2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N review: Sell your Tesla, sell your Taycan! This is the most fun electric vehicle ever

The most interesting, most fun and quite possibly the best electric vehicle in the world right now wears a Hyundai badge. And that Hyundai, the outrageous Ioniq 5 N, also wears a price sticker that says $111,000.

Yes, that sounds like a lot, until you do the essential Bang Per Buck maths and note that this groundbreaking, earth-shaking EV is more powerful than a Lamborghini Huracan. Suddenly it sounds like a bargain. 

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Speaking of sounds, it’s got lots of fake ones, and some of them are almost criminally awful.

Quite a bit to talk about, then…

Hyundai Ioniq 5 N price and equipment

Yes, that price is still quite a shock. Hyundai has never attempted to sell a car with a six-figure price before and when you consider that you can have the arguably more attractive and hugely fun to drive i30 Sedan N for $52,000 – and a lot of people think that car is expensive – asking $111,000 for the Ioniq 5 N is a face-smacking shock.

Yes, a lot of that money is paying for all the driving tech, the absurd power and torque outputs and an exterior styling job (carbon-fibre bits, air curtains, orange daubs of paint) that makes a Mardi Gras float look subtle and understated. But you do also get all kinds of exclusive touches inside. 

There’s an exclusive N steering wheel, N pedals (extra big in case you’re freaking out and need to stamp on them), a console that’s redesigned to support your thighs under hard cornering, blue stitching, lots and lots of chequered flag patterns on everything, lots of things that are exclusive and N, possibly too many to mention. 

Oh, and extra welds and adhesive sports to make the whole thing stiffer than Tony Abbott when he sees an Australian flag. Or a picture of Prince Phillip. Then there are semi-adaptive dampers, electronically controlled suspension, integrated drive axles front and rear, rack-mount motor driven power steering, an enlarged and strengthened braking package for fade-resistant track work (regen also helps, apparently), aero changes to the underbody for more downforce, and N Torque Distribution and N Drift Optimiser, which, when used together, allow you to destroy your rear tyres in lovely little puffs of sideways smoke.

I could go on and on – N Launch Control, N Drive Thru at McDonald’s mode, N is for Nigel, N Race – but let’s just mention one more, to whet the appetite, N Grin Boost, which, for 10-second bursts, allows you access to a staggering 478kW and 770Nm (a V10-engined Huracan has 471kW and 601Nm, which is pathetic, frankly).

2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N: what we think

Prepare for your correspondent to sound like a total wanker – make sure your mouth is empty so you don’t spit out anything important, open up the Message section below and prepare to give me both barrels – but I think the only reason I didn’t disgrace my underwear when driving the Ioniq 5 N around Sydney Motorsport Park at pace was because I’ve been lucky enough to drive McLarens, Ferraris and Lamborghinis there before. So I’m used to being scared, and packing brown pants.

I can say that I’ve never been faster down the straight, even in cars that cost eight times as much, and only very rarely – perhaps in the hybridised McLaren Artura – have I launched out of the last corner and on to the fast bit with the kind of sick-making surge of pure, relentless thrust that this Hyundai produces. 

It’s properly fast, everywhere, hitting 100km/h from rest in 3.4 seconds. But what makes it special, nay wonderful, is yet another hugely geeky feature, and one that’s designed to make it just a tiny bit slower. 

It’s called N E-Shift and it’s basically a synthetic, ersatz, video-game-esque eight-speed gearbox, or at least a simulacrum of one. And it’s genius. You don’t have to use it, but you will because it recreates that wonderful feeling from cars of yore where you control the power delivery, you can rev the “engine”, or what sounds like one, out in each gear and watch the non-existent, pretend revs rising on your tacho (it goes to 8000rpm, at which you actually hit a “limiter” and it bounces off the “redline”.

But it could just as well go to 80,000rpm, because they’re only really imaginary revs, as much there for your benefit as the blood and gore in a video game.

And it really does fool your brain, the way it gives a little kick in your back on up-changes, the way it makes you hurry your downshifts on the way into a sharp bend so that the whole thing feels right. Indeed, it brings back so much of the joy of involvement that is missing from otherwise wonderfully fast and hugely capable EVs like the Porsche Taycan. 

Aside from the gears and the laughable amount of grunt and speed, the Ioniq 5 N pulls off another few neat tricks by feeling welded to the track, while being really quite supple and pleasant in the ride department on public roads (a place in which it just generally feels too fast for its environment). 

The steering, adjustable through three different settings of feedback, is also pretty good, although still not Porsche or BMW good. And it can also be, depending on how you set it up and how brave you are, tail happy and playful. It’s a mighty fine driving machine, in short, let down by the fact that it’s still very heavy, of course, quite large and the fact that the driving position just isn’t low enough. Indeed, it feels weird to be approaching Turn One at 230km/h and yet staring down on the road from a kind of family car aspect.

And then, sadly, there are the sounds, available from, you guessed, it an N-marked button (N Active Sound). It’s certainly a good argument to say that the fake gearbox thing (and again, you don’t have to use it, and the Ioniq 5 N goes back to being a simple, electric missile when you press N Grin Boost for example) wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective if you couldn’t add revving noises, and pops and bangs on down changes, to the experience. 

It’s also fair to say that the first setting for the fake noises – pumped into the car through eight interior speakers and, unnecessarily, two external ones – called “Ignition” isn’t terrible. It sounds a bit like a car, I guess, although still nowhere near as good as the fake car noises you get on some video games. It’s okay, then, but could be better. I’d mark it as slightly sub-embarrassing to use in front of other people.

Unfortunately, and inexplicably, the Ioniq 5 N offers two other fake sounds; Evolution, which sounds like a sex toy that’s been thrown in a blender, and Supersonic, which is so awful it’s difficult to describe. It’s supposed to sounds like a fighter jet, which isn’t even a worthy goal for a car, really, unless you’re a six-year-old boy (and it sounds like one was in charge of designing this feature).

Instead, it sounds like a mechanical elephant being butchered with an electric saw, and complaining about it, and each gear shift is accompanied by what can only be described as a loud metallic fart. 

It’s almost laughable, but I didn’t laugh, because I was too appalled. You can find an example of its awful work on my instagram (@stephencorby).

You’ll be more amused to hear that Hyundai claims the Ioniq 5 N can get 448km off a charge, to which I say “bullshit”. But it’s the same tone of bullshit I use whenever someone claims a super car can get better than 10 litres per 100km, because it’s such a notional figure. These machines are designed to be driven hard, and doing so will destroy claimed economy figures entirely. 

2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N verdict

I’ll say it again, and continue to do so until another car maker matches its level of genius, involvement, speed and just outright fun: Despite its silly fake noises, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is the best electric vehicle money can buy you right now.

And I say this as someone whose previous favourite EV was the Rolls-Royce Spectre. 

Score: 4.5/5

2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N specifications:

Price: $111,000 plus on-roads

Basics: EV, 5 seats, 5 doors, mid-sized crossover, FWD

Range: 448km (I say again, HA!)

Battery capacity: 84kWh

Battery warranty: 8 years/160,000km

Energy consumption: 21.2kWh per 100km

Motors: 1 front and 1 rear permanent magnet synchronous, 448kW/740Nm

AC charging: 10.5kW

DC charging: 200kW (est)

0-100km/h: 3.4 seconds