2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe First Drive Review: A Fast-Fashion Luxury Car

The 2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe is very strong on style and excellent on comfort. How sporty it feels will depend a little on the driver’s imagination. Turns out, a car does not have to be electric to feel like a video game. Regardless, it’s a nice chariot to ride in and if you’re looking to spend $80,000 on a vehicle, this is worth looking at based on color options alone.

I recently test-drove the regular-shaped GV80 at our base in New York and was eager to tell Genesis’ people how much my dog loved its powerful rear air conditioning. They weren’t sure what to make of that; this vehicle is marketed as “the perfect blend of sporty flair and luxury,” not a muddy mongrel hauler. Utility is there, but this SUV’s main mission is to make you feel cool and this slopey-roof Coupe variant takes that even further.

After a brief test drive around Minneapolis and its suburbs, I can report that it mostly succeeds. If you like the way it looks, you’ll probably like the way it drives.

The Basics

The GV80 is a modern-day-medium-sized SUV. That means generous room for four people, and lots of luggage, plus good visibility and a fair amount of road presence without being cumbersome. The most obvious difference with this Coupe variant is the longer slope of the rear window. There are also some extra vents in the snout, metal pedals, a slightly flat-bottomed steering wheel, and some interior ambiance flourishes that make the car feel more aggressive.

The Coupe is also only being sold with the GV80’s more powerful engine options—you can get a twin-turbo V6 or a twin-turbo V6 with a 48-volt mild-hybrid boost and a compact electronically driven supercharger (Genesis has named this “e-Supercharger”). So it’s twin-charged but you could kind of say it’s triple-charged. One way to think of it is that the turbos will give you the big woosh when you want to go fast, the little electric supercharger will help spool things up at lower speeds, and the mild hybrid boost will help improve start/stop as well as initial off-the-line performance. But really, all these elements work in a system to provide super-smooth acceleration from rest and up through fast highway speeds. The sales pitch is that this setup is supposed to create an exceptional combination of performance and smoothness with minimal emissions. To me, it seems like a lot of complicated tech to hit highway mpgs in the low 20s.

Both engine versions ship with an eight-speed paddle-shiftable automatic and all-wheel drive, which can distribute power full-rear, 50/50 front/rear, or anything in between depending on the car’s perceived traction demands.

To preemptively answer one critical question: The GV80 provides a remarkably good riding experience for rear passengers, even with the slopier coupe roof. The back seats are super comfortable, adjustable, and climate-controlled. There’s plenty of leg- and headroom, and the rear vent for heat and A/C is immensely powerful.

Driving Experience

A good driving experience starts with the door handle. The GV80’s is perfect—shape’s nicely integrated with the car design, easy to grab, no waiting a beat for some dumb power-retraction action. As you slide into the seat and shut the door, you get a nice hefty thud and ambient outside noise essentially disappears.

Surveying the cockpit, you’ll see many fantastic materials and a few chintzy ones. Everything soft, from the seats themselves to the leather trim on the doors, is really nice. Sumptuous, even. The stitching and pleating everywhere is very pretty and the seats are supremely comfortable. The steering wheel wrap looks and feels good, too. Then you’ve got this glossy plastic trim running across the dash. The pattern looks like a low-poly wall in a first-person shooter from the ’90s. Not a dealbreaker, but it does break the spell of luxury that Genesis is clearly working very hard to cultivate. It just looks cheap. Trim on the console isn’t quite it, either. It’s not awful, but it lacks the aura of robustness that makes some luxury cars feel special. Looks a lot closer to Ikea than heirloom furniture.

Driver ergonomics are kind of a mixed bag. I already sang praises for the seat and steering wheel; both are widely adjustable and simultaneously comfy and supportive. Window switches feel nice too, and the passenger ones are unusually wide which I liked. Outward visibility and posture are both excellent. When you’re in gear, and in the zone, driving the GV80 Coupe feels great.

I did not feel that level of cohesion with the center console and screen situation, though. In between the driver and passenger are two big control knobs, one for messing with the infotainment system and another for shifting between drive, park, and reverse. Even having just done a week with a regular GV80, I went for the wrong one a couple of times. The infotainment knob, closer to the screen, has a janky jiggle to it. The drive mode knob is hidden off to the side; you need to make a really conscious effort to operate it. Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I like to cycle between eco, comfort, and sport mode all the time—I’ll run comfort around town, sport to merge, and eco on a long cruise. Genesis’ button placement makes that kind of annoying.

