The Ioniq 5 N and its inward ignition imitating test your willingness to accept some far-fetched situations.
How about we consider the meaning of a genuine machine. Is a Passage Bronco Surprisingly strong contender genuine when its exhaust is in clear mode and its measures are set to copy a Fox body’s bunch? Is a BMW M5 fair when part of its motor soundtrack comes from the sound system? Do we by and large concur that a CVT is better when it professes to move between the characterized proportions that it doesn’t really have? Car guile has been around the same length as vehicles have — witness the 1899 patent for the Horsey Horseless, a vehicle with a portion of a wooden pony fastened to its front end so as not to surprise the real ponies that were as yet normal on the country’s streets. The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N and its reproduced inside burning soundtrack is the very most recent model in a long queue of vehicles endeavoring to bring out some prior, romanticized car ideal. What’s more, if the 5 N is the Horsey Horseless, we’re the difficult equines scared by the smooth quietness of EVs and yearning for a bit of recognizable fuel-controlled upheaval.
HIGHS: Worked to endure track misuse, diverting taking care of, inward ignition fakery is entertaining.
The reason sounds a digit foolish: The 5 N means to jazz up EV motoring by electronically impersonating a drivetrain it doesn’t have. Its N Dynamic Sound + and N e-Shift highlights plan to convey a driving encounter that recreates a gas-powered vehicle with an eight-speed double grasp programmed transmission. Furthermore, it’s savagely exact in its copying — level foot it heading uphill in eighth stuff, and it’ll swamp and decline to speed up. Downshift excessively fast while plunge bombarding a corner, and it will deny you the gearchange until wheel speed matches accessible virtual rpm. It’s so great at the act that you can rapidly fail to remember that this isn’t, as a matter of fact, a gas-powered vehicle. Aficionados of mechanical genuineness, welcome to your existential emergency — because this entire devised carnival routine really works.
Lapping Laguna Seca with the Ioniq 5 N playing its actual self — no sound, no cogwheels — you notice it’s a fast yet detached machine in the way of its EV companions. There’s great input through the wheel, however, g-powers and tire commotion are your principal assets for deciding if you’re going excessively quick or not quickly enough. With the reenacted motor commotion and virtual eight-speed empowered, out of nowhere, you have a casing of reference — perhaps you’ll get into fifth stuff on a straight and brake for a third-gear corner, the cry of the fires up assisting your center ear with concurring with the g-powers attacking your internal ear. More tactile criticism rises to more tomfoolery, and hearable signals are a reasonable benefit in a vehicle that builds up momentum like a Store Clear candidate assembles food.
In our instrumented testing, the Ioniq 5 N hit 60 mph in 3.0 seconds and almost broke into the 10s in the quarter-mile, timing 11.1 seconds at 123 mph. We saw those times utilizing the Drag mode that expected around 20 minutes to prewarm the battery, yet out on the track in customary 601-hp mode, the 5 N unquestionably doesn’t feel a lot slower, particularly when the planets adjust to draw in N Smile Lift and access 641 drive for 10 seconds.
LOWS: Reach is not really ideal, drive-mode over-burden, where’s our virtual V-12?
Truly, this is a weighty vehicle, tipping the scales at 4849 pounds, and the real factors of EV range contemplations — Hyundai claims 221 miles of reach from the 84.0-kWh battery, and we saw 190 miles in our 75-mph roadway test — imply that its tires are not all out track-assault elastic. That reach result isn’t too distant from the 210 miles we’ve seen from a lesser all-wheel-drive Ioniq 5, yet the N likewise has a very nearly 9% more battery limit. The N’s Pirelli P Zero PZ4 summer tires (size 275/35ZR-21 at each of the four corners, on fashioned wheels) wear the EV-explicit Choose mark and incorporate a sound-stifling layer inside and a track configuration aligned for low clamor. All things considered, this large hunk o’ Hyundai pulled 0.96 g on the skidpad, provoking testing chief Dave VanderWerp to refer to it as “presumably the most power-oversteer vehicle I’ve at any point driven on the skidpad, and that was with the force divided set to into two halves.”
For sure, the 5 N permits the driver to change front-to-raise force split across 11 spans, from agreeable to wild. It will likewise allow you to impersonate kicking in the grasp of a back-drive vehicle to start a float. This is known as the Force Kick Float capability, and you likely don’t require it assuming you’re enjoying the Ioniq 5 N’s intrinsically chippy taking care of, which sticks to a way of thinking that Hyundai names “Corner Rapscallion.” They’re ginning up a few extraordinary names over at Hyundai nowadays.
What’s more, they need a ton of names with all the drive modes, settings, and highlights packed into the Ioniq 5 N. In some cases, the setting you’re attempting to choose contradicts a few different settings, and you receive a message like, “The working circumstances for N Force Conveyance (NTD) have not been met. NTD is accessible when every one of the accompanying circumstances is met. Engine mode: Game + (in N Mode or N Custom Mode). ESC mode: Game or off. It isn’t accessible while the accompanying capabilities are dynamic: N e-shift, (shrewd) journey control, speed limiter.” The 5 N presents a ton of minor departures from that kind of message. Indeed, even the virtual soundscapes incorporate two different choices other than Start (the inward ignition one): Development and Supersonic, which proposition commotions we’d portray as “cousin of a Martian laser weapon” and “somebody requested that a robot profess to be a warrior stream.”
