The high-performance Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is a genre-busting electric vehicle (EV) that sits somewhere between a hot hatch and a fast SUV.
With this in mind, Hyundai Australia product planning and development manager Tim Rodgers told CarExpert the company has been asking itself who Australian buyers of the Ioniq 5 N are.
“We hosted a customer test drive programme at Sydney Motorsport Park through our N Festival, where we ran that over the couple of days that we were there,” said Mr Rodgers.
“I don’t think that there were two similar people that turned up to that.
“We had some customers that were buying [the Ioniq 5 N] as their primary performance car [and] they’d never driven a Hyundai before.
“There were other customers who had bought into our brand before and bought into the N brand before. They though they just wanted the latest and greatest.
“Then there were other customers who are high-performance car buyers. They were buying [the Ioniq 5 N] as a second or third performance car.
“This is going to be their daily driver, high-performance car,” he said.
“It’s a totally new segment for us to operate and I think that speaks to the breadth and capability of this car, even on paper when we haven’t let people experience it yet.
“What we found when trying to hone in on the target customer locally in our local research was that you really couldn’t pin it to just one specific psychographic or demographic, or even income or household or lifestyle.
“That’s really cool, but also really daunting for us because we like to be certain and specific and get modelling and figure out what our customer base is going to be.
“But we are going to trust the product. Know that it’s very capable, very broad, and very accessible in terms of what it can offer to the customer.”
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is the first electric N car, and for now is the most expensive Hyundai-branded car offered locally.
It’s priced from $111,000 before on-road costs, with the only options being matte paint ($1000) and a glass Vision Roof ($2000).
Power comes from a dual-motor all-wheel drive electric powertrain producing total system outputs of 448kW of power and 740Nm of torque.
There’s also an ‘N Grin Boost’ (NGB) function that ups the outputs to 478kW and 770Nm for 10 seconds.
The two electric motors are fed by an 84kWh lithium-ion battery pack, which is the highest-capacity battery Hyundai has offered in an EV to date.
The Ioniq 5 N offers a plethora of modes and functions aimed at making it more engaging.
These include N Active Sound, N e-shift, N Race mode, N Pedal, N Brake Regen, N Drift Optimiser, N Torque Distributor, and N Battery Preconditioning.
MORE: Everything Hyundai Ioniq 5 N
MORE: Hyundai Ioniq 5 N review
