I Just Saw Genesis’ New Design Center. It’s A Huge Flex On The Entire Car Industry

The story of the Genesis brand is a fascinating one. Trying to build a competitive luxury marque is an extremely tall order, and for Hyundai Motor Company to do so so quickly after having gotten its own stuff together (Seriously, just 20 years ago the idea of a luxury brand from the maker of Hyundai would have been laughable) is genuinely impressive. What’s also impressive is just how much of a clear identity Genesis has built in just 10 years of existence, and now it’s leaning hard into that brand identity with “Genesis Design California,”
a ridiculously nice design facility in California.

“We’re not an arrogant brand,” legendary car designer and Hyundai Motor Company’s Chief Creative Officer Luc Donkerwolke told journalists during yesterday’s media event. He pointed out how open Genesis’ new building is — airy and welcoming. This building isn’t Genesis trying to be ostentatious, he said; it simply represents the brand’s commitment to the concept of “Design is brand and brand is design.”

And while, thanks in large part to Donkerwolke’s leadership, Genesis has done a great job defining itself as a design-focused brand (something that becomes more important as the world electrifies and cars can no longer distinguish themselves through things like engine sound, torque curve, transmission shifting behavior, weight distribution, etc.), there’s no question about it: This new design center is absolutely a flex. Genesis invited a boatload of journalists out to El Segundo to get the word out about not only how nice this building is, but about how Genesis is a rapidly growing brand with serious momentum.

While I myself was impressed by the building and will share with you what Genesis showed me, I can’t say I’ve fully drunk the Genesis Kool-Aid quite yet. While the brand has grown substantially (now selling 75,000 cars a year stateside), the road ahead is challenging. Tariffs are hitting Genesis hard, competition from China is only likely to increase, and then there are the extremely mercurial regulations that are screwing everyone over (though Genesis plans to ramp up EREVs and hybrids to help on that front). That is to say, I’m impressed by Genesis and its world-class design team, but I’m also not entirely sure about its future growth from here.

Anyway, with the skepticism out of the way, I’ll just share with you, dear readers, what Genesis showed me yesterday in El Segundo, just south of LAX.

Here you can see a bunch of journalists in the lobby hanging out with the Genesis X Gran Convertible concept:

Speaking of, what do y’all think of this blue interior?:

The lobby had a very natural theme to it, with lots of horizontal wood elements on the walls. Car models and sketches and photos adorned the whole area:

Before we could see more, we were ushered into a big room where executives showed us some slides.

To give you an idea of how much this event meant to Genesis, José Muñoz — President and CEO of Hyundai Motor Company’s global business — was in attendance:

He was showing everyone that Hyundai Motor Company is planning on invested $25 billion in North America in the next four years — more than the company has invested since it began selling cars in the U.S. in 1986:

Muñoz also mentioned that his company just leapfrogged Volkswagen to become the second most profitable car company there is:

This slide shows just how broadly Hyundai is investing right now, with numerous partnerships and subsidiaries across industries:

Here’s Muñoz showing that Hyundai is crushing it, which is true:

Genesis, too, has seen faster growth than both Lexus and Tesla to 1 million sales, per Muñoz:

Muñoz mentioned an “EV Chasm,” the difference between real EV demand and formerly expected EV demand, and how Genesis plans to fill that chasm with hybrids, including EREVS (which we should all be excited about, because — especially for certain segments — they represent the best of all worlds)

As for future products, we didn’t see much, but Muñoz did mention the X Gran Equator concept, which is extremely cool:

Then there was the Gran Convertible from the lobby:

The company’s racing division, Magma, is going add some heat to each existing model, plus there will be one-off performance models:

And then Genesis is doing an “ultra bespoke” personalization thing like what Porsche, Aston Martin, and the other high-end automakers do:

It was all optimistic, as you might expect, but Genesis’s rise has been impressive, and it will be cool to see where it goes. Anyway, let’s get back to the “flex” that is the new design center.

