We Sent A NASCAR Engineer To Review The New Genesis GV80 Coupe

Hello, friends. This is not going to be the usual post that you’re used to seeing from me. Thanks to an invite from the Autopian and the Genesis Motor Group I got to spend three days in Minneapolis a bit outside of my comfort zone. I would also like to take a moment before we get started to thank my dear friend Alanis King for chaperoning this rookie’s first press trip, and making it such a wonderful experience.

I am admittedly not a street car person. For my entire life, I have worked on race cars. Even before I was old enough to drive, my mother would drop me off three days a week at the Alleman Racing shop to work on their dirt track late model. Everything I’ve touched has been a thoroughbred. A purpose-built missile. A vehicle built and designed to live on the limit of adhesion, to tip-toe along the fine line between speed and danger.

[Ed note: Aeden is our NASCAR correspondent and the engineer for the JR Motorsports Chevy Camaro driven by Sam Mayer in the Xfinity Series. He had the summer Olympics break off and we cajoled him into taking a fancy trip to Minnesota to try driving a regular car. – MH]

I’ve just never paid much attention to street cars. Compared to a racecar there was nothing to capture that boyhood wonder. Learning to perform routine maintenance on a car that spent most of its life barely above idle elicited approximately zero emotion when compared to changing springs and shocks on a race car hunting for one more tenth of a second. To me, street cars were nothing more than a tool to get you from A to B and a bill to be paid every month. As long as mine started every morning, I’ve never paid it any mind.

The email that came across my desk had a subject line that read “Genesis GV80 Coupe,” and an image popped into my head of a sleek two-door sports car sitting low to the ground. In my typical fashion, I had already responded “yes” to the invitation before I did literally any research. [Ed note: LOL what? -MH] After closing out of Gmail I opened a few more tabs to try and figure out what in the hell I had just signed myself up for.

What Is The GV8o Coupe, Seriously, Someone Please Tell Me

The first thing I learned was that the coupe is not in fact a sports car but is actually more of a crossover SUV. The 2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe is the “sporty” version of the standard Genesis GV80 SUV. The most noticeable difference is obviously the sloped roofline. Genesis calls this a “Coupe design” but in reality, it’s more of a tear-drop shape than an actual coupe. That’s all a bit pedantic though, and it’s not worth losing the forest in the trees because visually it is a very different car than the standard GV80.

The coupe, with its sloping rear end, features 644 liters of storage space, which can be increased to just over 1,000 liters with the rear seats laid flat. By comparison, the standard SUV starts off at 1,033 liters with the rear seats up. [Ed note: Liters? This is almost always represented as cubic feet, but I’m gonna let it slide because it amuses me that our NASCAR correspondent is using the metric system. -MH]

From the stylish coupe’s exclusive wheels to the sharper body lines this really is a good-looking car. Personally, the most exciting part was discovering that the tailpipes are actually real and not just there for show. Combined with the coupe-style rear bumper, visually the only thing separating the rear of the GV80 from an actual sports car was its ride height.

The Genesis standard two-line MLA headlamps [Ed note: I feel like Alanis taught him this -MH] pair nicely with the sharp body lines. By using the body lines to connect the head and tail lights with the side turn indicators, they have created a distinct and subliminal set of pinstripes down the side. Compared to the standard GV80, which has smoother and body lines and a rounded profile, the GV80 Coupe looks precisely chiseled.

Where the standard GV80 has a luxurious interior with real wood trim finish, the coupe version tosses this aside in favor of carbon fiber, with red stitching and seat belts. Even the steering wheel is a D-shaped GT-style wheel with aluminum paddle shifters, giving this spacious SUV the feeling of a sports car.

The Genesis designers did a lovely job of trying to blend the feel of both luxury and performance on all parts of the GV80 Coupe’s interior. The jewel finish on the shift knobs creates a nice contrast with the carbon fiber center fascia that they are located on. Even the cup holders have a red LED trim to them, adding to the performance feel.

The metal pedals feel very solid underfoot, and the whole thing comes together in a nice combination of sleek and sporty with refined and comfortable. Even the turn signal and windshield wiper levers had a diamond-cut finish that was tactilely pleasing. The cars I work on don’t even have turn signals, so this is pretty impressive.

While dual-zone climate control is not a new feature on cars, the GV80 Coupe also offers a heated armrest when the heated seats are activated. Each half of the center console can be heated separately, which was a nice touch for Alanis who prefers a much warmer ride than I do.

