Hyundai Ioniq 6 N review: so brilliant, you'll forget it’s fully electric

What is it?

Hyundai’s next battlefront in its attritional war to make petrolheads take note of things powered by electricity. Basically an Ioniq 6 given the N fast car treatment and utilising the generalised bones of the boxy Ioniq 5 N, but with quite a few tweaks and changes, as well as that space-banana bodywork. And again, it’s an attempt to make the EV driving experience dynamic, rather than just accelerative. Although it does that, too.

Stat me up, Scotty.

It uses dual motors for all-wheel drive; 234bhp for the front, 406 for the rear. From the pedal in natural format, the Ioniq 6 N makes a smidgen over 600bhp and 568lb ft, but hit the ’N Grin Boost’ (NGB) button on the wheel and you get a little extra (641bhp) for ten seconds, after which you have to wait ten seconds before you can use it again.

Photography: Mark Riccioni

That’s good for 0-62mph in 3.2 seconds and a top speed of 160mph, with in-gear pull that’ll make you swallow teeth. It might not be just about acceleration, but the 6 N still pulls stumps. Good wheels, more wheelarch, gooseneck spoiler on the droopy back end. Although all of that stuff is more for stability than downforce – you don’t want to eat too much range.

What about the EV bit?

Well, a relatively large 84.0kWh battery gets all sorts of heating and cooling to keep it in good nick (more on that below), so the range should be happily over 300 miles if the standard AWD car does 322-miles WLTP. There’s 11kW DC charging as standard, plus 350kW DC capability from an 800-volt architecture. Find a big enough charger and be within the operating window and you’re looking at 10-80 per cent charge in 18 minutes.

And yep, it has all the usual Hyundai goodness like vehicle-to-load, a heat pump, an app, and more electronic toys that are strictly necessary. But all that is kind of a given for a modern Hyundai EV - it’s the extra stuff that makes this an N product.

So what are the extra driver-centric additions, then?

Lots of items that begin with the letter N. Which gets a bit heavy-handed after a bit, but we’ll let you be the judge. First, we have N Battery, which you can set for drag, sprint or endurance. That optimises the battery cooling and conditioning for whatever you’re doing. Good.

Then there’s N Active Sound+ allowing you to choose what this thing sounds like, so you get actual car noise – distinct V8 rumblings including lift-pops/bangs – the swoosh of spaceships or the sound of the future. Only the engine noise sounds any good – the rest are kind of Enya-adjacent.

N Launch Control does exactly what it says on the tin, reliably and with enough force for you to remember that this is definitely an EV with AWD. Just switch to sporty-mode, traction off, left foot firmly on the brake (you have to be very deliberate), mash the throttle pedal and release when baked.

Fake gearshifts too?

Absolutely. N e-Shift gives you paddleshifts (via paddles used for brake regen aggression in more normal modes) so that you can deliberately feel more involved. In Ignition sound (the V8 noise), it really does electrically backfire a bit like an Audi S3 with a silly map. And it’s not as fake or remotely as annoying as it sounds. You can also hit a digital rev-limiter if you don’t shift. That’s a rev-limiter in an electric car. Whatever next.

The N Grin Boost we’ve already mentioned acts as a kind of digital nitrous for extra shove when needed. Then there’s N brake regeneration and N pedal, which you can actually get the car to tuck faster and hit the brakes as soon as you lift off the accelerator. It produces definite G on throttle reversal, and you can basically make a one-pedal track car. Though there’s something really odd about not hitting the physical pedal on the way into a braking zone.

But then it gets really fun. Because there are also dials for something called N Torque Distribution and dials for the N Drift Optimiser. So you can set this car to have all the torque to the rear motor (or the front) and make it rear-wheel drive via the torque distribution system, and then arc your drift using the optimiser. Now because the rear motor only has 378bhp, that’s what you get. If you set it all to the front, you only get the front motor’s power of 223bhp.

And it is good. Getting on for 378bhp to the rear is more than enough to get things moving, and it’s a fun car to play with thanks to a long wheelbase and steady reactions. The Optimiser is slightly more confusing – you can set initiation aggression, wheelspin speeds and angle of dangle, but it never really feels natural, and you can still spin the car. It’s actually better to switch everything off, make it RWD and just… learn to drift.

That's a LOT of stuff. Does it feel faker than a market stall diamond?

Nope. And that’s the shocker. It takes a little while to set things up as you like, but then you just save your favourites to the two N buttons on the steering wheel. We had a full comfort/range spec for road, then a mildly violent spec for track, which included a 20/80 torque split front-to-rear.

And it’s brilliant. The 6 N has a lower centre of gravity than the 5 N and features re-designed suspension geometry as well as new ‘stroke sensing’ dampers. And the 6 N feeds itself along with the kind of stable calm that makes it very fast indeed. It does feel more like a road car than a track weapon, but it’s a laugh and a half.

Bad bits? The steering is accurate but hasn’t got a lot of feel and the brakes are powerful, but again, lack true delicacy. Around a track it feels a bit too heavy and isolated – despite all the theatrics. That outside front tyre is doing a lot of work. But as a thing? It’s brilliant. And you keep forgetting that it’s electric entirely, which serves as a massive compliment to the Hyundai engineers.

That’s... a surprise.

There are the beginnings of a proper EV brand here. The ethos, the ideas, the joy of playing with a technology to make it more interesting. Hyundai is really embracing the idea of trying to make electric fun for petrolheads. Any true driver would always be interested in figuring it out, even if they decided they didn’t like it.

Add to that the fact that this Ioniq 6 does all the normal stuff and does it well, and it’s a winner. As mentioned, it charges like a good ‘un, and it’s super comfortable on the road and has plenty of space. It’s a fabulous EV.

Obviously one of the big factors for anything that needs to feel lively on the track is weight – and electric cars just can’t escape that yet. Once we’ve got that a bit more nailed, then these ideas are going to be the foundations of really special electric cars. Imagine an Ioniq 5 or 6 that weighed 300kg less. It’d be epic.

The Ioniq 6 N is more of a fast road car than a full-on circuit weapon, but ironically, it’s on exactly the right track.

Price: £65-70,000 (estimated, TBC)
Transmission: Dual electric motors (front: 234bhp/rear: 406bhp), all-wheel drive
Power: 641bhp (with overboost), 568lb ft 
Performance: 0-62mph in 3.2s, 160mph top speed
Battery: 84.0kWh
Charging: 350kW DC (10-80% in 18 mins), 11kW AC
Weight: 2,080kg (est)