Ancient Earth, Matte Green Paint, and the Road That Connects Them: The Pinnacles in the Genesis GV70 2.2D Diesel

There’s a moment, somewhere along Western Australia’s magical Indian Ocean Drive with the Indian Ocean flashing blue through the scrub to your left and the diesel pushing you along smoothly, that you start to appreciate what a well-balanced luxury SUV does to the experience of going somewhere. The distance doesn’t matter as much, and the open road just flows.

I had that moment about forty kilometres north of Lancelin, sitting in the luxury of the quilted Nappa leather of a Brunswick Green Genesis GV70 2.2D AWD Lux Sport Line with the massage function doing its best impression of a “wave”, the Lexicon audio filling the cabin with something low and cinematic, and the ventilated seats quietly doing the Lord’s work against a Western Australian summer morning that was already pushing 32 degrees. Ahead of me, roughly two and a half hours from Perth, were thousands of limestone spires rising from the sand like the ruins of a civilisation nobody has ever managed to name. That contrast, between something this technologically sophisticated and something this ancient, made for a road trip worth writing about.

The Drive North: Indian Ocean Drive and Why You Should Take Your Time

Perth to the Pinnacles is roughly 195 kilometres via Indian Ocean Drive, and the standard advice is to allow about two hours. That is sound guidance, but it undersells what the road itself has to offer. From the Mitchell Freeway you transition to Wanneroo Road and then pick up Indian Ocean Drive at Two Rocks, and from that point the highway ribbons along the coastal plain with the kind of gentle undulation that suits a long-geared diesel SUV beautifully.

The GV70’s 2.2-litre turbodiesel produces 154 kW and a genuinely impressive 440 Nm of torque, arriving from just 1,750 rpm. On a road like Indian Ocean Drive, with its sweeping curves and rolling gradients, you barely need to touch the accelerator. Overtaking is a non-event; the eight-speed automatic finds the right gear before you’ve consciously asked it to, and the car settles at 110 km/h with the engine barely working just below 1,900 rpm. Official combined fuel consumption is 7.8L/100km, and what I experienced on this run was just under 8.5L/100km in the heat, which with a 66-litre tank means the entire return trip from Perth is covered on a single fill. That matters on Indian Ocean Drive, where fuel stops are sparse between Lancelin and Cervantes, and the ones that do exist are neither conveniently located nor affordable vs metro prices.

The Sport Line specification adds 21-inch wheels and Michelin Pilot Sport4 SUV tyres, which look perfect against the matte green paint but do occasionally remind you they’re there on coarser surfaces. The trade-off is worth it for the handling balance the larger wheels provide on the sweeping corners. Brunswick Green Matte is one of those colours that photographs deceptively. In pictures it reads as a conventional dark green. In person, under Western Australian sunlight, it is something else entirely: a deep, almost military shade with an absence of glare that draws the eye in rather than reflecting it back. Other drivers definitely look, heck, even I can’t help but look back at how good it looks every time I park up and walk away. Petrol station attendants ask questions of a still less familiar, Bentley-ish design. The colour is a factory-applied finish, not a wrap, and it requires dedicated hand washing and matte-specific care products, but the visual reward on a road bordered by white, yellow or red sand depending on the side of the road you’re on and turquoise ocean is considerable.

A word about the RAC’s caution around Indian Ocean Drive: this road earns its reputation as one of WA’s higher-risk routes, not because it is technically demanding but because it is beautiful and you relax into it. The curves and undulations encourage speed, and the same dawn and dusk periods that produce the best light for photography also bring wildlife onto the road. The GV70’s active safety suite, including forward collision warning, lane-keep assistance, and blind-spot monitoring adds a layer of comfort, but be cautioned that it doesn’t replace the attention required on this road.

Recommended Stop: Lake Thetis and the Rainbow Serpent’s Eggs

Just before you turn off for the Pinnacles, there is a small saline lake approx one kilometre from the centre of Cervantes that most visitors drive straight past. This is a mistake. Lake Thetis is one of only a handful of places on Earth that contains living microbialites: in this case, both thrombolites and stromatolites sharing the same water, which is scientifically unusual even by the rarefied standards of such things.

