Published by Chad Krifa - Genesis of Norman | September 17, 2026
There is a moment, driving north on I-35 toward downtown OKC after a late rain, when the pavement changes character without warning. A patched seam, a shallow trough, the kind of imperfection you register a half-second after the car has already passed over it. In a G90, you may not register it at all.
That is the work of the Preview Electronic Control Suspension — a system that reads the road with a forward-facing camera and adjusts the dampers before the tires arrive at what the camera has seen.
What the camera actually does
The forward camera, mounted near the rearview mirror, scans the road surface roughly five to fifteen meters ahead of the vehicle. It is looking for changes in elevation — expansion joints, patched asphalt, the shallow dip where a driveway meets the street. That data is passed to the suspension control unit, which softens or firms the individual dampers a fraction of a second before each wheel meets the disturbance.
The result is not a car that feels floaty. It is a car that feels informed. The chassis stays composed over surfaces that would set other cabins into a brief argument with themselves. You notice it most on the drives where you had stopped noticing the road at all — the long stretch of Highway 9 out past Lake Thunderbird, the concrete slabs of the Kilpatrick Turnpike, the seams on the Broadway Extension approaching Nichols Hills.
Where you'll find it
Preview control is currently the province of the larger Genesis platforms, where the rear-wheel-drive architecture and the air-spring hardware give the system the most to work with. The G90 uses it in concert with an air suspension that also raises and lowers ride height based on speed. The GV80 pairs it with a road-reading logic tuned for the taller center of gravity of an SUV, so body motions over undulations are damped without the cabin feeling detached.
Smaller platforms in the lineup — the G80, the GV70, the G70 — use electronically controlled dampers that adjust based on inputs from wheel sensors, steering angle, throttle, and brake, but without the forward camera preview. They are quick, but they are reactive. The G90 and GV80 are, in the small window the camera provides, predictive.
Why it matters on Oklahoma roads
This is where the system earns its keep locally. Oklahoma pavement is honest about its winters. Freeze-thaw cycles push seams up, salt trucks and heavy equipment leave their signatures, and the patchwork of city, county, and state maintenance schedules means a single commute can cross four different surface qualities. A reactive damper handles each of these adequately. A camera-fed damper handles them without asking you to brace.
A quiet kind of composure
The virtue is not comfort in the marshmallow sense. It is the absence of small interruptions. Conversation in the second row does not pause when the car crosses a bridge joint. A glass of water in the cupholder does not need attention on the drive back from a dinner in Bricktown. A passenger who fell asleep on the way to Tulsa stays asleep.
The interaction with drive mode
The system's behavior shifts with the drive mode selection. In Comfort, the preview information is used to maximize isolation — softening damping ahead of impacts and letting the body float, gently, over long undulations. In Sport, the same data is used differently: the dampers firm up in anticipation of a mid-corner bump so the outside wheel does not lose its line. Same hardware, different priorities. The car understands which conversation you want to be having with the road.
What the camera does not do
A few honest limits. The forward camera relies on visible road surface, so heavy rain, dense fog, or a low sun angle directly in the lens can reduce the system's effectiveness. In those conditions the suspension reverts to conventional adaptive behavior — still capable, just no longer clairvoyant. The camera also does not read potholes with the precision of a laser scanner; it reads surface changes above a certain threshold. Small imperfections still register, faintly, as small imperfections.
None of this is a shortcoming. It is the honest boundary of a technology that, when it works, does its work so quietly that you have to be told it is there. The detail rewards a second look.
How to feel it for yourself
The system is difficult to demonstrate in a parking lot. It reveals itself on real roads, at real speeds, over real surfaces — the kind of drive we can put together from the store: a loop that includes a stretch of interstate, a section of older city pavement, and one of the longer undulating county roads west of town. Fifteen minutes is usually enough. By the end of it, most drivers stop talking about the suspension entirely, which is the point.
If you are cross-shopping and want to compare the sensation directly, a back-to-back drive between a G90 and a G80 — same route, same afternoon — is the clearest way to understand what the preview camera contributes. Both cars are composed. Only one is anticipating.
For a broader look at how the current lineup is equipped, our new inventory page lists the trim configurations currently on the ground, and the GV80 overview details how the system is integrated on the SUV side.
We invite you to a private, unhurried drive at Genesis of Norman — schedule online or call ahead, and we'll map a route that lets the Preview suspension show its work.
