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Journalism of Courage
Tiger Wood’s SUV crash has thrust a little-known luxury brand into the spotlight Tuesday, though with not the kind of publicity the carmaker would have ideally liked. Footage showed Woods was driving an SUV sporting a ‘Genesis Invitational’ logo on the side of the vehicle, which rolled over and wound up on its side after the crash in Los Angeles.
The SUV Woods was driving was a Genesis GV80, a vehicle from the luxury brand of South Korea’s Hyundai Motors. The GV80 is the only SUV in the luxury carmaker’s line-up.
Woods is reported as having promoted the Genesis brand last weekend as the host of the PGA Tour’s Genesis Invitational tournament, where the winner received a new GV80. The car he was driving was likely part of a promotional fleet of vehicles owned by the event sponsor – Genesis.
“This morning, Genesis was saddened to learn that Tiger Woods had been in an accident in a GV80,” Genesis spokesman Jarred Pellat was quoted by USA Today as saying in an email.
The accident happened near the hilly Palos Verdes area of LA, at the bottom of a road section that has reportedly had previous instances of drivers losing control while going downhill and multiple accidents.
Incidentally, in 2020, consumer-satisfaction survey firm JD Power named Genesis the ‘most dependable’ automotive brand in North America.
The Genesis brand is a luxury offshoot from the parent company, just as other Asian carmakers have spun off their luxury badges — Toyota has the Lexus brand, Honda has Acura, and Nissan has the Infiniti brand. The idea is to make a clear distinction between the parent brand’s mass-market appeal and the more selective clientele of the luxury badge.
The 2021 Genesis GV80 sports a starting price tag of around $50,000. In its list of features, the SUV offers 10 airbags as standard, with a forward-collision warning system and a driver monitoring system that monitors how alert the driver is during the ride. Its augmented reality navigation system displays driving guidelines on a real-time video feed from the front-facing camera.
India is among the markets that Hyundai had evaluated the prospects of launching the Genesis brand in 2019, mainly through the CKD assembly route. But nothing concrete has been announced by the carmaker since then.
