2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N preview drive & suspension deep dive

We’ve sampled the Ioniq 5 N in pre-production form on ice, and on South Korean roads in production guise, but Hyundai has finally called us an hour north of Sydney for a first local taste of an Aussie-spec 5 N.

Short on distance but not on bumps, the road we’re heading to (known informally as Akuna Bay) is the stuff of nightmares if you happen to be a damper, spring, or suspension bush.

When engineers come to visit and ask the team at Hyundai’s Australian outpost how they tune suspension without using a proving ground, Akuna Bay is the place product development manager Tim Rodgers takes them to demonstrate our roads. It helps that it’s close to the Macquarie Park head office, and one of the roads used before final sign-off of local suspension tunes.

Partially due to the success of the ride localisation program and i30 N involvement (though mainly due to expected demand for the Ioniq 5 N), the electric N car marked the first time Aussie engineers were embedded in tuning from the get-go.

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Tim told Wheels he was thrown in at the deep end, testing the car jetlagged and then being thrown into developing and refining various N-specific components including the rear knuckles and bump stops.

Inside, it’s clear how different the N is from the regular Ioniq 5, with almost no shared DNA. Aside from different interior fabrics is a superb driving position obliged by heated and ventilated manual-adjust bucket seats set millimetres above the carpet and a perfectly sized three-spoke steering wheel.

The centre console is different, too, and is an item former lead engineer Albert Biermann said he obsessed over trimming weight from, yet at 2.2 tonnes (provisional weight, spec not yet finalised), the N is about 70kg heavier than an Ioniq 5 Epiq AWD.

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Of course, that extra weight can be attributed to a combination of things, including enhanced cooling, a bigger battery, stiffening measures – 42 extra welding points and 2.1 metres of structural adhesive for a start – and other things.

Even knowing the depth of engineering behind the 5 N – it being Biermann’s last official start-to-finish N product – and reading Jez’s words from Korea, I was still half-expecting a stiff-limbed limpet tuned for Nurburgring lap times.

Logic goes that with something so large and heavy on such big wheels will always be talent-limited – the flawed, concrete-ride BMW X3 M is the perfect example of this.

Yet the Ioniq 5 N’s compliance in Normal mode took me totally by surprise. Rolling through the waterlogged gravel car park’s potholes at walking pace, the N’s big 21-inch forged alloys eased themselves into depressions as needed and soaked up sharp edges as well as – or better than – a standard Ioniq 5 might've.

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Should be damn good at the ‘going to get milk’ part of being an everyday sports car.

Guess that means the body control suffers? You’d be wrong. The Ioniq 5 N was planted and poised, dispatching savage mid-corner bumps that upset even the best hot hatches without breaking a sweat.

That front end is so gripped up, I kept upping entry speeds to find a limit to the grip but it proved impossible on the road, with the Ioniq 5 N's sticky HN-marked 275/35 R21 Pirelli P Zero rubber holding steady.

And yet the beauty of the Ioniq 5 N is that you’re given something to enjoy mid-corner, with genuine weight transfer and yaw moments that so many fast and heavy cars (including the Kia EV6 GT) erase with high spring and damper rates; in contrast, the Ioniq 5 N is delightfully loose-limbed.

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With the diff set to Sport Plus and the ESC in its half-off mode, a little extra accelerator than you might strictly need on corner exit allows a gentle over-rotation of the rear that can be caught effortlessly with a flick of the wrists.

The drivetrain is naturally rear-biased, the front motor producing 166kW and the rear 282kW, with the ability to control the ‘torque split’ for drifting around skid pans (though there's no physical connection between each motor).

Steering is sharp without being hyperactive and it has a nice heft in Sport+ mode with no glugginess – the Ioniq 5 N’s EPAS system is a ‘driver demand’ type that dishes out assistance as the wheel is turned rather than altering it depending on road speed.

Compliance at speed is excellent and our lumpy road dictated that N Custom mode with dampers in Sport was the best. Sport+ (or full N mode, accessed using one of the two wheel-mounted buttons) wasn’t catastrophic but would be best reserved for smoother roads and racetracks.

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As for the difference between Aussie Ioniq 5 Ns and everywhere else's, N mode is identical but there are a few – rather complex – differences in Normal and Sport.

Rodgers illustrated the nuance of the Ioniq 5 N’s electronically controlled dampers by riding shotgun with a laptop plugged into the car’s mainframe. Using a humble spreadsheet, Tim could adjust all manner of damping parameters on the fly; the most illustrative is the speed-dependent mapping.

