Genesis G70 Shooting Brake review

Genesis has clearly tried to skip a class entirely when it comes to the interior – there are dull grey options available, but our car had a strangely compelling red leather interior with diamond quilting. It’s not a 100 per cent successful aping, with some whiffy plastics around the place, but an impressive job nonetheless. 

It does feel a touch old-fashioned, the layout and design of the dashboard gives away the fact that this is actually a mid-life facelift for the G70, even if it’s a new car to us in Europe. That said, we’re always here for the physical climate control buttons and suchlike, rather than an explosion of enormo-touchscreen spreading across the middle of the car. 

The 10.25-inch touchscreen works well in the car, and you can sync your phone easily for Android and Apple connectivity. We don’t mind this idiosyncrasy on cheaper cars, but it’s annoying here that your Apple/Android connectivity can only be done with a wired connection while the car offers wireless phone charging. 

Genesis boasts of its internet-based connected services that are on offer – live traffic info, local fuel prices and where the nearest bit of parking is. Not something we managed to take advantage of, but probably useful if you’re living with a car and have managed to read the instruction manual a few times.

A digital instrument panel with 3D display is an option on the car – it takes a little getting used to as the different elements of the instrument panel float around in front of you, but it actually works quite well. A lot of effort to go to when you could just put in actual three-dimensional dials, mind. 

A nice carryover from the Hyundai range is the blindspot camera set-up, which shows you a rear view along from the side mirrors in the instrument panel when you turn the indicators on. Sadly it’s rendered almost useless at night or in poor weather when it might be particularly useful. 

Rear passenger space is good, but not great – especially considering the size of the car. Boot capacity isn’t massively increased with the addition of the estate-ish hatch – you get an extra 100 litres or so, taking you to 465 litres and 1,535 litres of space with the seats folded down. It’s a reasonable amount of storage space, but the steeply raked bootlid does mean a bit of squashing things down. 

For context, a BMW 3 Series Touring gets 500 litres of space with the seats up and 1,510 litres with them flat. The Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4 Avant are similar, although something like a Skoda Octavia Estate will blow all four out of the water in terms of practicality.