Korean car brands have spent the better part of a decade quietly winning arguments they were never supposed to win. The Genesis GV60 is the latest, and perhaps most confident, instalment in that story. Its silhouette sits somewhere between hot hatch and compact SUV — a low, swooping roofline, near-non-existent overhangs, and a wheelbase that gives it a planted, purposeful stance that reads as both athletic and assured. A three-dimensional grille and twin-line LED headlamps with 200 micro lenses announce its presence on the road with quiet authority.
A standard Vision Roof with power sunshade floods the cabin with natural light, which matters more than most manufacturers acknowledge. Families spend a significant portion of their lives inside cars — stuck in traffic, waiting at school gates, grinding through motorway miles — and the quality of that environment deserves the same attention as the performance figures. The GV60, to its credit, seems to understand this.
The Interior: Where Luxury Actually Lives
The Crystal Sphere is the first thing anyone mentions when they talk about the GV60’s interior, and it earns the attention. Laser engraved and illuminated with ambient light, it rotates to reveal the shift dial when the car powers up, and offers haptic feedback in reverse — a detail so well executed that it makes you wonder why no one thought of it sooner. There is theatre here, but it serves a purpose.
A 27-inch OLED screen spans the dashboard with a customisable split-screen interface for maps, media and more — a display that makes certain German rivals feel as though they missed a product cycle. A fingerprint reader allows the driver to start the car and access personalised settings without a key fob, which in a household where two adults share a car and have entirely different preferences for seat position, mirror angle and ambient lighting, turns out to be one of those features you didn’t know you needed.
The Performance model’s front seats include a lumbar massaging function that activates automatically after an hour of driving — the kind of thing that sounds indulgent until you’ve done a three-hour motorway run with children asking questions and a sat-nav making bad decisions. Rear legroom sits at 37.6 inches with 60/40 split-folding rear seats that open up to 57 cubic feet of cargo space — workable for most families, though those routinely hauling a pram, a dog and a week’s worth of luggage may find themselves doing a version of the boot Tetris they were hoping to leave behind.
The Drive: Effortless, Electric, Occasionally Astonishing
The GV60 comes in three variants, and the honest answer is that two of them are excellent and one of them is something else entirely. The base Standard rear-wheel drive offers 225 horsepower, while the Advanced AWD raises that to 314 — both smooth, both refined, both more than sufficient for the daily reality of family motoring. They are, in the best possible sense, undemanding.
The Performance, however, is a different proposition. Twin 160kW motors produce 429 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque, delivered with the kind of immediacy that takes a moment to recalibrate to. A Boost mode activated via the steering wheel temporarily pushes output to 483 horsepower for ten-second intervals — a feature that will delight whoever is driving, mildly alarm whoever is in the passenger seat, and cause every child in the back to immediately demand it again.
Forward-facing cameras read the road ahead and prepare the adaptive suspension for incoming bumps — technology borrowed from the kind of cars that cost considerably more. On broken tarmac and imperfect road surfaces, which is to say on most British roads, the difference is tangible.
The Technology: Quietly Ahead of Its Time
All 2025 GV60 models now come standard with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, alongside Genesis Connected Services — which sounds like a given in 2025, but the execution here is tidier than most. The app allows you to check the car’s charge level, set a departure time, and pre-condition the cabin before you leave the house. On a January school run, stepping into a car that is already warm without having wasted meaningful range doing so is a small win that compounds daily.
Vehicle-to-Load capability turns the GV60’s battery into a portable power source — useful for camping, outdoor events, or simply maintaining a fragile ceasefire in the back seat by keeping devices charged throughout a long drive. A Top Safety Pick+ rating from the IIHS sits alongside a comprehensive suite of driver assistance systems.
The Range & Charging: The Family Road Trip Question
Every conversation about a family electric car eventually arrives at the same place: can it actually do the journey? The 2025 GV60 carries an 84kWh battery with an EPA-estimated range of up to 306 miles — enough for a long day of mixed driving, a cross-country run, or a European itinerary that doesn’t require obsessive route planning around charging infrastructure.
When you do need to stop, the GV60’s 800-volt architecture charges from 10% to 80% in around 18 minutes. That is a coffee, a circuit of the service station, and a negotiation about which snacks are acceptable — and you’re back on the road. Access to 20,000 Tesla Superchargers via the updated NACS port adds a further layer of confidence to longer trips, which has historically been the point at which the electric family car proposition has started to feel effortful.
The Verdict: The Understated Luxury Family EV
The GV60 is not trying to be the biggest, the fastest, or the longest-ranged electric SUV in its class. What it is trying to be — and largely succeeds at being — is the most considered. The interior is genuinely lovely to spend time in. The drive is fluid and quiet and, in Performance trim, properly quick. The technology is comprehensive without being bewildering and the design, which takes a genuine creative risk without ever quite toppling into excess, means it still turns heads two years into its production run.
For families who have decided that their daily car ought to be something they actually enjoy rather than simply tolerate, the GV60 makes a case that is harder to dismiss with every mile.
KeiKei is a London-based award-winning journalist and videographer with a degree in Broadcast Media and Journalism from the University of the West of Scotland and an extensive reporting background in news, entertainment, travel, and lifestyle.
KeiKei has travelled the globe interviewing, reporting and reviewing. Her work has been published in worldwide media outlets including, The New York Post, The Guardian, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, National Geographic and Conde Nast publications.
