How Well Do the 2019 Genesis G70's Active Safety Features Work?

Active safety features have proliferated among luxury cars, and the all-new 2019 Genesis G70 is no exception. Our long-term G70 3.3T Prestige is packed with them, from the ones you hope you’ll never need, like automatic emergency braking, to helpful driving aids like blind spot warning.

Related: 2019 Genesis G70: 6 Things We Like, 3 We Don’t and 1 Big Nothingburger

The usefulness of active safety features varies considerably from car to car, and after living with our G70 for four months, we’ve become quite familiar with its systems. While we like them overall, there’s still room for improvement.

Blind Spot Warning

One of the G70’s most effective and useful safety features is its blind spot warning system. Oftentimes, blind spot warning indicators appear near or in the side mirrors, which provides little benefit for drivers who set their mirrors properly. The G70 has these, but it also includes indicators in the car’s optional color head-up display. It’s an important evolution because it puts them in your line of sight, making the warnings easier to see and process. The Kia Stinger also does this, but such integration for active safety features isn’t widespread yet.

Head-Up Display

Blind spot warning isn’t the only safety feature that’s integrated with the head-up display; the HUD also shows the set speed and following-distance info for the adaptive cruise control. It also indicates when the lane-centering steering system is active. There’s so much information in the G70’s HUD that it’s not wrong to consider it a supplemental active safety system.

Adaptive Cruise Control

The standard adaptive cruise control system works well overall. It gives four following distances to choose from and works reasonably well in stop-and-go driving. It’ll creep along in slow-moving traffic without complaint but occasionally accelerated and braked harder than I would have, knowing that the gap that opened wasn’t really traffic moving faster again but just part of the rush-hour commute.

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Lane-Centering Steering

The G70’s standard lane-centering steering system actively adjusts the steering wheel — you can feel it at work while you’re driving — to keep the car approximately centered in its lane. Combined with the adaptive cruise control system, the G70 will handle a lot of the demands of highway driving. However, the driver must remain attentive and ready to take over with their hands on the steering wheel because it’s not a hands-off system like Cadillac’s Super Cruise. We’d like to see Genesis make this feature available at low speeds, too, as some other models from Genesis parent Hyundai now offer. Currently, the G70’s system works only from around 40 mph up.

The G70’s active safety systems also offer a lot of adjustability. You can change the sensitivity of the adaptive cruise control, collision warning and lane-keeping assist systems, to name a few. If you don’t like the car steering itself, you can switch to more basic lane departure warning or turn off the feature entirely.

Most of the G70’s active safety features are standard, but to get the benefits of the head-up display on the base 2.0T model, you have to add the $9,000 Dynamic Package that includes a lot of other convenience and luxury features. The G70’s suite of active safety features isn’t the most advanced out there, but the systems work well without being overly intrusive — providing another layer of protection for you and your passengers.

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