In any case, get everything set up as you would prefer, and the 5 N is an impact. Different hot laps didn’t agitate its battery, which never transcended 95 degrees, and its brakes were consistently prepared to pull down for the Wine tool. These are the greatest brakes ever fitted to a Hyundai — 15.7-inch rotors front and center clipped by four-cylinder calipers — and the double engines add to slowing down as well, lessening blur while recovering energy. Without anyone else, the engines can convey 0.6 g of deceleration, meaning you can try not to utilize the rubbing brakes completely in ordinary driving. And, surprisingly, in a full-ABS stop (70 mph is scoured in only 153 feet), some regen can in any case be dynamic. Every one of these feels totally normal through the brake pedal, with no swaying or absence of linearity as the calipers and engines share their responsibility.
You can fail to remember that mixed slowing down is working the same way you can fail to remember that the 5 N is an EV. This willingness to accept some far-fetched situations is empowered by eight speakers inside the vehicle and two external playing an interior burning ensemble. Our evaluation here isn’t that Hyundai decided to imitate an internal combustion vehicle but instead which vehicle it chose: the Elantra N DCT and that implies the reproduced pops and snaps of the fumes are displayed on a vehicle that is itself inventing those pops and pops through intentional programming. It’s a duplicate of a duplicate.
Furthermore,, Hyundai displaying the Ioniq 5 N on the Elantra N is like being conceded supper with any individual from history and picking your collaborator, Mike, who sits in the following workspace over. It isn’t so much that Mike is certainly not an engaging person, however, what might be said about Cleopatra or Leonardo DaVinci? Similarly, on the off chance that you can program an EV to sound and act like any vehicle whatsoever, what about a Recipe 1 vehicle from the V-10 time or — keeping it locked down — a Hyundai WRC vehicle? At the point when you put the 5 N in Imagine Elantra mode, the instrument group even switches over to show Elantra-fitting checks, incorporating a tachometer with a 6700-rpm redline. In the interim, the 5 N’s genuine engines twist to 21,000 rpm. There’s such an incredible concept as too on-brand, and copying your own vehicle that costs half as much is a great representation.
Decision: The electric future channels the interior burning past with astonishing achievement.
Indeed, the Ioniq 5 N costs $67,475, or $32,625 more than its inside ignition N stablemate. Obviously, it’s much more vehicle, both in a real sense and metaphorically, a maximalist articulation of the double-use road and track vehicle. On the off chance that 350-kW chargers at any point become normal at street courses — hope against hope — then the Ioniq 5 N is prepared to satisfy the commitment of the track-prepared EV and convey 20 minutes of track time substituting with 20 minutes of charging.
Up to that point, a diverse road weapon merrily investigates the fan prospects electric drive presents. Whether you partake in its theater or get hung up on mechanical peculiarity depends on you, however, we don’t watch a John Wick film and continually shout, “Keanu Reeves couldn’t do that!” or get on Space Mountain and pronounce, “Just so everybody knows, we’re not exactly going to space.” Thus, assuming an over-the-air update could some time or another permit us to encounter a 20,000-rpm V-10 en route to work, we’re prepared to accept.
Counterpoint
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N introduces itself as this well-honed track weapon, yet even on the bumpiest pieces of my drive home, it didn’t shake my midsection as cruelly as the Nismo Z and Subaru BRZ tS did on a similar stretch. Like those back-drive sport vehicles, the all-wheel-drive N’s float mode is simply asking to be set free. It can cut out a thruway cloverleaf with extraordinary speed and hold, yet it’s prepared to oversteer would it be a good idea for you to let it? At the point when this Hyundai isn’t humming with adolescence, it rides similar to the ordinary Ioniq 5, or, in other words enjoyably. However, the forcefully supported sports seats really do secure you rather immovably.
Generally, the tomfoolery, giggling, and energy of an EV end soon after its fast send-off from a standing beginning. Not so with the N. It resembles Hyundai made it explicitly for individuals who don’t pay attention to digital broadcasts when they drive. The N Dynamic Sound + and N e-shift are humorously persuading. In addition to the fact that it drops force among movements and declines to advance quickly after colliding with its pretend redline, however, it likewise gives the N a little buzz “out of gear” that you can feel with your arm laying on the entryway board. Most EVs are so calm inside you could hear a waiting bug ease itself on a napkin. The greatest disturbance here is that the false moving should be empowered before each drive, and it’s to some degree covered in a settings menu. Without this empowered, it drones like you’re riding a cow caught in a delayed moo or working the most intense CVT on earth.
On a warm spring evening, I examined the Home Warehouse parking garage close to my home with the most sultry hatchback in Korea. Friday evenings are vehicle voyage evenings on Broadcast Street, only west of Detroit. This parcel is a well-known gathering spot, where the impacts and snarls from Hemis, Coyotes, and Chevy little blocks just become stronger and venture further into neighborhoods as daylight plunges underneath the skyline. All the N, with its phony clamor settings empowered, got no adoration from the Corvette corral.
