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Check out Hyundai's amazing IONIQ 5 N in a real world track day environment - passes EVERYTHING!
CHECK OUT HYUNDAI'S AMAZING IONIQ 5 N IN A REAL WORLD TRACK DAY ENVIRONMENT - PASSES EVERYTHING!
If you’re as much of a motoring fanatic as the lot at SXdrv, there’s a large chance that your social media accounts follow more than a few motoring-related channels. One thing that we see multiple times a day is the ragging of electric cars, local posts are always about Eskom and charging issues and worldwide posts are about how EVs are soulless and quiet and detract from what makes driving, driving. One page that we see during our morning bowel movement social media catch-up even swears that electric vehicles are a mistake and have a limited shelf life because automakers will realise how bad battery power is and they will swing back to ICE setups. That may be a bit of wishful thinking on the part of fans of petrol-fed engines, but that’s another argument for another day involving a massive blunt. What we are seeing from the positive side of the social media posts is that electric cars are being refined and improved monthly in terms of battery power, charge times, range and performance - so much so that we’ve started visualising which of these cars would be the perfect addition to our virtual garage. Electric hypercars are a no-brainer, any legit motoring fan would bite someone in the face to have access to things like a Rimac Nevera or even the compact McMurtry Spierling, but we’re talking about EVs that your regular Joe can aspire to. Our virtual EV garage already includes the Audi e-tron RS GT, the VW ID.Buzz, and most recently, the Hyundai IONIQ 5 N. While it’s still out of our budget, it’s not as much of a stretch as some of the other cars we’d want. We’re not sure Hyundai will ever bring the car into SA, especially considering how hard it has been to crack the market with the brilliant Hyundai i30N, but if it did make it here it should cost in the region of R1,500,000. That’s not terrible for a performance-oriented car considering the price tag for the unofficial worldwide benchmark for performance, the BMW M3, retails for over R2,000,000.
We’re fans of this electric Hyundai because it seems to be the first proper performance EV to hit the market. The IONIQ 5 N ticks more boxes than things like the e-tron and similar cars, and it has the right size to be called a hot hatch. The good-looking car is powered by a pair of electric motors, one at each end of the car. At the front, that electric motor is rated at a decent 166 kW which is a more lukewarm hatch than a hot hatch, but when you add in the rear motor that’s rated at a beefy 282 kW things look a lot better. These motors work in tandem though and that means the IONIQ 5 N has a total of 448 kW of power on tap. It doesn’t end there though, the IONIQ 5 N has a specific drive mode called N Grin Boost and when activated it takes the total power up to an unbelievable 478 kW. The current most powerful turbocharged hot hatch on the market is the Mercedes-AMG A45S and it creates 310 kW from its turbocharged 2.0-litre, and without options will set you back over R1,400,000. You can see why the IONIQ 5 N has so much appeal. So we’ve seen the car being tested by various motoring journos and publications and the resulting videos do a lot to show how good the car is, but this video from YouTube guest driver Misha Charoudin has to be the best one yet, and will be hard to beat in terms of entertainment value. Charoudin has amassed a huge following on his YouTube channel, he’s based at Nurburgring and drives the track more than most people on the planet, and the cars he gets to drive are amazing. He doesn’t just have access to media fleet cas, but private owners happily hand over the keys to their pride and joy so that can ride shotgun with him while he pushes the car harder than they dare themselves. In this one, Charoudin is handed the keyfob to an IONIQ 5 N, but what makes it so interesting is that he ends up following another IONIQ 5 N with an equally capable driver at the wheel so we can see the performance from inside and outside of the car. Just watch it, just take in how good the car is, and then you;ll see why it’s part of our virtual EV garage.