SHUT UP AND DRIVE

HYUNDAI'S UPCOMING IONIQ 5 N PROMISES AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION YOU CAN'T SHAKE

- SCOTT EVANS

Soul. It’s the latest temporary goalpost set by car enthusiasts unwilling to consider buying an EV. We hear it from you a lot, about the lack of noise, vibration, smell. Fast golf carts, you call them. One-trick ponies that can accelerate quickly and that’s it. There’s no sound to get excited about, no feel of the engine revving and gears changing, nothing with which to form a mechanical bond.

But what if there was? Where do you move the goalposts then? It’s a question you’ll need to start asking yourself, because the 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N prototype will make you question all of your preconceived notions about EVs.

The Ioniq 5 N is loaded with features that walk a fine line between useful and gimmicky, but they’re all designed to increase driver engagement and create an emotional connection that’s missing from most EVs. We’ll get to them. The real success, though, is in the car’s underlying engineering. The Hyundai N team went at it the right way, tuning the mechanical bits first and then layering on the technological enhancements. (Too many automakers running short on budget skip straight to the electronic band-aids.)

With the dual electric motors tuned up to 600 hp and an N Grin Boost mode that temporarily juices that number to 641, the Ioniq 5 N is Tesla-quick in a straight line. That was the easy part. Making a car that weighs 4,700 pounds in non-N trim properly stop, go around a corner, and do it again and again was the hard part.

“We tried to make it as crazy as the other [N models],” Hyundai executive technical adviser Albert Biermann told us. “It’s not an easy thing to do, I have to tell you.”