The 27” OLED display system was well thought out.  The screen is split between two displays that were neatly separated right about where the steering wheel blocks the driver’s line of sight. You can see the handy turn signal display camera below. Also displayed is the impressive 20.8 miles per gallon that we got on our driving route, which consisted of a nice mixture of city, highway and back roads. By comparison, an Xfinity Camaro stock car like the one I work on gets an MPG of anywhere from 4-6.5 miles per gallon. This is a massive improvement.

How Does It Drive? Is It Tight Or Loose?

The Genesis GV80 Coupe features an array of driving modes including Eco, Snow, Comfort, Sport, and an additional Custom setting that allows you to create your own mode. Flipping between the modes changes the colors of the gauges to match the ambiance. Green for Eco, blue for Comfort, and red for Sport. The biggest difference between Comfort and Sport was in the throttle response. There was no “hunkering down” feeling that you get in a true sports car and the body roll felt about the same but with each click of the drive mode dial the throttle became increasingly crisp. In comfort mode, the throttle almost felt like a dead pedal, with lots of turbo lag and delay when trying to accelerate quickly.

Speaking of performance, the Genesis GV80 Coupe will be offered with a choice of two different engine packages. The first option comes from the standard GV80 SUV and consists of a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V-6 that produces 375 horsepower. The second option is the e-supercharged V-6 out of the G90 sedan that pumps out a nice 409 horsepower. The e-supercharged option also comes with launch control and an additional Sport+ driving mode. In our highly unscientific testing, the e-supercharged GV80 coupe had a zero to sixty time of roughly eight seconds which is honestly not bad for a crossover SUV.

When engaging Sport+ mode the seat bolsters tightened slightly, giving the feel of being hugged by the seat. Compared to Sport it feels one step torquier and everything just feels a touch crisper under your right foot. I wouldn’t call it as much of a change in performance as it was a change of the shift points to make the car feel sharper. For a luxury SUV, this is more than sufficient.

Genesis’ e-supercharger is a fancy bit of tech. By pairing the supercharger with a 48V mild hybrid electric system, the e-supercharged engine provides fantastic throttle response at lower RPM’s with minimal lag on sudden acceleration.

Another coupe-specific feature is the incorporation of Active Sound Design to make the ride sound more like a true sports car from the cabin. The system really does do a nice job and I wouldn’t have even noticed that it wasn’t real engine noise had Alanis not pointed it out to me.

In NASCAR parlance, was the car tight or loose? As in, does it tend towards understeer or oversteer? You will be shocked to find out that trying to ascertain this on a public road in an approximately 5,000-pound SUV is a bad idea and I would highly discourage anyone from seeing the sporty aesthetic and trying to test this. Also, it’s ever-so-slightly tight.

Yes, the Genesis GV80 Coupe that’s not really a coupe is a fantastic car, and I know that this is a car review but that was not my biggest takeaway from the trip.

This Was Fun

My whole life has been spent at race tracks around race cars and racers. In that segment of the car world, I could walk up to anyone in a bar and say “Did you see Hoffman and Pierce the other night?” and they would immediately know I was referring to the Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury. Faces would light up and an exciting discussion of the event would take place. For as long as I can remember, that was my perception of car culture. What I got to see and experience over three days in Minneapolis was a side of my own world that I never quite knew existed.

Walking down the street, a simple comment about a parked car would spark a lively discussion. Year, make, model, features, available colors and any other aspect of this car was open for debate and everyone seemed to have a thought to go along with it. As the resident not-a-street-car-guy-car-guy all I could do was observe in amazement. The same level of passion and detailed knowledge that I was familiar with in the racing world existed just as much, if not more so, for these vehicles I had mostly ignored. I found a group of strangers that could talk long into the evening, brought together simply by their love for the automobile.

I’d like to leave you with the first page of “Motor Racing” by S.C.H Davis, originally published in 1932.

Every car enthusiast has a moment in their life just like this one that was written about nearly a century ago. That little boy from the book exists in the souls of each and every one of us. That part of our soul is critical. It deserves to be nurtured and tended to.

Sometimes it takes a broadening of your horizons to recenter yourself and remind you why you do the things that you do. When your favorite driver crashes or you find yourself heatedly debating a taillight design in the comments section, take a second to think back and remember the moment that made you first fall in love with the automobile. Whatever you do, go out and do it for the love of the car.