LA Times article

[blasterguam]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil14-2008nov14,0,7444477.story


Good article.

 

[Sal Collaziano]

The South Korean automaker's first full-size, rear-drive luxury car is a near-peer to Euro sport sedans -- but at a 20% discount.

The chocolate-brown leather is softer than a Hershey bar in a cop's back pocket. The topstitched upholstery across the dash and doors seems sewn with a needle borrowed from Miuccia Prada. The interior wood accents are carved from the most majestic lumber in the old-growth faux forest.

If you didn't know better -- and really, Hyundai would prefer you didn't know better -- you'd think the South Korean company had been at this luxury-car business a long time. In fact, the Genesis is the company's first full-size, rear-drive luxury car, an audacious shot whistling across the sport-sedan bows of BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Lexus. And the Genesis -- $33,000 with the base 290-horsepower V-6; $38,000 with the optional 375-hp V-8 -- undercuts whatever relevant competitor you care to name by a good $10,000.

Cut-rate luxury is a complicated notion. It is true that when you buy a BMW or Mercedes-Benz, some incalculable percentage of the cost resides in the badge. But there is value in those names, and not just as a matter of getting good spots in valet parking.

Premium-brand cars keep more of their residual value and offer owners the satisfactions of heritage -- Mercedes at Monza, BMW at Le Mans -- and the sense of belonging to a great automaking tradition.

Hyundai -- storied maker of cracker boxes such as the Excel and Accent -- has no such poetry to fall back on. But it does have an extraordinarily lean and efficient manufacturing process, cheap labor and great relationships with its suppliers. So it's possible for the company to offer this near-peer to Euro sport sedans at about a 20% discount. In these leaner times, many customers will forgive the Hyundai its relative lack of brand cachet.

To make that compromise easier to swallow, Hyundai has taken the extraordinary step of de-badging its own car: There is no flying H on the big grille of the Genesis. This is a first, in my experience, and it's a move that subverts the grammar of luxury in ways I can scarcely wrap my head around. It's like taking a Rolex knockoff -- a Romex, say -- and scratching off the name. A real counterfeit, a fake genuine article? I'm dizzy.

Read more

 

[blasterguam]

Thanks - tried to cut and paste and it wouldn't let me.

Interesting, yet kinda strange article. I think the author was taken back with the quality, the look, and options available, but just has trouble wrapping his brain around Hyundai producing a knockout vehicle!