I’ve never been much of a believer in magic. By that I mean both the Harry Potter and David Blaine varieties – neither a flying broomstick, nor a sleight of hand with a deck of cards does much for me. But what I think we have here is the car industry’s first stab at a proper ‘illusion’, and for once it’s actually got my attention.
Electric cars, we’re constantly reminded, are never going to be as good as petrol ones. Aside from the usual arguments about charging infrastructure, cobalt mining, range anxiety and so on, the world is full of car enthusiasts that like the sound and feel of burning carbon – and they’re not prepared to accept anything less.
Enter Hyundai: a rather surprising saviour to car enthusiasts the world over. For the last few years its engineers have been blazing trails in two totally different directions. Their range of electric cars, like the Ioniq 5, are about as good as it gets in the EV world. Then there’s its range of N-badged hot hatches – giant killers that seemed to come almost out of nowhere when they appeared on the scene a few years ago.
Strangely, it’s taken Hyundai until now to realise that those two teams don’t have to be sequestered away in different bits of the engineering centre – and if this car is the proof of what they can do when working together, perhaps it should’ve combined them a bit sooner.
What we have here is the first electric car that actually – properly – feels like a petrol-powered one. It sounds like one. It accelerates like one. It changes ‘gear’ – and hangs on the rev limiter – just like one too. If this is all sounding a bit cheesy, well, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so. We’ve been here before with fake engine noises and electric cars. But this is a next level trick – think David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Plonk someone behind the wheel of the Ioniq 5 N, and – without telling them – I’m sure they’d be none the wiser that the petrol engine under the bonnet is 100% imaginary.
So how is the trick done? Software – a lot of software. Like a PlayStation game, the Ioniq is just doing an extremely good impression of a conventional car: copying the sounds, the throttle response, the torque curves and more. The whole act goes so far that, should you find yourself in the wrong ‘gear’ and hit the throttle, there’s a little delay factored in while the imaginary gearbox pretends to shuffle its cogs around to get you a lower ratio. At some point, there must’ve been a conversation about that: just how long should a shift from 6th to 3rd take? ‘Musn’t make it too quick – has to feel believable’.
In a way, it’s sort of madness. Volkswagen probably spends millions of euros trying to make its DSG automatic gearboxes shift even a tenth of second faster than the last generation did – and then here’s Hyundai, deliberately engineering in the exact opposite.
Logic dicates that you should drive the 5 N with all this trickery turned off: an electric car trying to be a petrol car is never going to be as quick as one unburdened by such things. But speed is just one part of the experience.
Hyundai hasn’t simply ramped up the power output and called it a day, of course. There’s four-wheel drive to help apply that to the road, some pretty beefy brakes to stop the two and a quarter tons of metal from flying off the edge of a Welsh B-road. Special mention must also go to the springs and adaptive dampers Hyundai has fitted: quite how a car of this size can handle so well without breaking any passengers’ spines is beyond me.
That’s the thing with the 5 N: it’s only a monster when you actually want it to be. Family-oriented performance cars always need some duality of purpose – and lots of them do, to some degree. But whether you put your Audi RS4 into ‘Comfort’ mode or not, it’s still going to wake the neighbours when you start it up at six in the morning.
On the flip side, the Ioniq lets you potter around town in serene, silent comfort much like any other electric car. You can plug it into your house overnight and get 200 miles of range for a fiver. Perhaps most compellingly, it’s even available on a salary sacrifice scheme.
Amusingly though, it’s not for any of these reasons that the Hyundai finds itself here in Wales. Our little team of EV advocates, agnostics and sceptics were all united by one thing: we all thought the Ioniq was an absolute riot to drive, no matter what happens to be hiding under its duck egg blue bonnet.
With any luck, this is the start of something bigger. Perhaps this is what proper petrolheads were looking for from an electric car: put simply, something that’s pretending not to be one.
Illusion or not though, Hyundai has created something properly magical with this car – because here, in a rainy layby in Wales, a group of people saw what the future of performance cars looked like. And for once, they didn’t hate it.
- Price: £65,000
- Engine: Twin electric motors, 84kWh battery
- Power: 650bhp (boost)
- Torque: 740Nm
- Max speed: 161mph
- O-60mph: 3.4 seconds
- Range (WLTP): 274 miles
- Emissions: NA g/km CO2