These lumpy, rust-coloured structures bobbing at the shallows are alive. They are colonies of cyanobacteria, among the most ancient life forms on the planet, and their ancestors were producing oxygen when Earth’s atmosphere contained almost none. The structures at Lake Thetis are estimated to be between 3,000 and 3,500 years old, though they belong to a lineage stretching back 3.5 billion years. They grow at approximately 0.04 to 1 millimetre per year. A careless footstep on the lakeshore could damage something that took a century to form.

The Yued people, the traditional custodians of this country, have their own understanding of the lake’s significance. In the Waakgardy story, the Rainbow Serpent travelled through this country from the north, coming to rest in Lake Thetis to lay its eggs. The thrombolites and stromatolites are those eggs. The Rainbow Serpent then continued south, its movement cutting through the land to form the Nambung River before finally resting in the hills at Dandaragan. This is not metaphor in the way a Western audience might assume; it is knowledge, carried across generations, connecting the geography of this coast into a single continuous story. Standing at the lake’s boardwalk, knowing both accounts at once, is one of those moments where the scientific and the cultural illuminate each other rather than compete.

Access is straightforward, turn into Hansen Bay Road from Aragon Street in Cervantes, follow the signs, and you will find a car park with a good boardwalk that is universally accessible for the first 300 metres. The 1.5-kilometre loop trail takes about an hour and is rated easy. There are picnic tables but no toilets and no drinking water, so plan accordingly. Entry to the lake precinct is free and the gates are open around the clock, though morning visits when the light is low across the water are strongly recommended.

This is also the ideal point to note one feature of the GV70 that makes a stop like this far more comfortable than it would otherwise be. I parked, switched off the engine, and the car’s ventilated seats kept running on battery power while I walked down to the lake. Returning to a cool seat rather than sun-baked leather, at 11 in the morning in summer, is not a trivial thing. By the time I reached Cervantes for a snack stop, the cabin had already returned to a comfortable temperature.

The Pinnacles: What They Are and Why They Matter

Nambung National Park lies 17 kilometres south of Cervantes, and the Pinnacles Desert sits within it: an ancient limestone field covering several hectares of pale yellow sand, populated by thousands of individual stone formations ranging from ankle-height nubs to columns more than three metres tall. There is nothing else in Australia that looks like this. There is arguably nothing else on Earth that looks quite like this either, which is why over 250,000 visitors make the trip every year.

The geological story begins roughly 500,000 years ago when shallow seas covered this coast and deposited layers of marine shells. As sea levels fell, those shells were broken down into lime-rich sands and blown inland to form dunes. The scientific consensus, established most comprehensively by researchers Matej Lipar and John Allan Webb in a 2015 paper in Earth-Science Reviews, is that the pinnacles formed through a process called karstification: rainwater, made slightly acidic by dissolved carbon dioxide and organic matter from plant roots, percolated through the limestone and dissolved it in concentrated channels called solution pipes. The material between those channels was left standing and, over thousands of years of alternating burial and exposure by shifting sands, was hardened by calcium-rich groundwater into calcrete. Wind erosion did the rest, revealing the columns we see today. The mushroom-shaped formations, where a harder calcrete cap sits atop a narrower shaft, show this process most clearly. Cross-bedding visible within many pinnacles records the changing wind directions during the original dune formation.

It is worth noting that the structures visible today are the most recent exposure of formations that have been buried and re-emerged multiple times.

The Yued cultural story is as layered as the geology. The Yued people are one of fourteen groups within the Noongar (Nyoongar) Indigenous people and they are the acknowledged Traditional Owners of Nambung National Park. Their name for the pinnacles area is Kwong-kan, meaning “sandy place.” The Dreamtime story recorded by the Northern Agricultural Catchments Council, as told by local Yued Noongar people, explains the formations as the remains of young warriors who disobeyed their elders. The elders had declared Kwong-kan taboo, a sacred place for women’s ceremonies, healing, and gathering. The young warriors entered anyway and were swallowed by the moving sands. The pinnacles are their fingers and hands, and their weapons, pushing up through the ground.

This significance means that visiting the Pinnacles with any awareness of the land’s history involves a different kind of looking. These are not just geological curiosities but a place with a long human story attached, a story that predates any scientific categorisation of limestone formation by many thousands of years. The Yued Aboriginal Corporation, which can be reached at yued.org.au, is working actively on a ranger program and cooperative management of the park with DBCA.

