Jared has spent 15 years covering the auto industry, getting his first break with autoX—one of Asia’s biggest auto magazines. Since 2010, he has reviewed hundreds of cars and motorbikes around the world, worked with Top Gear, Autocar, Evo, Motoring World, and Quattroruote, served on the IMOTY jury for five years, and is a founding member of the Automotive Journalist Association of India (AJAI).
Genesis has done it again. The Korean luxury carmaker has managed to grab our eyeballs once again with a brilliant new 1,000hp V8 super vehicle. Just a few months after showcasing the brilliant Magma GV60 super SUV, and the Genesis Magma GT supercar, we now have another epic car that is absolutely breathtaking.
The GMR-001 is shaping up to be an absolute beast of a machine.
Genesis doesn’t usually do chaos, but it looks like the brand’s new X Skorpio Concept crawled out of a motorsport fever dream and headed straight for the dunes of Dubai. The X Skorpio is an extreme off-road machine and it was unveiled in the Rub’ al Khali “Empty Quarter” desert in the UAE.
Besides looking like Batman’s personal Dakar rally car, this thing comes with a high-performance V8 making 1,100 hp and 850 lb-ft of torque. The name is inspired by a black scorpion, and with this kind of high power output, it’s probably poisonous.
This radical rally car concept is something we have not seen before from Genesis. The carmaker is describing it as a purpose-built desert weapon, and it’s got the basics down from a tubular frame to the full roll cage, with multiple components sourced from off-road endurance racing specialists. It also gets armor-like exterior panels that are designed with practicality in mind, such as making repairs quicker and more efficient in extreme environments.
Visually, the car doubles down on the rally theme with tension-filled curves meant to echo a scorpion’s arched tail, plus Genesis’ signature lighting integrated all over to make sure nobody mistakes it for anything else when it’s storming across the sand.
We really do not know what the game plan is here. We know that Genesis is getting involved with Motorsport, and they have hired all the right people for it. Last year, at the New York Auto Show, we got to see their endurance race hypercar up close, and that was yet another insanely gorgeous car. We are not sure what other motorsport events the brand wishes to compete in, but to add to all this excitement, Genesis went ahead and customized its entire SUV lineup for hardcore off-road performance.
Alongside the X Skorpio Concept’s desert debut, Genesis also showcased a trio of off-road-focused concepts developed for rugged desert driving, including the GV60 Outdoors Concept, GV70 Outdoors Concept, and GV80 Desert Edition. It looks like this event was also used to underline a broader push behind its concept-car strategy as well, pointing to recent halo studies like the X Gran Coupe, X Gran Convertible, G90 Wingback, and X Gran Equator Concept as signals of where Genesis design and performance experimentation could head next.
Whatever Genesis is thinking, we are all for it. Never will we ever be upset when a carmaker brings fabulous new designs to an industry that seems to be straying away from car enthusiasts. Well played Genesis! Well played!
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I’m not sure what it is designed for. A 1000 horse dune buggy. I’m sure there’s not much of a market for those types of vehicles.
