2022 Genesis G80 3.5T AWD PVOTY Review: The Old College Try

If your kid participates in sports, they've probably gotten one or two of these in recent years: the participation award. The "you played" medal. Don't get us wrong, we get why it's important to positively affirm. If we were giving away something similar at this year's Performance Vehicle of the Year, the 2022 Genesis G80 3.5T would have gone home with one.

Let's start by checking off the good stuff. The G80 in its 3.5T guise comes with standard all-wheel drive, and its 3.5-liter twin-turbo V-6 has more than a fair amount of grunt, rated at 375 hp and 391 lb-ft of torque routed through an eight-speed automatic. The combination is enough to move the Genesis sedan from 0 to 60 mph in a brisk 5.0 seconds flat. In our dynamic tests it also performed decently, with a 0.97 g average skidpad number, a respectable figure-eight run of 24.8 seconds at 0.77 g, and a 106-foot stop from 60 to 0 mph—not bad for a sedan that weighs close to 4,500 pounds.

In case you hadn't noticed, we're also big fans of the Genesis brand in general, and the G80 3.5T shares many attributes we've found attractive in other Genesis models, including its well-appointed cabin loaded with upscale amenities, overall attractive looks, and road manners in line with the best that competing luxury brands have to offer.

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Therein lies the rub with the Genesis G80—this is a luxury car first and a sport sedan second, and no amount of Sport Prestige (the car's trim level) can change that, not even an electronically controlled suspension with sport tuning and rear-wheel steering (part of a $6,300 option package). Quite frankly, it has no real business being at the track other than stopping by to see real sports cars run, and it showed. Judges were pretty unsparing in their criticism, consistently noting excessive body roll, lack of proper tires, and slow steering. The car also had a tendency to yank its seat belt tensioners at any sort of aggressive maneuver.

One loud dissenter who cut through the chorus of road-course negativity was technical director Frank Markus, who found the G80 to be surprisingly lively at Streets of Willow. "It's more performance-oriented than it looks," he said. "Even if no one will ever consider bringing it to a track day, it should prove an entertaining dance partner on roads like Tail of the Dragon." Markus even went so far as to say the G80 "earned its place" at an event stacked with so much hot and exotic machinery more suitable for pavement-scorching. 

The debate over whether we should have even invited it aside, the G80 participated, and although it didn't exactly garner much praise for how well it handled itself out on the track save from Markus, it endured a proper flogging by the judges and kept on going. For that alone, it earned its participation trophy.

"It's a nice-driving car in the real world, just not a true performance vehicle," noted executive editor Mac Morrison, who summed up how most judges felt about the G80. "But it's certainly a solid, sporty-ish luxury all-wheel-drive sedan. "