The park history is more recent. The formations were known to Dutch sailors as early as 1658, who charted them as “North and South Hummocks” and may have glimpsed them from offshore and imagined a ruined city. British navigator Phillip Parker King noted “the Hummocks” in 1820. They were not formally protected until 1967, when a reserve was gazetted specifically for the preservation of the natural formations. The three separate reserves that made up the area were combined into Nambung National Park in July 1994. The park name comes from the Aboriginal word for the Nambung River that flows underground through the area, meaning “crooked” or “winding.”

Visiting the Pinnacles: What You Need to Know

Entry fees: The standard vehicle entry fee is $17 per vehicle (up to 12 occupants) as of 2025, payable at the entry booth on arrival. Concession (seniors card) is $10. If you are planning further visits to WA national parks, a 5-Day Holiday Pass costs $30 or an Annual All Parks Pass is $130, both available through the Parks WA online shop at shop.dbca.wa.gov.au/collections/park-passes.

RACWA members receive a discount. Full current fee schedules are at exploreparks.dbca.wa.gov.au/park-entry-fees.

The Pinnacles Desert Discovery Centre is open daily from 9:30am to 4:30pm, closing only on Christmas Day. Phone: (08) 9652 7913. The building itself is worth examining: designed by John Nichols of Woodhead International, it uses podium walls of local limestone and vertical tuart wood beams, the lower sections deliberately burned during construction to acknowledge the role of fire in both the landscape and Aboriginal cultural practice. Noongar words from the Yued language were engraved into those burned timbers. Inside, interpretive displays cover the geology, the cultural heritage of the Yued people, and the natural history of the park. The viewing lookout at the rear is the first visual contact most visitors will have with the desert. There is a souvenir shop and light refreshments, though the nearest proper café is back in Cervantes, at the Lobster Shack or in town.

The self-guided Pinnacles Drive is a sealed 4-kilometre loop with multiple stopping bays and lookouts for photography and short walks. It is suitable for all two-wheel-drive vehicles but not for caravans or trailers, which should be unhitched at the Discovery Centre car park. Allow one and a half to two hours for the drive and associated walks.

Walking trails: The Desert View Walk (1.2 to 1.6 kilometres) winds directly through the formation field on a combination of boardwalk and sand, and is the closest engagement with the pinnacles you can get on foot. The Lookout Trail is a 4.3-kilometre loop from the Discovery Centre that includes the main elevated lookout. There are no toilets within the formation area itself; use the facilities at the Discovery Centre or at Hangover Bay (12 minutes south of Cervantes, also within the park).

Best time to visit: Late winter and spring, from August to October, combine comfortable walking temperatures (15 to 25 degrees) with the extraordinary wildflower displays that make this stretch of WA coast internationally significant for botanists. For the pinnacles themselves, late afternoon and the hour before sunset produce the most dramatic photography, with long shadows picking out the detail in the limestone surfaces. The park is also outstanding after dark; there is almost no light pollution and the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye on clear nights during the middle of the year.

If you are visiting in summer, as I did, the advice is to be there by 9am. By mid-morning the heat radiating from the pale sand is intense and the ventilated seats waiting back at the car become an active destination. The GV70’s cabin, well insulated against ambient noise and solar heat gain, was noticeably cooler inside than the air outside even after a two-hour walk. The tri-zone climate control and the cooled seats did not stop working the entire visit, and I was grateful for both.

For accommodation, the Cervantes Pinnacles Resort and the RAC Cervantes Holiday Park are the main options in town. Jurien Bay, 20 kilometres north, has broader accommodation choices. Tourism WA’s Cervantes page at australiascoralcoast.com/destinations/indian-ocean-drive/cervantes covers current options.

Official visitor resources:

• Parks WA (DBCA) Nambung National Park: exploreparks.dbca.wa.gov.au/park/nambung-national-park
• Tourism WA Pinnacles page: westernaustralia.com/en/attraction/nambung-national-park/56b266d92880253d74c4f03c
• Discovery Centre (Tourism WA): westernaustralia.com/en/attraction/pinnacles-desert-discovery-centre
• Australia’s Coral Coast: australiascoralcoast.com/see-do/national-parks/the-pinnacles
• Pinnacles Visitor Centre Cervantes: visitpinnaclescountry.com.au

The Vehicle: Why the GV70 Diesel Makes Sense for This Trip Specifically

Long-distance road trips in Australia have a particular set of demands that European luxury SUVs, designed around a completely different geography, sometimes struggle to meet. Heat management, not just air conditioning but seat ventilation and cabin insulation, matters in ways that Scandinavian and German engineers do not always prioritise. And then there is the simple question of whether you arrive at the end of a three-hour drive feeling like a person or a set of accumulated complaints.

