2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Prototype Track Drive: Shut Up and Drive This Car

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 been 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 of the car 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 "around 600 horsepower" (final specs will come at its public debut), 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 ones," Hyundai executive technical advisor Albert Biermann told us. "It's not an easy thing to do, I have to tell you."

In Hyundai N-speak, the term is "corner rascal." It's how the engineers describe what an N car should feel like when you drive it. In real-world terms, it's an N car's innate desire to dive into a corner (as it rotates its rear end and transfers its weight forward with the nose at the apex) then dig in, pull itself hard out of said corner and down the next straight. That's a lot to ask of a big, heavy electric SUV to begin with; making matters more challenging was the fact that the Ioniq 5 N is Hyundai's first all-wheel-drive N car, so the team had to learn new dynamic tendencies.

The results speak for themselves. Launching out of the Nürburgring Grand Prix Circuit's pit lane was smile-inducing fun, but any sufficiently powerful EV can do that. At the end of the front straight, though, is an absurdly tight downhill hairpin corner where we got our first lesson in how to properly flog an Ioniq 5 N. We stand on the brake pedal, and although it doesn't have the tactile feel of say, a Porsche 911, the firmness is appropriate and the relationship between pedal travel and resistance and actual stopping power is bang on. Likewise, the balance between regenerative and mechanical braking is imperceptible. It just stops, no weird handoffs.

Keep your foot on the brake and the weight on the nose as you start your turn, and the Ioniq 5 N unloads its rear end, much like that of the Elantra N or Veloster N. Then it gently comes around on you, just enough to point you at the apex in a way that's predictable, comfortable, and immediately familiar. As you unwind the fully round and appropriately girthy new N-specific steering wheel slightly, the car comes right back to you. Then once you're past the apex, even in this ridiculously tight corner, you can basically stand on the accelerator and the Ioniq 5 N digs in and takes off like a rocket.

When you really slap the go pedal down, however, the Ioniq 5 N can do something no other N car can: Its electronically controlled rear differential will lock up and allow for a small amount of power oversteer as you come off the corner while the brake-based virtual front locker helps keep the nose in line. In addition, the specially developed Pirelli P Zero Elect tires that went through five iterations of development deliver impressive grip and smooth, predictable breakaway at the limit, further adding to the car's delightfully playful nature.

Put simply, the Ioniq 5 N drives like a 600-hp Veloster N, which makes sense given other N cars were the benchmark, not vehicles from other automakers. Somehow, the engineers have hidden its weight, despite it not losing much weight at all. The wheels are lighter, as is the new center console (that also makes a convenient place to brace yourself in left turns), but we suspect there wasn't a budget for more extreme measures.

Instead, the money went to replacing the Ioniq 5's front suspension with a modified version lifted from the mechanically related Genesis GV60. The steering system is entirely new, beefed up to handle the stress of track work. The 15.7-inch front brake rotors are the largest Hyundai's ever fitted to a production car, clamped by in-house four-piston calipers. They're augmented by a regenerative braking system capable of producing 0.6 g of decelerative force, though the engineers are hoping for more. Right now, they claim 40 to 50 percent of braking on track is handled by the regen while on the road it's 80 to 90 percent. The 14.2-inch rear rotors are clamped by a single piston each as they get much less of a workout. So powerful is the regenerative braking we noticed zero fade after our lapping sessions, even though the pads were smoking when we reached pit lane.

This is what we've been waiting for. We've always believed there's no engineering reason why an EV can't corner with the same excitement as the best gas-powered sports cars. We knew it was possible because Lucid did it with its Air Grand Touring Performance, a car depressingly few people will ever get to drive owing to its $180,650 starting price. Hyundai's done it in a car that'll be within reach of the average buyer.

"You can judge yourself," Biermann said. "Is it just a stupid gimmick or is it actually helpful for driving a high-performance car?"