When journalists walked into the courtyard, we were met with a GV80 and the Gran Equator concept, which looks absolutely sensational:

The clear glass, the big aggressive tires, the short overhangs, the minimalist styling — I love it!

While we were admiring the cars, Genesis opened the roof. An absolute flex:

The brand then showed us The Studio, which is where the clay models are created:

We got a demonstration of the T-Scan Hawk II portable 3-D scanner, which digitizes the 3D clay model sitting at a very precise location on the floor:

Here you can see that front right fender going into CAD:

The coolest part of this section of the design center, though, is what you see at the back of this picture, beyond the catwalk (which Genesis say is there to help their team analyze the design from a different vantage point — up top — whereas the outside courtyard helps the team assess the design under natural lighting and from a farther distance):

You can see at the back a pair of 5-axis milling machines beyond the glass doors in what’s called the Milling Room (Genesis says it can make two full-size clay models simultaneously):

The doors themselves are opened by hand via a contraption made up of a giant metal steering wheel, a driveshaft feeding an actual Genesis rear differential, which then moves a chain that spins what looks like a steering intermediate shaft, which moves a pinion that drives the big rack:

Obviously, this facility is all about design, but I’m a mechanical engineer so that differential was my favorite detail.

Journalists them went to the “CMF” room — Color, Material, Finishes. There we got to experience… well, various colors, materials and finishes:

I thought the light room was cool, because, per Genesis, it’s set up in such a way that it matches other rooms in Genesis design centers around the globe. This allows designers to “see the same thing” (so to speak) as they assess colors:

The event involved Genesis promoting its “Prestige Black” vehicles and talking a lot about sustainability.

We enjoyed a round table in which execs talked about how they’ve built a methodology that allows all 21 studios around the world, across three brands, work together in a way that keeps things moving 24/7. Nobody has to wait for an employee to get back to work, people don’t have to come in on weekends to send data — they’ve got a setup that keeps Korea, Germany and the U.S. sharing data in a way that ensures the machine moves forward. Genesis seemed very proud of this.

The most exciting discussion was the one I had with Luc Donkerwolke; we talked about his personal cars, which I’ll show you in a subsequent article. They are extremely quite odd for someone who designed the Lamborghini Murcielago. It would be impossible for anyone to guess what vehicle he just used to pick up a Christmas tree, or what vehicle he just had fully restored.

One thing I did get the impression of was that Luc has been given free reign to do all sorts of crazy stuff. I’ve known Luc personally for a few years now; he’s a true car nut, and it seems his bosses have empowered him to get Genesis into various racing series, to hire Jackie Ickx as a race advisor, and to branch the Genesis brand out into some quite interesting new areas like off-road (as we saw with the Gran Equator). He also showed me a video of his team doing donuts in the X Gran Berlinetta Concept in what looked like a design center’s courtyard. That’s this thing:

Clearly they’re having fun.

Genesis has plenty of challenges ahead, sure, but as a brand only 10 years old, it’s already made a name for itself. This is a brand run by designers. “We hire good designers that have talent and social competence,” Donkerwolke told journalists about leadership within his team. “We don’t hire managers. We are designers, and this is what we’re paid to for.”

Obviously, there are many other parts of the company beyond just design — building cars, after all, is a multifaceted endeavor. But, at Genesis, it’s clear that design rules all, and this is not the case for many car companies. Take Lucid, which is clearly an engineering-first company that would rather make its SUV look like a jelly bean-minivan to get maximum aerodynamic efficiency than make it actually look good. At Chrysler, where I worked as an engineer in a former life, there was tension between engineering and design just as there is everywhere, but I felt that the balance was in the designers’ favor. Their goals held more weight than engineering’s concerns, and this pushed engineering to innovate. I get the impression that Genesis is more like Chrysler, but amped up to about 1000.

Anyway, that’s all I got. Nothing groundbreaking, maybe a bit too puff-piece-y, but hey, I have the privilege of getting to see automakers’ facilities, and it’s my job to share that privilege with you, dear readers.