The 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is the best EV I’ve driven. Not because it’s the fastest or because it handles the best, but because it makes you feel like you’re not driving an EV at all. Synthetic engine noises and fake transmissions might sound like gimmicks, but in practice, they make the EV experience way more fun.
I got to experience the Ioniq 5 N first-hand in Germany, driving a pre-production car on the road and on the Nürburgring GP track. Though the sounds are very obviously fake, the synthetic dual-clutch transmission called N e-shift, programmed into the Ioniq 5 N via lots of clever layers of software, feels deceptively real. The Ioniq 5 N has just one gear connecting the electric motors to the road, but when you turn this system on, you’re convinced you have eight.
In the video above you can hear the engine sounds being piped into the cabin, changing as I go from gear to gear. And it’s not like the car simply plays engine sounds, there’s a real change in torque delivery as you go through the rev range (shown on the digital gauge cluster through a tachometer that redlines at 8000 rpm), and a cut of power each time the paddle is pulled. Hyundai spent a lot of time on the tuning to make this feel like a real ICE-powered car.
Because of that tuning, using the Ioniq 5 N with N e-shift turned on actually makes it slower. But that didn’t really matter to me, because it was way more fun.
Brian Silvestro
Road & Track staff writer with a taste for high-mileage, rusted-out projects and amateur endurance racing.
Keyword: Here's What the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N's Synthetic Engine Noise and Paddle Shifters Sound Like