Genesis is gearing up for what will be a pivotal year in the UK, as it ends sales of new pure-combustion cars and repositions itself following a turbulent four years since launching here.
The Hyundai-owned Korean premium brand has sold just 3700 cars in the UK to date. That’s 6000 fewer than DS – a brand of a similar positioning and age and in a similar state of flux – sold over the same period.
What’s more, Polestar, a rival firm that was launched a year earlier, has sold nearly 10 times as many cars – and with a single model.
With the petrol- and diesel-engined G70, GV70 and GV80 models now available from stock only and future hybrid models promised but with no arrival date yet confirmed, Genesis is effectively going electric-only here for the foreseeable future.
All of its EVs are due to be refreshed this year and new ones, such as the GV60 Magma, will follow as part of a renewed EV push.
Although the decision was almost certainly made due to those ICE models’ poor sales compared with their electric counterparts (EVs have accounted for more than two-thirds of Genesis’s total UK sales to date), it comes at a particularly challenging moment for the brand, as many of its early adopters’ finance and lease deals come up for renewal.
“Every one of our sales, even today, is a conquest,” Jonny Miller, brand director at Genesis Motor UK, told Autocar.
In a bid to entice owners into an EV, the brand currently offers electric courtesy cars to customers while their ICE models are in for service, so they can see how they live with it.
Although taking an EV isn’t compulsory, Miller described these short loans (sometimes one to two days in duration) as opportunities to open his customers’ minds to the prospect of running one in the long term.
“We will fully charge it, so [customers] can live with it, understand how it drives and how it feels but live with it for a little bit, like an extended test drive,” said Miller.
“So we’re actually using a natural life cycle-ownership model to get customers into cars that they possibly would not have driven or thought about and into our latest and greatest product.”
As for those who can’t see an EV in their immediate future, Miller pointed to the remainder of Genesis cars in stock, which have been distributed between model lines according to previous demand.
“We didn’t want to just sort of say ‘sorry, you have to have an EV now’,” he said. “We wanted to give them the opportunity to come back and take a second ICE product before it does go. They may be the people that then step into that hybrid [in a few years] and then step into the battery-electric vehicle further down the line.”
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