I’d love to see the Mint come to life.
Steven Pham/Roadshow
We’ve got a lot of love for Genesis recently, with cars like the GV70 and G80 in the pipeline, and next year, the Korean luxury brand is ready to go electric. In among a wide-ranging flood of announcements Thursday from Genesis’ parent company Hyundai, the automaker said it plans to roll out two new electric cars next year.
Hyundai plans to go big on EVs in the future with more than 12 of them coming by 2025, mostly via Hyundai’s new sub-brand Ioniq. Kia will get its own models as well and all three brands, Genesis included, will utilize the new E-GMP EV platform Hyundai detailed earlier this month.
We can only speculate on what form the two Genesis EVs will take, but the brand showed two electric concept cars in the past. The first was the Essentia, which took the form of an electric grand tourer. It stunned crowds at the 2018 New York Auto Show, but the brand never gave a final word on if it was meant for production. That same year, one report said it would enter production as a limited-run model with a lofty price tag. Perhaps Genesis wants to make a big statement as it dives into electrification, should a production Essentia come next year.
The other concept is the Genesis Mint, a darling electric city car that also found a lot of love at the 2019 New York Auto Show. Again, Genesis was tight-lipped on the possibility for production, but the company believes populations will continue to move to city centers. Theory is that will spur a desire for smaller, premium cars. As much as the Mint would be awesome, it seems like an electric SUV is more in line with today’s car buyers, especially in the US. It’s tough enough to move EVs, and building a super compact one may not reach as many buyers as Hyundai wants.
But we’ll see. Genesis has taken some big steps in its short time as an actual Hyundai division. Maybe it will surprise us again.
Source: Electric - cnet.com
