Genesis GV60 interior, tech and comfort
- Good trim and material quality
- Infotainment is good, but not brilliant
- Some cutting-edge tech, including fingerprint recognition
How is the quality and layout?
The GV60 blends modern and traditional luxury extremely well, and is an absolute delight to spend time in. It feels and smells upmarket, with high quality leather that’s soft to touch and feels of a much higher quality than its rivals.
If leather isn’t your thing, and you prefer a car with a vegan-friendly interior, you can option it with seats made partially from corn in order to reduce animal usage. The rear seats recline and the interior can be optioned in space-age white rather than dark and serious black – the interior looks all the better for it. Fit and finish is very impressive, and leagues ahead of the Volkswagen ID.5 or Jaguar I-Pace.
The floating centre console is inset with what appears to be a crystal ball, lit from within. Press the start button and it flips over to become a twist ’n’ go gear selector for Reverse, Neutral and Drive. It works well unless you’ve accidentally grabbed the infotainment controller, a similarly sized rotary dial just ahead of it.
We do find all the silver switches to be a bit out of place, though. It just doesn’t look or feel like metal, so a conventional black button would look better. Similarly, the patterned silver trim on the doors and dash isn’t as classy as some of the trims found in more mainstream premium rivals such as Audi and BMW. At least there are switches and buttons for important stuff like the heater, no guarantee these days.
Infotainment and tech
There’s a lot of tech but not all of it works well. First up, is the infotainment system, which is hard to fault – it’s fast, good to look at and easy to use. It works with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay and we love how you can operate it using a central controller as well as the touchscreen.
You can option camera mirrors instead of traditional ones too, but they’re not brilliant – in line with how we’ve yet to find one that is. You constantly adjust your head to no avail. The camera can be adjusted up and down and left and right but it’s still not as good as a conventional mirror. Confusingly, these cameras react slower than the rear-view parking one, which is a bit disconcerting when you’re reversing and using all three at the same time.
The Bang and Olufsen sound system has noise cancelling tech too, which really works. It’s spookily quiet at times. But the sat-nav isn’t brilliant. The instructions on screen are a bit confusing and the head-up display seemed to be just slow enough to be annoying.
Also impressive is the vehicle to load system. This allows you to power items such as hairdryers, TVs and games consoles from the car with a three-pin plug.
Last on the list is Genesis’ facial and fingerprint recognition system. Once set up, you can unlock your car by looking into a camera on the B-pillar, then start it by pressing a small fingerprint sensor ahead of the gear selector. That sensor can also be programmed with personal settings for seat and mirror positions.
Yes, it works – but we reckon it’s little more than a gimmick. After all, the GV60 already has keyless entry and start, and is it really that difficult to just keep a key in your pocket? Besides, while the facial recognition works very well on our long-term GV60, you can’t always trust the fingerprint sensor to work.
Comfort
- Seat comfort is seriously impressive
- Front-seat occupants are well catered for
- Rear passengers have lots of room, too
We’ve gone into great detail about the car’s flat floor and generous interior in the Practicality section of the review, but it has a great bearing on overall levels of comfort. There’s plenty of room front and rear, and all seats bar the central rear offer excellent support and comfort, while also being invitingly soft when you get into them.
Some drivers found the seat wouldn’t go down low enough, and the steering wheel doesn’t adjust far enough to compensate, which might annoy some drivers. Luckily, there’s enough adjustment in the GV60’s seat and steering column for most drivers, though.
Ventilated seats were certainly welcome on our long termer when it arrived towards the end of summer, with the heated seats and steering wheel coming into their own during the winter.