Tim effectively told the dampers to relax into their absolute softest setting at all speeds. This resulted in lots of body movement and heave over bumps I had yet to experience.

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The face of a man who can't quite believe how good a 2.2-tonne SUV rides and handles

Then it was fully hard, which is more in line with what I expected from N mode if I'm honest – that being a busy ride (but still preferable to a BMW X3 M in Normal) that sapped the joy out of driving the N.

Rodgers then dropped the damping force right off again and explained how the various lines of code work to rein in (or allow) body movements. In simple terms, there are two basic inputs for the suspension’s brain: road-induced motion and driver-induced motion.

The former takes information such as the car’s speed, and the size and frequency of bumps (there's even a speedbump-specific program!), adjusting damping forces up to 200 times a second. The latter responds to your inputs and might change the amount of anti-squat when the driver is accelerating, for example, or pre-empt body roll as the steering wheel turns in.

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In ‘full soft’ on the spreadsheet, inputs other than speed still cause the dampers to react and this gives an insight into the system’s sophistication. Brake heavily and the dampers quickly firm up; turn into a bend and after a moment of wallow the chassis stiffens up suddenly to limit roll.

As Tim points out, when you can feel the systems working clumsily, the effect of them in harmony is amplified: “The magic is blending it all together so that’s invisible because you don't want a driver to be able to feel any of that. You just want them to be able to drive the car and say it’s incredible.”

The Ioniq 5 N flatters the driver, no doubt, but it gets better. Not only does it make driving fast easy like all limpet hyper hatches (such as the Volkswagen Golf R), but it involves and engages the bit of flesh between the wheel and seat at reasonable speeds.

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Waiting a moment as the body settles on the outside rear, I fire out, just catching the faux limiter at the top of second

This chiefly comes down to N’s implementation of what reads like childish gimmicks in a press release: 'N e-shift' simulated gear shifts, three selectable ‘engine’ noises with external speakers (Evolution with the interior level set to 2/10 and the outside speakers on was our preference), fake pops and crackles on the overrun, and a ‘rev-limiter’ that imitates fuel cut.

Clearly though, the N team has been hard at work. Coming into a downhill right-hander I plucked ‘second’ using the paddles while turning in on a trailing brake (the left pedal feels fantastic, by the way).

The Ioniq 5 N jerked slightly as the extra regenerative force simulated the drivetrain shock of a DCT downshift. This helpfully unsettled the rear and pointed the car’s nose towards the apex. Waiting a moment for the body to settle on the outside rear, I fire out, just catching the faux limiter at the top of 'second gear'.

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It sounds silly as I write it, but the grin on my face and elevated heart rate don't lie. These are primal reactions that a great sports car can unlock.

Any whingeing about electric cars with silly childish programs is quickly replaced by grins and giggles. That's what matters for Ioniq 5 N buyers. Plus, if you don't like them, you can customise these features to your heart's content, or disable them altogether.

Think of the Ioniq 5 N’s engine fakery as lab-grown meat and you're on the money. If said meat was served as a steak with no accompaniments, you’d be able to spot the differences: a sinewy texture and slightly different flavour.

But when that meat is ground up into a patty and placed into an artisan burger bun with homemade dill pickle, a perfectly melted slice of cheese and just the right amount of special sauce, it’s a cheeseburger you can’t resist.

The simulated gears also help those used to engines pick the road speed better; all up they make driving the Ioniq 5 N briskly far more satisfying than even a Porsche Taycan.

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Of course, the Ioniq 5 N is savagely fast. Combining the launch control and 'N grin boost' functions that unlock the full 478kW and 770Nm outputs with a fully depressed accelerator is enough to make your vision go blurry.

It’s frankly excessive and enough to hit 100km/h in a claimed 3.4 seconds, so it’s nice that the throttle's long travel makes it easy to meter out that grunt.

The only real negative is the battery element. You can charge the 84kWh battery up quickly (from 10-80 per cent in 18 minutes) with E-GMP's 800V electric architecture, though that’s null and void without the right kind of fast charger.

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When you’re enjoying the Ioniq 5 N, a full charge will realistically get you 350-420km between stops.

And that’s a shame because it may prevent Australian owners from being able to get out and explore the kind of epic backroads that this car would devour with joy. That’s a problem common with any performance-oriented EV, from Born to Taycan, so it’s unfair to knock the Ioniq 5 N down a peg for that.

Things are looking good for Hyundai's first electric N car; it really does redefine your expectations.

We’ll be exploring the Ioniq 5 N in greater depth to see if we can’t find a chink in its armour (that currently seems rather impermeable), with a road and track drive in March followed by a comparison to put its excellence in context.