The GV70 2.2D Lux Sport Line answers all three questions convincingly.

The diesel’s 840-kilometre theoretical highway range, drawn from a modest 6.4 litres per 100 kilometres at extra-urban speeds, means Perth to Cervantes and back costs around 33 litres of diesel. At current Perth prices that is roughly $65, in a vehicle that retails around $80,000 in this specification. The maths is not the point; the point is that you do not need to think about it, and thinking is what a road trip is for.

The massage seats deserve their own paragraph. The Ergo-Motion system on the Lux Sport Line front seats offers both traditional air-bladder massage patterns and an active stretch mode that gently cycles the seat’s lumber and cushion adjustments over time, encouraging small postural changes that reduce the fatigue that accumulates across two or three hours of highway driving. By the time I arrived at the Pinnacles car park, three hours from Perth with the Lake Thetis stop included, I felt genuinely relaxed rather than merely not-sore. That is a distinction worth making.

The ventilated seats complement the massage function for summer driving. They are not merely fans circulating warm air through perforations; they are active cooling systems that pull air through the seat cushion and backrest, and in 35-degree heat they make an hour-long walk in limestone desert a considerably more comfortable proposition because you know what you are coming back to.

The 14.5-inch infotainment screen and 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster are clear and responsive, and the Augmented Reality Navigation overlay on the live camera feed is a genuinely useful tool on roads where turn-offs are easy to miss. The Lexicon 16-speaker audio system is the equal of anything in the segment at this price point, with a soundstage wide enough to fill the cabin without effort.

The boot, at 542 litres with seats up, accommodates two large bags, camera equipment, a decent esky, and the general overpacking of a day trip with room to spare. The 1,678-litre capacity with seats folded makes this a serious camping vehicle for those willing to sleep in the car, and the 2,200-kilogram braked towing capacity adds a trailer or small caravan to the equation.

One honest qualification: the GV70 2.2D with Luxury package and Sport Line package does not include a spare tyre. It comes with a Tyre Mobility Kit, which is appropriate for punctures on sealed suburban roads and not much else. On Indian Ocean Drive, 60 kilometres from the nearest tyre shop, a proper sidewall failure would leave you in a difficult position. RAC’s roadside assist is worth the membership if you are driving this car anywhere regional, and carrying a can of tyre repair foam as a backup to the standard kit costs very little.

The Return Leg

I left the Pinnacles mid afternoon, an endeavour to avoid the kangaroos as sunset. The car was cool, the seats were waiting, and the 195 kilometres south felt different from the 195 kilometres north, as return legs generally do: more reflective, less anticipatory, with the landscape taking on a different familiarity in the afternoon sun.

The GV70’s long-range diesel cruising is most apparent on the homeward run, when you are watching the fuel gauge barely move across a distance that would have a petrol SUV stopping for a fill. The HTRAC all-wheel-drive system, which runs rear-biased in normal and sport modes, makes the car feel planted and assured through Indian Ocean Drive’s flowing corners in a way that promotes confidence rather than demanding concentration.

I was back in Perth before 9pm, having covered just over 430 kilometres, consumed around 37 litres of diesel, visited an ancient lake, walked among limestone columns, and arrived home in better condition than when I left. That last part is the GV70’s most under-appreciated quality. It does not just carry you to somewhere worth going. It ensures you arrive well enough to take it all in.

Practical Summary

The Destination Nambung National Park, The Pinnacles Desert, Western Australia. 200 km northwest of Perth, 17 km south of Cervantes.

The Recommended Stop Lake Thetis, Cervantes. 1 km from Cervantes town centre, off Hansen Bay Road.

The Vehicle 2021 Genesis GV70 2.2D AWD Lux Sport Line, Brunswick Green Matte.

Note: The 2.2D Lux Sport Line does not include a spare tyre. Carry supplementary breakdown cover for remote routes.

Road Trip Reviews acknowledges the Yued people as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Nambung National Park and Lake Thetis stand. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and recognise the ongoing connection of the Yued people to their country, culture, and the stories held within this landscape.

Pricing and operating hours current as of January 2025. Always confirm before travelling at exploreparks.dbca.wa.gov.au.