It's easy to fall on the "stupid gimmick" side of the argument. We did, at first. Not just fake "engine" noises, but fake gear shifting? How could they be anything but gimmicks? After lapping with the systems on and off, though, we're convinced they could be just the thing some car enthusiasts need to finally accept and embrace EVs.

Describing Hyundai's N Active Sound + system as "engine" noises rather than "motor" noises was deliberate. "Ignition," the first of three options, sounds like a turbocharged four-cylinder engine with a bit of electric motor noise laid over the top. It idles, it climbs and falls with acceleration and deceleration, you can even rev it in neutral. It pops and bangs like an Elantra N on overrun, though you can turn that off individually if you find it annoying. Combined with N e-shift, which perfectly replicates the feel of Hyundai N's eight-speed dual-clutch automatic, you could put a blindfolded car enthusiast in the passenger seat and convince them it was a gas-powered car.

N e-shift so perfectly mimics an eight-speed auto it's uncanny. Switched on, the standard half-circle digital speedometer becomes a circular 8,000-rpm tachometer with a needle that even vibrates at idle. The virtual gears are mapped to portions of the powerbands of the dual electric motors, so you get stronger acceleration in lower "gears," and less acceleration in higher "gears." In each "gear," there's less power at low "rpm" and more at high "rpm."

Yes, there's a virtual rev limiter when manually shifting with the steering-wheel paddles, and it perfectly mimics a gas-powered car on the limiter, right down to the slight bucking and interrupted acceleration until you upshift. The feel of an upshift or downshift is simulated by a brief interruption in motor torque that gives you the little kick you expect, whether you're shifting manually or letting the computer do it.

Interrupting torque makes the car slower, as does manually shifting if you get it wrong. It'll probably be worse for lap times, but that's not the point. "You lose time, but I don't care," Biermann said. "It's more fun." Besides, he said, Hyundai has its TCR race cars available if ultimate lap times are what you're after.

It's still meant to be useful, though. The "engine" sound is mapped to the tachometer so you can use it as an audible cue of when to shift manually or when an automatic shift might be coming. Because the sound, the gear shifts, and the tachometer all work together, you can drive the Ioniq 5 N like you would an Elantra N. If it's a third-gear corner in a gas-powered car, it's a third-gear corner in this one. If you like to run the car up to redline but not upshift before the next corner, you can do that with this one. If you like to use manual shifting to control weight balance and torque, you can do that, too.

We didn't really appreciate the usefulness of the twin features until we turned them off. We've driven plenty of high-performance EVs and we typically dispense with the fake noises, which to date have been little more than sonic window dressing. But when we did that with the Ioniq 5 N, we blew the braking point at turn three on the next lap because we'd been unconsciously using the audible cue to judge our speed rather than a visual one.

In fact, that's the highest praise we can give an artificial noise generator in a car: We didn't turn it off immediately. Instead, we played with the other two sounds. "Evolution" was our pick, sounding like a gas engine that had been run through a sci-fi sound effects generator. "Supersonic" induced fits of giggles as it turned the car into Maverick's F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, right down to sonic booms on upshifts (which can be switched off) and sound intensity that changes from left to right as the car turns to mimic Maverick's "splitting the throttles" move from the new movie. The team actually wanted to call the sound "Maverick" but decided against it to avoid the licensing headache. Hyundai also hinted that additional sounds could be released via over-the-air (OTA) updates in the future.

Even if you're not convinced that Active Sound and e-Shift could win you over, you might already be thinking about "performance degradation" as the next location for those ever-shifting goalposts, but Hyundai has that exit covered as well. The N team's stated goal is to complete two laps of the Nürburgring Nordschleife without any loss in performance, and engineers on hand added another goal: 20-to-25-minute track stints without any loss in performance.

If they hit it, you'll be able to attend any typical high-performance driving experience (HPDE) track day and run a full session without losing power. If the track has a fast charger onsite, you'll probably even be able to charge up between sessions since the Ioniq 5 N charges just as quickly as a standard Ioniq 5, going from 10 to 80 percent battery charge in about 18 minutes.

