The weather is a little warmer than predicted for the day. I’m paging through the seemingly endless touchscreen menus in the 2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe before setting out for home, and I stumble on one called “Mood Curator.”
Ooh. What moods can this car create for me? My options appear to include Vitality, Delight, Care, and Comfort. I feel like being delighted, don’t you? I tap that choice.
The screen backgrounds show hot air balloons drifting over a mountainous landscape. Ambient lighting shifts to a soft yellow. A jaunty little jazz number starts playing out of 18 speakers — bouncy keyboard arpeggios under a floating harmonica lead. The climate control vents start gently mixing in a lovely fragrance called “The Great Outdoors” — sweet and herby.
I have to admit, it works. I’m delighted. I put the windows down for the short ride home.
Welcome to the curated world of luxury SUVs, where the cars do a little bit of everything. I spent a week driving the GV80 Coupe and came away with a well-cared-for mood.
My tester was a 2025 GV80 Coupe 3.5T E-SC MHEV AWD, which is a lot of letters in a row. It means a 3.5-liter turbocharged V6, an e-Supercharger, a mild hybrid electric vehicle, and an all-wheel drive.
The total price, as tested, was $87,780, including a $1,350 delivery fee and $650 for a dusty light blue shade Genesis calls “Bering Blue” that kept a big car from looking imposing.
Elegant Design
SUV coupes are risky things for designers to take on. SUVs lend themselves to function, even brutality sometimes, but not beauty. SUV coupes take the largest, most form-follows-function sort of passenger car and try to make it beautiful.
They’re not true coupes in that they don’t have two doors. But designers give them fastback rooflines to try to make them sleek. Many buyers choose an SUV for cargo space, so if you’re going to sacrifice cargo space for beauty, you’d better get it right.
Genesis designers did. The GV80 Coupe is an inch longer than the normal GV80, but it looks balanced and may even be light on its heels. The Genesis double-line design scheme is at its best here, where designers put chrome strakes behind the front fenders that visually carry the two lines of headlights further back into the car.
Color and Style Inside
Designers had a remit to be bold, and they kept it going inside. My tester’s quilted leather was Ultramarine Blue, with orange accent stitching and orange seatbelts. No other luxury automaker is that routinely daring with color.
Genesis will also build you a GV80 Coupe lined in deep Sevilla Red leather with Obsidian Black accents or one in Vanilla Beige and Smokey Green. Of course, there’s a black upholstery option if you feel more monochrome.
Carbon-fiber trim, frankly, feels out of place in this car. It’s usually reserved for high-performance cars. And while the GV80 is no slouch, this is made for traffic, not the track. But the carbon fiber doesn’t look bad with this color combination.
Every Technology You Could Imagine and Then Some
A single 27-inch display screen greets the driver, split to show simulated gauges where you’d expect them, and infotainment controls in the middle where both driver and passenger can reach them. A smaller screen below handles most climate functions and seat settings.
You can operate the big screen as a touchscreen or with a satisfyingly hefty metal puck controller below. And those operations? Endless.
Sure, you can adjust the seats to your preferred locations. Or, you can input your height, weight, and inseam measurements and let the car suggest ergonomic settings. I only have one body to test it with, but I felt comfortable in the recommended settings.
Here are the usual sound equalizer settings — bass, treble, and so on. But there is a “beosonic” setting that lets you select “bright,” “energetic,” and “warm” tones in your music.
That Great Outdoors scent is just one of three options. Ambient lighting comes in a nearly endless number of colors.
The GV80 Coupe uses technology to let you design your experience. That goes for the driving experience as well.
Drive Modes That Mean Something
When I first started driving the GV80 Coupe, I felt a flash of disappointment. The suspension was simply too soft, with too much give. Then, I remembered to explore the drive modes.
As someone who drives many different cars every year, drive mode selectors are often one of my biggest pet peeves. Many seem to do little. In many vehicles, settings with names like “Sport” and “Comfort” all feel the same.
In the GV80 Coupe, Genesis has solved this problem. Comfort is extremely cushioned (too much for my taste). Eco firms the suspension up a touch and sets throttle response to favor fuel economy — perfect for a calm ride through traffic (maybe with hot air balloons and harmonica jazz). Sport firms it up to where I like it (perhaps too firm for many). Sport+ does a fair imitation of a performance car.
So does the steering. It’s precise, and while it doesn’t give as much feedback as a true sports car, it’s impressively sporty for such a heavy vehicle.
Big 22-inch wheels give it a ride that might be too harsh for some. They’re standard on the upper trim and an enhancement you might want to decline if you prefer a softer ride.
Genesis sells the car with two engine choices. They loaned me a car equipped with a 3.5-liter V6 with both a turbocharger and a supercharger mated to a 48-volt mild hybrid setup, good for a total of 409 horsepower and 405 lb-ft of torque.
It felt a bit slower than those numbers would suggest. Adding both a supercharger and a turbocharger to an engine gives it plenty of low-end power, but a transmission tuned for the highway means that, even if you punch the accelerator, the big car takes a beat before it really lurches.
That’s fine — the mood curator doesn’t have a setting for Friday night drag races. But it makes me wonder if the other setup — also a 3.5-liter V6, that one making 375 hp and 391 lb-ft of torque — would be plenty in day-to-day living.
The Real World, Selected
After a week in the GV80 Coupe, I was stuck on the word “curated.” It’s perhaps the best summation of why some luxury cars exist.
The GV80 Coupe is very particular — a version of a luxury automaker’s flagship SUV redesigned to be more beautiful.
Most vehicles with price tags close to $90,000 give you a carefully considered experience. But a buyer choosing this, or the similar BMW X6 or Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe wants to slide into the driver’s seat and experience the world edited by artisans looking to make it a little more pleasant.
The GV80 Coupe does that as well as any vehicle on the road today, I thought to myself. As I completed the thought, the car automatically started a massage sequence that kicks in after you’ve been driving for about an hour. That deserves some delightful keyboard and a gentle scent.
