An obvious question that started popping up in people's’ heads upon seeing the recently unveiled Genesis G70 is whether or not it will get a high-performance variant to compete with the likes of the BMW M3, Cadillac ATS-V and Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. According to Motoring, the short answer is no.
Motoring asked Manfred Fitzgerald, Senior Vice President of the South Korean luxury brand, whether or not we can expect Hyundai’s N division to tune sporty versions of models in the new Genesis brand.
“I don’t think so right now,” Fitzgerald replied. He emphasized that Genesis as a brand is more concerned with investing in electric vehicles.
“If you look at the performance value of an electric vehicle today, there are a lot of [internal combustion engines] that really struggle to keep up with that,” Fitzgerald said.
In other words, if a Tesla Model S P100D can smoke just about any other high-performance sport sedan on the drag strip, what’s the point of making a new entry in a segment that’s going out of style from a technological standpoint? Fitzgerald seems to believe pretty firmly that the future of performance in luxury cars is electric.
So does that mean the future of Genesis is electric?
“What we said is that we will develop, around 2021 [or] '22, two dedicated [EV] platforms,” said Fitzgerald. “And on those two dedicated platforms, we will develop dedicated models.”
Before Genesis gets carried away with its EV plans, it needs crossovers, a mandatory part of any luxury brand today. We can expect to see a GV80 crossover based on the next generation G80 and a smaller GV70 based on the freshly-unveiled G70 sometime soon.
Although we won’t see a Genesis tuned by the N division, the luxury brand is still a tempting alternative to established rivals.