Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Review

Every fast electric car before this one was fast the way an elevator is fast. Hyundai's answer was to stop trying to sell instant torque as a thrill and to rebuild instead the parts of a combustion car that made driving interesting. N e-Shift fakes an eight speed dual clutch, complete with a rev limiter that will cut power if you sit against it, and N Active Sound pipes a synthetic engine through the cabin and the exterior speakers. Written down it reads like a gimmick. Twenty minutes of use reorganizes how you drive the car, because you are suddenly managing a powerband that does not exist and enjoying the work.

Underneath the theater the engineering is serious. Two motors make 601 horsepower, 641 with N Grin Boost held for ten seconds, and the 84 kWh pack has its own preconditioning modes for drag runs and for track sessions. That second mode is the important one, because this is the only performance EV near the price that will run consecutive hard laps without folding into a limp mode. The front brakes are four piston units on 400 mm discs with regeneration blended into the pedal properly rather than abruptly, the shell is seam welded and braced at the strut towers, and the rear biased torque split with the drift optimizer makes the car adjustable rather than merely quick.

The costs are real. Two hundred and twenty one miles of EPA range out of an 84 kWh battery is poor, and it collapses when the car is used as intended, so a track day turns into a charging logistics problem before lunch. It weighs a little over four thousand eight hundred pounds and every one of them shows up in quick transitions, which is the single thing the software cannot disguise. The cabin is an Ioniq 5 cabin, which is praise for space and materials and a complaint about the two screens and the low set bucket seats that cost rear headroom.

Depreciation is the worst number on the sheet. Performance electric cars have fallen harder than anything else on the used market and there is no reason this one will be spared. Buy it anyway, or lease it and let somebody else take the hit, because it is the most interesting thing anybody has built on a skateboard platform.