2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe First Drive: Leaning in the Wrong Direction
Less cargo space, more style, and similar performance make the GV80 Coupe a half-measure.
At its best, marketing clearly and concisely helps you understand why you should want to buy a product. Sometimes, though, marketing tries to convince you a product is something it’s not, but something you might find desirable, nonetheless. Case in point: the 2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe. It’s being presented as a sporty, driver-focused model despite being neither of those things. It is, though, a very nice luxury SUV.
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Stick to What You’re Good At
Our only real beef with the new GV80 Coupe is that it’s trying to be something it’s not, when it ought to be leaning into what it is, instead. The GV80 is the brand’s flagship luxury SUV and a very good one at that. It’s stately, comfortable, and luxurious. The latest updates to the standard model improved it in all the right places without substantially raising its price, though it did come at the cost of rated fuel economy.
The GV80 Coupe, like so many SUV “coupes” before it, is being billed as the sporty one. It’s only available with the bigger twin-turbo V-6 engine (you can also get an electric supercharger tacked on that’s good for another 34 hp and 14 lb-ft). Added to that is a Sport + drive mode, a sport stability control mode, and launch control. The standard all-wheel-drive system, meanwhile, has been reprogramed for rearward power bias in dry weather modes. While the suspension hardware is unchanged, Genesis claims substantial tuning work has been done to make the GV80 Coupe sportier than the standard SUV.
Why, Though?
If you’re familiar with the GV80, you can start to see the problem here. As nice as it is, it’s not sporty to begin with, and that’s fine. Luxury SUVs don’t all have to have a performance variant. Retuning the GV80's existing suspension parts only leaves an engineer so much to work with, and the result is an SUV Coupe that rides a bit firmer and rolls a bit less in corners but otherwise isn’t really any more engaging or thrilling to drive fast.
Weighing the same as the full caboose model doesn’t help, either. At 5,000-plus pounds, it’s no lightweight and not surprisingly, it doesn’t drive like one. Rather, it drives like a tall, heavy luxury SUV. Which, again, is fine, but none of this is what you’d call sporty.
As the base GV80 Coupe comes equipped with the same engine and transmission as the high-trim GV80 SUV, we’re willing to bet its instrumented performance and subjective impressions of acceleration will be the same. We haven’t been able to test it yet, and Genesis hasn’t provided any performance estimates. (We wish we’d had the chance, as we’d have liked to compare the ride quality on the standard 20-inch wheels to the 22-inch wheels that come with the 3.5T e-Supercharger model we drove.) We suspect those big, heavy wheels wrapped in rubber band tires are a contributing factor in the firm ride that transmits every crack in the pavement into the cabin (softly, at least).
As to the performance of the top-spec 3.5T e-Supercharger equipped GV80 Coupe, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that adding an extra three dozen or so horsepower and less than half as much torque doesn’t result in a blistering performance increase. As in the G90 sedan, we suspect the electric supercharger is mostly there to fill dips in the torque curve and cover for the turbos at low rpm while they spool up. If it’s meaningfully quicker than the engine relying only on turbos, it isn’t by much. Good enough for a big luxury SUV, certainly, but nothing that’s going to impress the members of the country club driving high-performance German SUV coupes. Indeed, it’s such a small increase that Genesis didn’t feel the need to fit larger brakes to it. Those big wheels are just for show, not clearance.
The new Sport + drive mode is no help, either. Seemingly programmed by the same team that does Hyundai’s N cars, it cranks up the gain on the accelerator pedal and makes the transmission super aggressive, but all of it feels completely out of character for this vehicle. It gives the illusion of sportiness, until you realize the throttle is already maxxed out before the pedal is halfway to the floor. More than that, the suspension tuning doesn’t have the capacity to handle this kind of rapid weight transfer, so the whole thing just ends up feeling frenetic. The Michelin Primacy all-season tires, meanwhile, don’t have enough grip to fight the default understeer, so the rear-biased power delivery and sport ESC mode don’t mean much in real-world driving.
With all that said, you might be wondering why it has a sport ESC mode at all, much less launch control. The truth is, we don’t know, either. Both feel more like boxes checked and bullet points added to the brochure rather than proper features for the vehicle. Same goes for the fake exhaust noise piped in through the speakers, which can thankfully be turned off because it’s just odd having exhaust noise (not induction noise) coming at you from the dashboard.
See the Good
Look past the faux sportiness, though, and there’s nearly as much to love about the GV80 Coupe as there is the standard GV80 SUV. While most of it's on the inside, we do have to say the exterior designers have done a wonderful job of cutting the roof down without ruining the proportions or style. There’s a little bit of a Panamera hump in there, but it’s well hidden and (as in the Porsche) largely preserves rear-seat headroom.
Officially, rear headroom decreases by 0.8 inch, and in our estimation, it was space the GV80 could afford to lose. Average-height adults still fit with room to spare; it just feels a little cozier. Shoulder room also slims down by half an inch, which isn’t enough to notice. You’ll still be able to take your friends to dinner without issue.
Up front, it’s almost entirely unchanged over other GV80s. In fact, the only thing guaranteed to be different in the Coupe is the new D-shaped steering wheel. Other major differences are optional, like the new interior color schemes, or restricted to the 3.5T e-Supercharger model, like carbon-fiber-look trim. The new single-piece 27-inch screen carries over to the Coupe, mounted so low it makes you feel like you’re sitting high in the vehicle even when the seat is as low as it’ll go.
The design candy is nice and all, but the GV80 Coupe’s biggest win is its isolation. External noise is nearly nonexistent, as are vibrations from the powertrain. Impact harshness and tire noise are good but could be better, as we discussed earlier. Wind noise doesn’t show up until freeway speeds, and even then, it never rises to the point of annoyance. Here, again, the Coupe comes off as a style-forward luxury vehicle, not a sporty model.
A consequence of that style, of course, is cargo space. The optional third row is of course gone, and the sloping roofline cleaves 6.2 cubic feet out of the area behind the second-row seats compared to the SUV (9.6 cubic feet lost when the rear seats are folded). Most of the losses seem to come from up high, so you won’t be able to stack as much back there as before but are still left with space for several suitcases. Even better, Genesis designers and engineers managed to fit a massive rear window that really doesn’t impede rearward visibility much at all (though there’s a camera-based rearview mirror mode if you prefer).
Forget the Marketing
Ignore all the “sporty” ego boosters and see the GV80 Coupe for what it is, an even more stylish but less practical version of the two-box luxury SUV you know. Skip the performance modes and fake noises, and lean into the quiet comfort. Get the Coupe because you like the way it looks, not because you want to set a Nürburgring lap time on your way home from the country club.
Just keep in mind, style comes at a price. The GV80 Coupe starts where the SUV’s top-spec models leave off, commanding as much as $81,300 to start. If you really do want the extra sportiness, power bump, and special trim inside and out, the 3.5T e-Supercharged model will set you back $87,100 before engaging the very limited options list.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
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