The Hyundai Ioniq 6 N and the challenge facing the enthusiast EV

The Hyundai Ioniq 6 N is a great performance EV. It’s probably the best that halfway-sensible money will buy. Check out our recent comparison if you want to delve a bit further into that.

Given that it managed to beat Tesla’s big-selling Model 3 Performance, you might expect Hyundai to have shifted a few units of this 480kW monster.

And ‘a few’ is certainly an apt description. To date this year, Hyundai has sold just 17 Ioniq 6s of any stripe. Supply has certainly been a key issue, the $115,000 (plus on-road costs) list price is another, but the sports EV market as a whole hasn’t seen as many sales as planned.

It’s not just an issue facing Hyundai. When was the last time you saw an MG Cyberster on the road? Why isn’t Lotus talking about Evija sales figures?  It makes Porsche’s achievement in shifting Taycans look an absolutely Herculean effort.

So what is it about enthusiast EVs that isn’t really chiming with people who love driving? Let’s have a look at the Ioniq 6 N as a case in point.

Dynamically, the 6 N is about as good as a 2.2-tonne sedan can be. It’s really good, and the adaptive suspension works well on Australia’s roads.

But it is a 2.2-tonne car and, as such, it’s hard on its tyres when you start getting a bit expressive behind the wheel. You feel that weight when you demand rapid directional changes of it. 

Mind you, an all-wheel-drive BMW M3 now weighs nigh-on 1.8 tonnes and doesn’t carry its centre of gravity anywhere near as low as the Hyundai.

You’ve got a stack of drive modes to play with and the synthesised sound and gear changes are really good fun. Don’t get too hung up on whether it’s real or not. Most of what you hear in petrol-engined sports cars owes more to digital sound processing than you’d like to think.

But the 6 N’s slow sales do ask us whether we’re quite ready for the notion of a true enthusiast EV just yet. 

There’s a drive loop that I enjoy called the Reefton Ring, and it’s 130km of some of the best mix of roads in mainland Australia, encompassing Reefton Spur, the road from Cumberland Junction to Marysville, the Black Spur, and the fast flowing road back to Woori Yallock.

I would have loved to have driven this loop last weekend in the 6 N. I had hours spare, but given an earlier experience in the Ioniq 5 N, I knew that getting to the Loop itself and back (86km), and then doing some enthusiastic pedalling on the Reefton Spur section, would leave me having to button out of the gas early because I'd become a bit nervy about the rapidly depleting driving range.

And that’s a problem.

If you want to track down great roads, you tend to need to head off the beaten track a bit. Reefton Spur was an old logging road set deep in the forests at the headwaters of the Yarra Valley. There’s nobody there, much less a bank of 350kW DC fast chargers.

It’s not just the range issue. I once had a Mitsubishi Evo VIII that would do four laps of the Nurburgring per 55-litre tank of petrol. That’s 84km from brimful to running on vapours. It makes the Ioniq 6 N look a real long-ranger.

Watching the Evo’s fuel needle drop by a quarter, per lap, felt pretty hedonistic. But if you’re in a hedonistic mood, then juicing it back up and enjoying another 32 minutes of flat-out fun, consuming fuel at a rate of 65.5L/100km, seems entirely fitting.

And given that the petrol station was just down the road, it gave you the opportunity to have a drink and a salty pretzel, and have a look at the weird Michael Schumacher desk lamp in a clear plastic bag that looked as if the great man was being asphyxiated. Then you could head back out onto the Green Hell, so it wasn’t any great inconvenience.

Finding a public DC charger in an electric performance car is. Especially if you’re on a fantastic but remote road.

Now credit should go to Hyundai here in building the Ioniq 6 N around a fantastic 800V system architecture, which means that when you do plug a holster into it, it can charge from 10–80 per cent in around 18 minutes. That’s quick. 

The thing is, it still requires a measure of planning, and the joy of just driving for the sake of driving is not always having to plan. If you do come unstuck, it’s usually no great issue to be on your way again. If there’s one thing that EVs aren’t great at, it's spontaneity.

So instead of heading off on the drive I wanted to take, I had to be happy with the local roads, which are a fair bit busier or, if you get up at an unsociable hour, heavily populated with wildlife. 

Does that mean the Ioniq 6 N is a great car that’s a bit before its time? Partly. 

In order for these sorts of cars to really make sense, a few things need to happen. The public charging network needs to become far denser. The battery tech also needs to evolve such that the cars are lighter and the effective driving range greater.

We know that the Australian charging network is getting there, albeit in fits and starts. In 2018 there were 55 public charging bays in this country. Three years ago there were around 2600. That number has doubled in the last 36 months. By the end of this year, the number will be greater than 6000.

The increase in charger access is broadly mirroring the increased take-up of electric vehicles. But while we think of a 350kW charger as lightning quick today, if you’re reading this a few years down the line, it’ll probably appear pretty quaint.

That pace of change is another reason that many are sitting on their money instead of buying an enthusiast EV. Who wants to drop serious coin on a car that five years down the road might seem about as cutting-edge as your old Blackberry?

So what of battery tech? The game changer is solid-state technology, which seems permanently three years away. Despite recent technical breakthroughs, much of the solid-state promise from car makers at the moment actually surrounds semi-solid-state tech.

You’ll see true solid-state batteries in your cellphone a long time before they appear in cars, so judge the timescale on that basis. The path to a battery with triple the range and with less physical bulk isn’t going to be solved in the short term.

All of which leaves us in this slightly odd place, where the ambition of car manufacturers like Hyundai vaults ahead of the available technology. Imagine the Ioniq 6 N with 1000km of range and 200kg shorn from its kerb weight. It’d be unstoppable.

Even as it stands, it’s an absolute blast. But if somebody from Evie or Chargefox could install a few chargers up at Cumberland Junction, I think I’d enjoy it even more. Now there’s an idea: DC chargers adjacent to some of Australia’s greatest driving roads. 

Hyundai, MG or Porsche ought to give the charger installers a nudge or a bit of cash. They’d probably sell more hot EVs as a result.

I adore the Hyundai Ioniq 6 N and would love it to work for me. It’s genuinely endearing and great fun. But given the slow take-up of EV sportsters, I’m clearly not the only one struggling to generate a workable use-case. That will change in time., but it does throw into question the fitness for purpose of electric sports cars at present.

If you’re in the lucky position whereby you can make the Ioniq 6 N work for you in the here and now, I’m more than a bit envious.