Hyundai and their sister company Kia have been showcasing some impressive design work lately, and the company’s up-market brand, Genesis, seems to be getting an entirely new corporate face and design vocabulary, which we’ve first seen on the 2021 Genesis GV80, released earlier this year. Now that bold design is on Genesis’ traditional core of luxury sedans, as we can see before Hyundai would like, thanks to some Korean sites. It looks pretty good, I think!
We were sent these pics via the GVForums Genesis-enthusiast site, and they show the redesigned front and rear of the car:
Overall, I like this new direction. I think the shield-shaped grille design is striking without feeling too gimmicky, and the below-grille area, while a bit busy like nearly every other car available today, has a nice biomorphic quality that I think works.
The front licence plate positioning doesn’t seem particularly well considered, and again Genesis is hardly alone with that, but I still like this direction.
I’m still not crazy about the fake grille area used to hide the radar transceiver unit, another industry-wide practice that I think needs serious re-evaluation. Maybe I’m just kind of a jerk, though.
The lighting is good, too — the breaking up of the light units into those four wraparound separate units I think really makes the front end distinctive and sleek-looking.
If you look at the outgoing one, I think the facelift really helps separate the Genesis from the crowd of very similar-looking luxo sedans in this class.
Around the rear, the taillights have a sort of body-coloured racing stripe thing going on that I like, and I like how the low-mounted reflectors wrap around the prominent oval tailpipe openings there.
I think this is a just a mid-cycle refresh, and as such I don’t think we’ll see any dramatic changes to the car’s profile or proportions. As mid-cycle facelifts go, though, I think this is a particularly good one that does a lot to refresh the car and gives the brand a good, coherent visual identity that will help keep it separate from an increasingly homogenised pack.