Genesis GV60's Glowing Orb Shifter Is Ridiculous And Completely Unnecessary, And I Couldn't Possibly Love It More

When it comes to changing gears in a modern car that's missing a manual transmission, I'm firmly on Team Column Shifter. I hate push-button shifters with a passion, and few things make me madder than Hyundai's pseudo-column-shift-thingy in the Ioniq 5. How do you get so close and then screw it up? But there's one entry on the list of gear selectors I love that might be the most ridiculous, unnecessary, overdesigned one in the entire industry. I should hate it, but I'm sorry, I love the Crystal Sphere gear selector in the Genesis GV60. 

Now, we've already driven the GV60 and reviewed it a few times, so you can go read those if you want more information on how the car drives than you'll get here. My take is that it's perfectly sized for people with no kids and makes for an excellent luxury car, but it isn't very sporty in regular guise. Corners are not the GV60's priority. That also doesn't really matter when there's an orb to ponder. Come with me and ponder my orb.

First, it looks pretty, unlike most gear selectors. Its design adds to what you see in the center console. And it has layers, which actually makes it enjoyable to stare at. It's a design object that happens to be a gear selector, largely because the "selector" part of "gear selector" stays hidden until you turn the car on. That orb then rotates to reveal the knob you actually use to change gears. 

The shifter side has more going on, as it should, but it still looks great and has some cool ambient lighting going on, though not in as extreme a way as in the static orb. And while I normally don't like rotary gear selectors, Genesis molded and placed it in a way that made it easily the most enjoyable rotary selector I've ever used. I probably still would have preferred a Mercedes-style column shifter, but no column shifter has style quite like the GV60's orb. 

I can already hear the complaints now about how stupid this is. How Genesis introduced yet another failure point, and it's just going to break eventually. How automakers have lost the plot, and you'd refuse to own a car with such an unnecessary feature or design element. Which is fair. If you don't want a Genesis GV60, you shouldn't buy a GV60. Literally no one is going to force you to. Heck, even I probably won't be buying a GV60. 

But come on, lost the plot? We're talking about a luxury car here, not a Toyota Corolla. The entire point of a luxury car is to be unnecessary. That's why they're called luxury cars. If you only want nice leather and the basics, plenty of mainstream automakers will happily sell you some version of that car. Let's just say there are a lot of four-cylinder BMW 5 Series drivers who probably would have been just as happy in a loaded Honda Accord. 

Genesis

These days, luxury cars come with plenty of advanced software features and fancy suspension options, but it feels like the decision makers have given designers too many restrictions. Where's the fun? The excitement? The whimsy? In the Genesis GV60, apparently. They were willing to turn boring people off with their design, and the result is downright fantastic. They even gave it a glowing, rotating orb shift knob. And it's great!

For some people, design is luxury, and in that regard, the GV60 delivers on a level that's going to be hard to beat for less than $100,000 — and even the high-performance Magma version is pretty cheap. You can probably find competitors that offer fancier trim materials or more engaging handling, but none of them have the same commitment to fun design that the GV60 does. And none of them have a glowing orb you use to change gears.