Edmunds.com