Hyundai’s luxury brand, Genesis, is stepping things up a notch with biometric software and fingerprint scanning to make for a top-tier luxury experience—and it’s some really awesome technology.
These features were tucked into the G70's press release, but The Korean Car Blog went out of its way to do the deep digging to figure out what those names meant and why they’ll be debuting on the GV70.
We’ll start with the fingerprint tech, because it’s some of my favorite. In March of 2018, Bentley introduced a fingerprint-activated lock box to store valuables. Since then, more and more luxury automakers have been experimenting with fingerprint tech.
In the GV70, the fingerprint button is located just below the Start/Stop button. Press your finger to it, and you can facilitate something called CarPay (not to be confused with Apple CarPlay), which basically allows the driver to pay for things like gas via the infotainment system. You don’t even have to get out of the car to do it.
And that’s not all the fingerprint sensor can do:
- If you use it in Valet Mode, it prevents your personal information from popping up on the screen while someone else is driving the car
- When starting the vehicle, your fingerprint activates your personalized driver’s seat settings
- Your fingerprint pulls up information specific to you, like radio volume and your GPS destinations
That in itself is really cool—but things get even better with the Advanced Rear Occupant Alert. The system utilizes sophisticated sensors to detect if someone is in the backseat of the vehicle. This is way more than the current rear-seat reminders that are on the market. This sensor can detect even the slightest movement of an arm, a leg, or even the rise-and-fall of a baby’s chest, even when fully clothed or obscured by blankets. Hyundai is even claiming that its sensors are powerful enough to detect a dog in the cargo area behind the seats.
Here’s how the alert comes through:
- When the driver turns off the engine and opens their door, the digital cluster sounds a warning that lets you know passengers remain
- That initial detection is done via the GV70 detecting the opening and closing of rear doors
- If the driver ignores the warning, the radar sensor kicks into action to detect passengers
- If there are passengers, the GV70 will turn on an emergency light, sound an alarm, and send a text message to the driver
It makes sense to choose the GV70 SUV, since that’s generally the kind of vehicle a family with young children would be driving.
It’s a really neat system, one that currently exists nowhere in the market. It’s likely that all this fancy stuff will debut in South Korea—CarPay already has—but it’s also likely that it’ll trickle into the rest of Genesis’ models throughout the world.