The Finalists - 2009 Hyundai Genesis - 2009 Motor Trend Car of the Year

2009 Hyundai Genesis

What They Did Right: Almost everything. Besides its mechanical refinement, the interior is tastefully restrained in its use of stitched leather and simple shapes.

Room For Improvement: Ride quality on freeway heaves, needs a more distinctive personality, legroom for tall drivers.

Yogi Berra's great line, "deja vu all over again," has frequently been repurposed to automotive occasions, but it's hard to think of a better one than this case of Hyundai's new Genesis luxury sedan. Way back in 1989, Toyota introduced a big luxury sedan it called the Lexus LS 400-remember that? It was a car, Toyota declared, that would charge the imperial gates of Mercedes-Benz and BMW wearing nothing more than naked value, zenlike quality, and premium performance.

Where Yogi's deja vu comes in is that, almost 20 years later, Hyundai is not only reenacting Lexus's yellowing battle plan, but wickedly using it to do to Lexus exactly what Lexus did to those one-time fat and happy German luxocar builders.

No, Hyundai's Genesis isn't a separate brand as Lexus is. But it's a car so apart from anything the Korean firm is associated with that it might as well be. Like those early Lexi, the Genesis has that same many-luxury-cars-morphed-into-one sort of appearance. The shape is neither soaringly sonorous nor a sour note. It's comfortably familiar, more Andy Williams than Placido Domingo. And of all the Genesis's many impersonated Lexus qualities, the most notable is its steering feel, which replicates the LS's highly oiled, precision-bearing, sensation, spot on.

So, too, the car's silky yet quick acceleration. In V-8-guise (a 290-horse V-6 comes standard), 60 mph can be dialed up in as little as five and a half seconds. Yet, even in ordinary go-with-the-flow acceleration, the Genesis's all-new 4.6-liter, 368-horse V-8 (*using premium fuel raises output to 375 horses and 333 pound-feet) is such a refined sweetheart that Deutschland's and Japan's brightest engineers ought to be sensing the hot breath of their South Korean counterparts on their necks right about now. The Genesis's sole defect in its Lexus channeling? Its ride quality, which, in the opinion of a few of our testers' tushes, has seemed to periodically lapse into an awkward heaving.

The headline here, of course, is the car's profound value story: It's tens of thousands below its Tokyo competition. A compelling argument, to be sure. And when Hyundai irons out its last wrinkles (as it assuredly will) in its next generation, maybe it will be enough to commend it as our Car of the Year.
- Kim Reynolds