The immense information screen that does gauge cluster duties on the left and infotainment in the middle is, ironically, not that easy to parse information from. No matter how much I fiddled with posture, something on-screen was eclipsed by the steering wheel. There’s a decent breadth of things you can cycle through to display in the gauge area, but a lot of them are dumb. Five-day weather forecast? That’s something I need to peek at, like, once in a day. It’s not something I ever need to take up a huge chunk of dashboard real estate. And a day of test driving was not enough time to get acclimated to the right-thumb button on the steering wheel that controls it.

It was, however, enough time to appreciate the car’s ride quality (superb), steering response (good), and acceleration (solid). Stepping into the gas from a slow roll really brings some thunder. The car soaks up potholes with aplomb, and the steering-suspension pairing rocked it in suburban sporty driving. At civilized speeds and even a smidge higher, the car felt heroic. Just a super-clean ride through roundabouts and roads of varying roughness.

There are paddle shifters, but I get the sense that they were begrudgingly added. You can activate a manual mode by pulling one, but the car still pretty much shifts when it wants to. You won’t want to touch them much anyway, they’re made of the lightest and cheapest-feeling plastic I’ve ever put my fingers on in a car.

Genesis GV80 Coupe Features, Options, and Competition

I have to give Genesis credit for taking advantage of how electronically laden modern cars are to provide a high level of personalization. Beyond driving modes, which we’ll circle back to in a second, the GV80 Coupe lets you pick between two brake pedal modulations that are dramatically different. When you put the brakes in “sport,” pedal response is quite linear and initial bite is very aggressive. The “comfort” mode is much closer to what you’d expect in a luxury car.

The GV80 has perfume packs that can inject various scents into the cabin, which Genesis has bundled with ambient lighting and music in a “Mood Curator” function. You can cycle through a few options with slightly abstract names like “vitality” and “delight” and the car will attempt to set a vibe with its full suite of comfort features. Each mood even has an instrumental audio loop that lasts about nine minutes. If you’re old enough to remember Brookstone stores in malls and really liked its products, you are the target demo for this.

But the GV80’s human-machine interface also tries to appeal to the Fortnite generation. Cycling through drive modes, once you find the knob, alters the coloring and design of the tachometer. Each look is extremely video gamey—eco is soft, green, and leafy. Sport turns the needle red, and Sport Plus actually animates the needle to look like some kind of flaming sword. I appreciated the creativity but found it pretty cringey (you can turn that off, at least).

Finally, there are four engine soundscapes to pick from, including “off” where you just hear the natural vroom of the exhaust. The unassisted note is not bad at all. The digital engine noise modes don’t sound bad either, but the exercise feels hollow and pointless. A loud engine is satisfying because other people can hear it; it spills a car’s presence out into its surroundings. And it has the warmth of a physical instrument.

Revving a great-sounding engine is like strumming a guitar; this is like pushing a button on a keyboard. Or to keep going with the gamer analogies—changing the engine noise in the cockpit is like dressing up an avatar in a video game. It’s a fun little distraction, but it’s not going to stick with you emotionally. And if it does, you’ve got to get outside and touch grass.

Genesis is strict and simple on packaging—every car has everything, you pretty much just pick the powertrain and paint. Color options, inside and out, are both unique and gorgeous on the GV80. Our test unit was sprayed in a really cool blue called Bering Blue with a blue interior. You might think that would look like something out of the ’80s, but in person, I found it contemporary, classy, rich, and interesting.

As far as competitors go, if we’re talking “sporty luxury vehicles with some utility and an $80,000 budget,” the field is enormous. But the real direct rivals in the slanty-roof SUV “coupe” class include the Porsche Cayenne Coupe, BMW X6, Audi Q8, and Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe.

The Early Verdict

I ragged on the GV80 Coupe’s gimmicks a lot, but this car nails the core tenets of modern luxury. It looks great, it’s comfortable, sure-footed, and it makes you feel like a titan of industry as it glides around town. I’d be thrilled to drive cross-country or across a continent in one of these today. Or, if I had a miserable suburbs-to-city drive to make every day, doing it in a GV80 Coupe could make that chore feel like fun.

The driving enthusiast features made me more self-conscious than satisfied, though. I turned up the exhaust volume and found myself thinking, “Maybe my mom was right, loud cars are stupid.” Paddle shifting felt redundant; it was so much cleaner to just put my foot down and let the car pick the gear. The aggressive braking option, while cool and novel, could not find a logical application in my lap around suburban Minnesota.

But what undercuts this vehicle the most is its fast-fashion vibe. I’m not convinced that the car will age well, physically or aesthetically. So I guess I’d lease it, or trade it in when the next gen comes out and let its off-trend life be the next owner’s problem. What do you care—if you’re car shopping at this price point, you’re planning to die with debt anyway.

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