“It’s all about how you bring across to the customer that they don’t feel they are driving or seeing the same car.” — Manfred Fitzgerald, Genesis Motors Senior Vice President
The 2018 Kia Stinger and 2018
Genesis G70 are platform partners, two new sporty and luxurious four-doors from the Hyundai Kia Automotive Group.
The timing of their release is synchronized. They utilize the same engine portfolio. They’ll compete in a similar price bracket. But there are differences. For starters, the styling is markedly different, the kind of difference one expects to find when one car, the Kia, is a hatchback and the other is a sedan. The
Kia Stinger works harder to get noticed; the
Genesis G70 is more subdued.
But while Hyundai’s Genesis spinoff will need to further differentiate the
G70 from a marketing standpoint in order to provide a true luxury brand glow, it’s already been made clear by Albert Biermann, the former BMW chassis guru who’s now head of vehicle testing for Hyundai and Kia, that the cars are
very similar. In terms of driving experience, “It’s not so easy maybe as with the styling, but I think we can find good tuning and calibration that set them a little bit apart,”
Biermann said earlier this year.
A little bit.
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