Hyundai Ioniq 5 N review: fake shifting, real fun

Spend any time around dyed-in-the-wool automotive enthusiasts, and you’ll undoubtedly hear how “boring” electric vehicles are. The common complaint is that they lack a physical engine “feel” or an audible sound when you romp on the accelerator. 

That is until the introduction of the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, a fully electric SUV with a suite of frivolous features and performance upgrades that make it behave and sound just like a dinosaur juice-burning hot hatch, one that brings a giggle of joy every time you drive it. 

For the holdouts, the Ioniq 5 N is just the thing to break the mold, and it scratched an itch I never knew I had, thanks in part to two ridiculously silly features: “N e-shift” and “N Active Sound Plus.” When combined, these lend themselves to the pure joy that the Ioniq 5 N brings to the table. 

When it debuted in 2021, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 was lauded for its unique, space-age looks, vehicle-to-load capability, 800-volt fast-charging underpinnings, and unique take on an electric SUV. 

Fast-forward to this year, and Hyundai’s specialized N division, which focuses on improving the performance and handling of a handful of select Hyundai vehicles, reworked the entire vehicle. 

First, the Ioniq 5 N gets as much as 641 horsepower and 545 lb-ft of torque, which is nearly triple the horses and double the torque that the standard Ioniq 5 gets.

While the Ioniq 5 N is built on Hyundai’s Electric Global Modular Platform, this is the first vehicle to get Hyundai’s fourth-generation 84kWh battery pack. The chassis, cooling system, and motors were completely overhauled to take on so much power and torque, and allow customers to go from a track to daily driver, without destroying the car or its components.

Brakes, suspension, tires, and other parts on consumer cars tend to break down much faster when they’re driven at their limit on the track, and Hyundai wanted to ensure that the Ioniq 5 N could handle the extremes with minimal degradation. 

That’s no small feat because electric powertrains tend to be much heavier and generate more torque, power, and heat when pushed hard. For track performance, the engineers also had to make sure that the Ioniq 5 N could be charged quickly since many of the track-focused features require a specific state of charge to access. Hyundai says the Ioniq 5 N can go from 10 to 80 percent on a DC Fast Charger (225kW) in just 18 minutes.

Because the engineers juiced the performance, they also had to stiffen the chassis, suspension, steering rack, and body panels to handle the added G-forces. Hyundai also replaced the standard brakes with high-performance versions and added wheel vents to keep them cooler. And they reworked the regenerative braking system so there’s less brake fade as things heat up. 

The N group also added drift features, a button on the steering wheel that adds a 10-second boost of power and torque, launch control, race modes, and specialized battery conditioning for various modes to ensure that you’re getting all the power you can from the battery and motors.

Admittedly, I didn’t get a chance to try these features, because I’m a responsible human, and I only drove the Ioniq 5 N on public roads and not on a closed track. After some digging through a LOT of vehicle settings, you can toggle these on and off, but there are a lot of conditions that have to be met to make them work, and it’s not exactly easy to figure out. 

Additionally, the other trade-off is that you get reduced range compared to the longest-range Ioniq 5, which gets an EPA-rated range of 303 miles. The N version gets just 221 miles of EPA-rated range. 

So what else makes this car stand out? Fake internal combustion engine sounds and shifts. 

Automotive fakery isn’t new. Automakers have been tweaking looks (fake vents, extended wheel arches that don’t do anything, even horse heads attached to horseless carriages) and piping in audio since the advent of the automobile. A car is a costume, and in the ICE era that costume came with the physical sensation of shifts and raucous engine sounds to match. It signaled, in big clouds of fossil fuel fumes, that you have arrived, and makes people look at you and wonder, “Who’s that person revving to redline and rev-matching shifts?” 

The N e-shift uses the motor’s torque output to simulate shifts that you can control with two paddles on the steering wheel. When you pull the paddles to shift up or down, you feel the car simulate a shift, pop and gurgle on downshift, rev-match and turbo spin on upshift, and you get the head-bob as a bonus.

N Active Sound Plus uses speakers inside the car and out, to pipe three different sound options into the world: Ignition, which sounds like a raucous, blipping, redline-limited, internal combustion engine; Supersonic, which sounds like a robotic version of a fighter jet; and Evolution, which is kind of a boosted EV sound. 

These were big risks for Hyundai to take, according to Andre Ravinowich, senior manager of product planning at Hyundai. Even if the shifts and sound are fake, he says “it’s bringing that sense of connection to driving and engagement to EVs […] it’s just back to what makes driving fun.” Hyundai’s N group saw it as a way to “develop a personality of a performance EV,” Ravinowich notes.

When I put the Ioniq 5 N into the N e-Shift and Active Sound mode and selected Ignition, the sound and the fake shifts brought a tremendous smile to my face. Paired with the seemingly endless power and torque offered by the electric motors, I couldn’t stop grinning. 

It’s just like a little kid making car noises as they push a Hot Wheels car around a track, but combined with the driving experience in the Ioniq 5 N, it just taps into a pure enthusiast joy. Even kids around my neighborhood stopped and looked when I started the Ioniq 5 N up with the sound management turned on. They’d pull out their phones to take photos and videos as I drove off, happily faking the internal combustion engine experience and knowing I wasn’t adding a drop of carbon to the atmosphere.

The Ioniq 5 N just might be the performance EV that will change self-described “auto enthusiast” minds about the electric transition. It’s that good.