Surprise: Hyundai proves it's a master of luxury with Genesis

— -- If you'd have done such a thing back in school, your teacher would have rapped your knuckles with a ruler and pronounced you impertinent.

But here comes South Korean automaker Hyundai with a big, rear-drive premium sedan that the car company brazenly compares to Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus…

Where's that ruler?

Easy on the knuckles, though. Is the 2009 Hyundai Genesis a Lexus, BMW or M-B? Probably not. Does it matter much? Probably not.

Genesis is better than most people need, and easily good enough for most of the rest of us.

Genesis' excellence is surprising, because usually a car company's first crack at a new segment is wanting.

For instance, Toyota's 1993 T100 pickup, first try at an American-style pickup, was too small and lacked a V-8.

Only now, a decade-and-a-half and two generations of truck later, has Toyota hit the mark with its ultra-beefy Tundra (just when the bad economy dried up pickup sales, alas).

Genesis is Hyundai's first big sedan and its only U.S. rear-drive model, and it offers the automaker's first V-8. You can quibble with the timing — small cars and small engines are hot right now — but you can't argue much against the execution.

Two Genesis test cars, a well-furnished V-8 and a lower-level V-6, were so right that it's hard to find gripes. Hard, not impossible — though some beefs are pretty minor.

• Front seat didn't go back far enough for some taller drivers.

• Ride felt bouncy on undulating pavement.

• Console-mounted joy-knob controller on the V-8 tester (like BMW's iDrive) was simpler to use than most — so only mildly annoying. You still had to go through up to half-a-dozen motions just to assign a preset button to a radio station, for instance.

• The wood section on the steering wheel in the V-8, while handsome, was a reminder that wood is for decks and boats, not cars. Wood steering wheels are cold in winter, sweaty in summer, hard and slippery always. Leather, please.