SUV Popularity and Origins:-
Now, percentages around the world vary, but think it’s safe to say that there are a lot of people who really love SUVs. And had to remind myself and remind you what SUV stands for. for it was a term that was coined in an advert for the Jeep Cherokee in 1974, the sports utility vehicle. And it makes sense in America. It’s a huge country. There’s vast areas with no roads at all. So, you want a big vehicle with big wheels and high off the ground, four-wheel drive, so you can go off into the wilds, go camping, live in the wilds, and shoot animals. You know, they love shooting animals there.
Introducing the Genesis GV70 Electric:-
A great pastime for them. But then after a while they became very popular with people who live in cities. But SUVs made up 33%. That’s basically a third of all car sales in the UK in 2024. Really popular. It’s the most popular individual style of car. And 99% of those SUVs are petrol or petrol hybrid or diesel cars. And they’re immensely inefficient. and they use loads of fuel and they blat out loads of fumes out the back and that’s the reason . This is a big beautiful luxury SUV, but this one is 100% electric. That is the Genesis GV70 and this is everything electric cars.
Driver Assistance: Helpful or Annoying?:-
Think a lot of people would find it annoying. The good thing is you can turn all of that either right down or off altogether. But to do that, you need to stop. You need to stop where you’ve got a good signal on your phone or go through the manual on the car. takes quite a while and really go through the multiple levels of very sophisticated software, the multiple choices you have, the the the incredible um the sort of software tree of all the different things that this car can do is quite complicated. But the beauty of it is if you spend that time, so if you were going to buy or lease one of these cars, it’s really worth just sitting in it stationary off the road for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, going through all the settings and making it right for you.
Comfort and Quietness:-
And then once you’ve done it, then it remembers and it knows. But the it is such a a a different car to drive when it’s not ponking and binging and donking at you. The really good things are like the lanekeeping assistance, which have got a very neurotic about with MG4, which has the worst lanekeeping assistance in the universe. This is brilliantly good.
Charging Experience and Battery Tech:-
So, Genesis is the luxury brand of Hyundai. And have to say with all our experience on the show of Hyundai electric cars, they’re pretty good at making electric cars. Let’s leave it at that because this is effectively a converted petrol car. You know, you can get a petrol or and and maybe even a diesel version of this car, but this one is 100% electric, nothing else. Uh it it costs between £65,000 and £75,985. So, we’re not looking at a cheap econo box as we used to say in the old days. But it has a lot of pluses if you just ignore that for one moment. So, it has an 84 kWh usable battery pack, but it has 800 volt architecture, which means it charges really, really fast.Got it up to 220 uh kW. It was charging out off a off a Tesla charger. It means in ideal circumstances you can charge from 10 to 80% in about 19 minutes. Not 20, not 18, about 19. And that is really good. Here’s a thing like because one of the advantages that the other brand of cars that are designed in America uh has that when you put a charge point in the battery automatically starts warming up or cooling down to enable the maximum speed of charging. And it’s quite haven’t seen other cars do that. This you can press a button and the battery starts to manually take itself either warmer or cooler for maximum charging speed which is a really really good thing.
Power and Performance:-
It has a 360 kW dual motor powertrain, four-wheel drive all the time, and it has about 500 horsepower, which means it’s not a sluggish car. It’s quite nippy if you want it to be. But it’s also really easy to drive it very, very smoothly. And there’s one reason why they’ve got that down to fine art, and that is their regen braking. More on that in a moment.At the top of a very high road pass in West Wales. Just driven 11 miles to get up this mountain at 2.3 miles to the kilowatt hour. And I’m now going down and there’s a 40 mph speed limit.And this is a really important aspect of electric vehicles in general, not just cars, that you can use the engine effectively, the electric motor as a brake. And when you apply uh more regenerative braking, you slow down.
Verdict: If You Want an SUV, Get This One:-
So there’s got numerous advantages. One, your brakes wear out much much slower in an electric car. That is a critically important thing when people go on about wearing out your brakes because the car’s heavier. The whole point of electric cars is the tires last longer because there isn’t the sudden jolting acceleration going through gears rips tires to pieces. Combustion cars destroy tires really really quickly. They’re much much worse. That’s one. And two, brake brakes last way way longer in an electric car. And I’m going over the speed limit and it’s binging me. So got to slow down, which is so easy to do. And also there’s sheep around and do not want to create mutton. So we have had an amazing day today driving around1 the Welsh hills.
Final Word:-
It is really a kind of compact SUV, It’s not one of the really big stupid ones with a massive diesel engine in. Do we really need SUVs of any sort or cars this big. But the flip side of that is, well, if you’re going to get one, and they’re very popular, you know, if you’re going to get one, get an electric one. Get one of these. They It is brilliant. It can do everything a stupid dirty diesel SUV can do and it can do it better and it’s so much nicer to drive. There’s no argument. Get a real life, get an electric SUV. If you can afford one, this is the one to get. It’s just it’s just stunningly good to drive. Now got to drive over 100 miles home and honestly don’t care. So, from up here on the top of a Welsh mountain uh with my pals, the sheep are backing off a little bit now. That’s it basically.