We think they'll do it. Our eight laps around the Grand Prix Circuit lasted roughly 20 minutes, and we detected zero loss in performance. In that time, we used less than 40 percent of the battery. Then, engineers took the car to the charger for a quick boost and had it back on track for the next driver within 20 minutes.

Part of that time was spent pre-conditioning the battery. Those high-voltage bricks work better when they're the right temperature for what you're doing (cold for charging and longer stints, warm for maximum performance in a drag race or qualifying lap). There are separate settings for Drag and Track to account for the amount of heat each will generate in the battery. Beyond that, the N Race function has settings for Sprint and Endurance, depending on whether you want to run a qualifying lap or keep up performance for the whole stint. Endurance limits top speed to 149 mph (from at least 165 mph) and cuts motor output by 10 percent, though the N team is working to get that down to 7.5 percent.

The Ioniq 5 N's battery has also been tinkered with, though the engineers won't say how. Something about this next-generation battery allows for faster discharging and recharging, enabling the big acceleration and huge regenerative braking effect needed for track work. Standard Ioniq 5s and other cars built on the E-GMP platform will get these battery upgrades somewhere down the road. It also features a new cooling stack with bigger radiators stacked on top of each other instead of front to back and slots cut into the front bumper for extra airflow.

Not just a track special, the Ioniq 5 N drives like a 600-hp Veloster N in the real world, too. Here, you have so much grip and your speeds are low enough that it takes more work to get the car to rotate, but the underlying character is still there. It's playful, tossable, and begs you to fool around. That grip allows for immediate reaction to steering corrections when you want to dodge a pothole, and out here the brakes don't even feel like they're breaking a sweat.

Thankfully, it doesn't ride like a Veloster N. We've harped on the N brand in the past for making all its cars absurdly stiff in their sport and especially track settings, and although the engineers remain unapologetic, they do recognize the Ioniq 5 N buyer won't be the same as an Elantra N buyer. Less willing to put up with a spine-fusing ride, these customers will be happy to know the three-mode electronically adjustable dampers are what we'd call appropriately stiff in track mode and reasonably comfortable in comfort mode.

Hyundai isn't talking about range yet, and at no point were our test cars fully charged, so we can't tell you what the computer was estimating. Neither are the engineers disclosing the car's top speed, but we hit 165 mph on an unrestricted section of German autobahn, and while acceleration was decreasing, it wasn't tapped out yet. Zero to 60? Also up in the air, but we'll bet it's quicker than the similar Kia EV6 GT ("What's that?"—Biermann), which does it in 3.2 seconds.

"We don't care so much about numbers," Biermann said. "We're about driving fun. Of course, nobody wants to be the slowest car out there, and we won't be." He's been saying it since the first N car came out, and although it was easy to dismiss initially as marketing spin, the more N cars we drive, the more we're inclined to believe him.

The money question, in every sense of the word, is what this kind of world-shaming performance will cost. As with so many other numbers, Hyundai isn't saying yet, but there are clues.

"In fun per dollar, we should always be the leader," Biermann said. "That doesn't change for Ioniq 5 N." He admits, though, it'll be significantly more expensive than the low to mid-$30,000 price tags on the Elantra N and Kona N.

We can take an educated guess. The Elantra N and Kona N are $11,000 to $12,000 more than their base models, a roughly 50 percent price increase. Apply that to an Ioniq 5, and you're into the low $60,000 range, which would price it right in the same range as a $62,695 Kia EV6 GT.

We'll find out more when the Ioniq 5 N makes its public debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on July 13, where a production car will compete in the famous hill climb. Final tuning stretches to this fall, and the Korean market gets first dibs, so it won't go on sale in the U.S. until sometime in the first half of 2024. Not long after it does, though, it'll have good company.

"Using Ioniq 5 is really going the hard way," Biermann said. "Ioniq 6 is so much better in aerodynamic efficiency. Of course, this could inform other cars in the future." The goalposts are ready.