The 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Is the Start of Something New

“If you only have a 400 volt car, you might as well stay home,” Albert Biermann, Hyundai’s former head of R&D, now Executive Technical Advisor, said when I asked him why the BMW i4 M50 couldn’t make it a single lap at Car and Driver’s Lightning Lap without degradation.

Biermann explained that the i4’s EV drivetrain has to work twice as hard as the 800-volt system in the Ioniq 5 N. The basic Ioniq 5 has that same 800-volt architecture, and high-efficiency silicon carbide inverters, too. It’s an efficient and high-output platform, one that the N team was basically gifted for the N version. The N is more of less is a project to unlock the potential within that structure.

“And they don’t have our silicon carbide inverters!” Biermann continued, explaining that the car has to work twice as hard, twice, making a great deal more heat in the process and wearing everything down. While the i4 can’t make it a single lap of Virginia International Raceway without losing significant performance, the Ioniq 5 N can do a little more than two laps of the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Biermann claims, before it starts to wear down. The only other performance EV that has an 800-volt system is the Porsche Taycan, but Biermann says it doesn’t have as efficient inverters as what they’re working with at Hyundai.

This all puts the Ioniq 5 N in a weird space. We think of N cars as fun more than anything else. Little sedans and hot hatchbacks that punch above their weight, that make do with around 300 hp.

This Ioniq 5 N makes about double that, or “around 600” as the Hyundai people have been saying here in Arjeplog, Sweden at their winter testing facility. That’s as specific as they’re going to get now on this early first drive, but it’s enough to go on. This is a different kind of product. It’s the first N with all-wheel drive. It’s the first N that’s electric. It’s the first N with this kind of power. I asked Biermann what was the last AWD car he worked on. After some thought, all he could think of was the X5 M. It probably weighed as much, too, we joked.

The Ioniq 5 N seems half a generation ahead of the competition, the only EV that—if what Biermann says about its Nordschleife runs is true—can survive doing the kind of track-day duty we expect of internal combustion performance cars. This isn’t a peppy hot hatch to rival Hondas and Toyotas. This is something like an M5. This is something like the M5 when the M5 first came out in the 1980s. There’s nothing quite like the Ioniq 5 N in production right now.

It is a moment. One that we both share. I am the one driving, seeing if I can link every corner on this handling circuit plowed out on top of this frozen lake in Arjeplog. We both sense that I’ve misjudged something, and that this car, big and heavy, is headed towards a snow bank. There are a few decreasing-radius turns on this course, as my instructor for the day, Chris Nigemeier, has pointed out. Nigemeier has run the Nürburging 24 hours, he’s run in the European Drift Championship, but his day job for the past few years has been working on the Ioniq 5 N. Formerly at Pirelli, he says at first that he is in charge of tire development for the 5 N, but it quickly becomes clear he is just as much in charge of destroying tires as he is engineering them. As an actual pro drifter, he helped calibrate the N’s drift mode. At first, he explained, all the other engineers thought that drift mode would just mean sending all of the car’s power to the rear axle and calling it a day, but that setup quickly proved undrivable. The moment you touched the gas, the rear wheels spun up virtually to maximum velocity, and you spun out. There was no control, particularly with the limited steering angle the 5 N has to work with.

Instead, the N sends a variable amount of power to the front of the car, acting something like a virtual steering angle. As you near the limit of how much lock you can put on to catch a slide, the car is able to send more and more power to the front to pull you straight. It’s possible not only because of g-sensors and wheel speed sensors in the car, but also from these fiendishly responsive motors front and rear, and the 5 N’s ability to so instantly vary torque. The car can vary how much power is devoted to the front or the rear, then varied left to right by an electronic limited slip differential. A gas-powered car can never act as fast.

In those two aspects alone the car is varying power sent front to rear, and left to right, but the charmingly German “Drift Optimiser” integrates also the torque rate, the suspension stiffness, and the steering effort. There is so much that you can tune with an electric car. All of this is direct, digital, working through electric motors and not fickle gas engines or hydraulic lines. Normally, this kind of electric tuning is dedicated to raw efficiency, or simply straight line speed. In the 5 N, it is about making an EV that drives like a performance car.

In this moment, I remember to not look at what I don’t want to hit and look where I want to go. I redirect my eyes away from the snow bank and through the corner. I ease off the throttle, the nose of the car tucks in, I add more steering angle, the car slows, and we gracefully drift through the curve and link up with the next.