New Genesis GV60 vs Audi Q4 Sportback e-tron vs Tesla Model Y: costs
Upmarket South Korean brand Genesis has bold ambitions to take on the likes of Audi and Tesla with its new electric SUV. Time to see if they're realistic...
Buying and owning
Costs, equipment, reliability, safety and security
Tesla's big price rises over the summer – largely because of the weak British pound versus the strong US dollar – are partly why the Tesla Model Y is the most expensive of the trio by some margin. If you're paying cash, it'll cost you around £6500 more to buy than the Audi Q4 Sportback e-tron and a whopping £11k more than the Genesis GV60.
True, the Model Y is predicted to hold onto its value extremely well, but even factoring that in, it'll still make the biggest dent in your wallet in the long run if you're buying outright. The GV60 is likely to work out cheapest over a typical three-year period.
Not that many people will be buying outright, of course. Far more people will choose to sign up to a PCP finance agreement, and on this front the GV60 is even more appealing. Put down a £5000 deposit and you'll pay back £619 a month over the next four years, assuming a limit of 10,000 miles per year. On the same terms, the Q4 will cost £724 and the Model Y a hefty £858.
Because fully electric cars are so cheap for company car drivers paying benefit-in-kind tax, there's less than a tenner a month between our protagonists when it comes to salary sacrifices. Again, though, the GV60 is cheapest and the Model Y dearest.
The Model Y justifies some of that extra cost with an impressive roster of standard luxuries. It's the only one with heated rear seats, a heated steering wheel and the panoramic glass roof that we mentioned earlier, for example. Audi has been stingiest with standard equipment; the Q4 is the only one that doesn't come with keyless entry and a heat pump for more efficient warming of the interior in cooler weather. It's also the only one without front parking sensors or a reversing camera.
Mind you, the Q4 does have the most advanced headlights, which can adjust the shape of their beams to improve visibility at night without dazzling anyone. Plus, it has a third climate zone for rear passengers; the other two only allow specific temperature settings for the driver and front passenger.
One advantage of choosing the Model Y is easy access to Tesla's proprietary Supercharger network (although non-Teslas can now use some of them too, for a higher fee). There are nearly 1000 charging points at more than 90 locations around the UK, and from one of these you can get a 10-80% top-up in around half an hour.
The peak charging power the GV60 can accept isn't quite as high (239kW versus 250kW), but it can sustain a higher rate for longer, so it can theoretically be topped up from 10-80% in just 18 minutes. The catch is that public charging points capable of delivering that much power aren't all that common yet.
The Q4 can accept a maximum of only 135kW from a public CCS charger, and a 10-80% charge will take around 33 minutes in ideal conditions. It will take roughly 12 hours to charge any of these cars from 0-100% on a typical 7kW home wallbox.
None of our contenders featured in the 2022 What Car? Reliability Survey, and neither did Genesis as a brand (it hasn't been selling cars in the UK for long enough). However, Tesla ranked 15th (out of 32) in the overall brand league table, just ahead of Audi (18th).
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