Genesis will launch a whole range of hybrids because “customers now want hybrid more than EV”

“Five years back we anticipated that the EV era would arrive very quickly, and we really wanted to be a leader and a disruptor in the EV space,” said Genesis boss Mike Song at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. “Electrification is still our vision. We will have 100 per cent electrified vehicles, but the market and the customers now want hybrid more than EV, so we really want to bring Genesis hybrid into the market as soon as possible.

“We will apply it to as many models as possible.”

Yep, that’s concrete confirmation of a whole new range of Genesis powertrains incoming. Previously Hyundai’s luxury brand had committed to only launching all-electric cars from 2025, but low appetite for full EVs seems to have put that plan on hold.

“Here in Europe five or six years ago, everybody was super nervous about things like CO2 penalties, and so a lot of decisions were made on that basis. Strategic decisions were made on that basis,” said vehicle development boss Tyrone Johnson. 

“I think what we can say today, five years later, is that in large parts of the industry, we've actually overachieved. That gives us the opportunity to do things that perhaps five years ago may not have been possible. We’ve also learned a lot from a technical point of view in the last five years, and that opens up new possibilities.”

The Genesis range is currently powered by either fairly old internal combustion engines or solely by electric motors and batteries. Whether these new cars will be full hybrids or plug-in hybrids remains to be seen but given the rather rapid nature of their uptake it wouldn’t be too surprising to see powertrains borrowed from Hyundai and lightly fettled. 

“We're constantly reassessing what it is that we're doing and sometimes you need to make slight adjustments,” said Johnson at Goodwood. “As Mike has said the EV strategy holds strong, but you shouldn't be so dogmatic with certain things when boundary conditions change, you have to react and that's what's happening.”