A decade ago, Genesis arrived. Spun off from Hyundai as a dedicated luxury brand (a la Lexus in 1990), it launched with a barebones lineup and a mandate to take the fight to the traditional segment heavyweights. Not everybody was convinced that it would work, of course, but like Toyota, Hyundai chose to meet its potential customers where they already were. The “startup automaker” hit the ground running with two upscale, rear-wheel drive models that had already cut their teeth in Hyundai showrooms before the brand’s official inception.
Ten years later, Genesis now has a far more robust lineup (between six and eight distinct models, depending on how you count ’em), and despite some early teething pains (including the minor inconvenience of having to jettison its entire dealer network and start over again) and Covid, Genesis has managed to blow past one of its chief rivals, Infiniti, with a total of 82,331 cars sold in 2025. Nissan’s luxury subsidiary only managed about 53,000 in all of 2025.
On its face, that number may not seem like much next to the segment-defining volumes of Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Lexus, but in this (as in all things), context is king. It goes without saying that all three have a pretty significant head start on Genesis (especially the Germans), and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it took Mercedes-Benz more than 30 years (from 1952 until 1985) to top 80,000 units sold in the United States. Lexus, by comparison, only needed four.
Genesis: Going Away Party
80,000 units may not be bragging-rights territory, but in addition to putting Genesis ahead of Infiniti, that number puts it in spitting distance of some other established players. Lincoln has been surfing the 100,000-unit mark for a while now, and Volvo just hit the mark. The Swedish automaker reported 107,414 U.S. sales for 2025. Audi, which has been battling sales declines after a stunning recovery throughout the aughts and early 2010s, is floating around the 165,000 mark.
If Genesis can keep adding 10-plus-percent to its sales volumes every year, both Lincoln and Volvo will be in the rear-view before too long. Does the brand have the legs? More importantly, can it find enough buyers to sustain that growth with increasingly more-expensive model launches? Only time will tell.
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