As award-winning British actor (and fellow Richard Anderson client!) Jude Law says near the end of “Closer”… “This will hurt.” For once, however, it’s also going to hurt me as much as it hurts anyone else. After all, your humble author has made an absolutely unjustifiable amount of money, and has had more than an unjustifiable amount of fun, cataloging the failures of my so-called peers in the auto business. So-and-so can’t drive, so-and-so is a paid toady, so-and-so is a working prostitute, so-and-so lived off his wife’s customer tips from her, ahem, after-hours performing career while utterly failing at being a craft beer maker, and so on. I’ve been throwing stones from a concrete bunker for nearly twenty years. But this time, you can call me Leelee Sobieski because I’m inside the glass house myself.
The issue at hand: the so-called “huge strides” made by Hyundai/Kia over the past twenty years. The narrative pushed by the automotive media has generally sounded something like this:
Sure, Hyundais used to be crappy little cars like the Pony or Excel, but now they compete with the best that Honda and Toyota have offer, at a better value proposition besides. The upscale Hyundai SUVs, like the Palisade and its Kia Telluride sibling, are just as good as Lexus or Acura. They might even be better! Hyundai’s products are now equivalent to the Japanese but they also offer the kind of dynamic, prestigious styling and high-touch interiors that Toyota, Honda, and Nissan can’t or won’t provide.
This rhetoric was amped-up further with regards to Hyundai’s Genesis sub-brand. As early as 2009, Car and Driver was describing the first-generation Genesis sedan as being well ahead of front-wheel-drive competitors from Lincoln, Cadillac, and Acura, while The Car Connection stated that “The 2010 Hyundai Genesis is a power play for luxury credibility-and it’s just about the equal of mid-size luxury rivals from Lexus and Infiniti.”
While I never went quite that far, I’ve been effusive with praise for how Hyundais built around the turn of the century were considerable improvements over their predecessors, and I’ve been absolutely smitten with the last two generations of Genesis G80 and G90. While I’ve declined to participate in the worst of the hype — my 2017 Sonata review stated that “Were I spending my own money on a midsize sedan, I'd still pick the Accord or the Camry” — but I have advised plenty of people to add Hyundai to their potential-purchase lists. I’ve also repeatedly suggested that readers of ACF buy a G90.
When one of our readers took me up on it, his short tour through a living hell as a Genesis owner made me start reconsidering my advocacy. It also caused me to begin looking critically at Hyundai/Kia products as they age, a process that reached its natural conclusion yesterday when I started looking at data about older Genesis and Hyundai cars for sale. It’s now obvious to me that Hyundai never made quite the leap for which the media, self included, has given them credit. Before we look at the reality of the situation, however, let’s briefly discuss how we got here.