You’re mad. You are likely big mad. Using the words “muscle car” and “EV” in the same breath will cause a hardcore car guy to bow up and prepare to attack. Let’s park the insane emotions for a second and let me plead a case before you throw me and my opinion down the well. The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is a muscle car and because of that all the good and the bad of muscle car fun comes with it, no matter how whiz bang the motor, tech, and other widgets are. Physics remain undefeated but hot dam is it fun to try to beat them.
For as much as we loved much of this car, we resented other parts of it more. There are no perfect cars in the world and this one, gnarly as it is performance-wise can make you smile wide but it can also make you question human existence when on a succession of not so long car rides.
The muscle cars that get all the attention from back in the day were not the smooth running, comfy interior, drive it across country without a worry in the world type cars. No, they were big engines, solid lifters, radical cams, huge carburetors, and steep rear end gears. In short, they were the radical cars that required certain compromises in comfort and efficiency to integrate your life into. The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is actually that thing in the modern state circa 2025.
The power is insane. 0-60 in three seconds flat. It will run 10s in the right conditions and with the right sequence of buttons pushed in the cockpit. In many ways it is the fastest street legal car I have ever driven for any length of time. This is the 2025 equivalent of the those old cars. It is bad fast, it is compromised in comfort for performance, and the range of travel, like an old muscle car is pretty short per tank or in this case, charge.
So the root of my frustrations with this absolute rocket ship of a car were born out of a high school graduation of all things. More specifically the timing of the high school graduation. It was a glorious personal occasion seeing one of your kids complete their initial phase of education but it was happening on the same weekend as my regular job was needed to be executed at New England Dragway with the NHRAonFOX. Thankfully and expectedly my bosses cut me some slack for the graduation day but it meant that I’d be traveling back and forth from my home in Massachusetts to New Hampshire a BUNCH over the course of a few short days with a fast but notoriously range limited little car.
Like that big block muscle car with 4.11 gears and no overdrive, this little hatchback which has the equivalent of 641hp available instantly can only go about 190 miles on a charge. I say about because try as I may, I was never able to get it that close in actual real world operation. My round trips to Epping are about 160 miles and thankfully It was June when I had this car so I was not running the heat or air conditioning, which would have deflated my already dim hopes to make trips completely without charging.
As I was watching the available range melt like butter while tooling down the highway in the 70mph range, my frustrations were salved by a few things. The seats, the steering feel, the handling, and the tech in this car are all next level. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is on electric cars, if you like FAST cars, you cannot truly write this little monster off.
Yes, it is true that between my drive up on Thursday, driving to the track Friday morning and making my way home Friday night I had to stop before getting home and then yes, it is also true that I had to stop to charge before leaving New Hampshire for home on Sunday night and again on Monday to actually get a full charge rather than a partial to get to my house, I’m not really able to hold it against the car like the muscle car owner pumping every drop of 94 octane he can find into the tank after a night of cruising. He, like me may shake his head watching the pump number spiral up and I may have done it staring at the charger and trying to will it to be faster, but the machine itself is too much fun and too engaging to truly dislike.
The driver’s area of the Ioniq 5 N is wildly interesting. It is so because for the majority of its elements, it comes off like a pretty standard Ioniq 5. Center stack, screen layout, console, etc. But the fun starts when yo get into one of the very deeply bolstered buckets and then look at the steering wheel.
Note the paddles. Does this car have a transmission? No. So what’s happening there? It has the tech to make you think it has a transmission and it’s eerily good at it. Yes, you can “shift” the car up and down as you please while you cruise. Note the four buttons. The upper two are the drive mode selector on the left and the red NGB button on the right.
The NGB stands for N Grin Button which when pressed (so long as you have more than 30% charge) will give you a 10 second super burst of power that brings the car to peak performance. It is insane. If you have never been in a car with nitrous, you can experiencer this in EV mode with the NGB button. It’s how we have seen these cars in the 10s on the regular at the drags.
The lower two N buttons are programmable with your favorite settings so that they can be pressed and those settings engaged in an instant. As you can imagine there are plenty of widgets and things to tweak on a car like this that is basically a rolling super computer, so the N buttons are your way to tailor the experience.
The back seats are very, very roomy. With a flat floor and a good use of the interior space it’s downright spacious back there as compared to what you’d initially think about what is basically a small hatchback layout. You can see the level to adjust the seatback and allow for some recline action to give an even more comfy ride.
You can also see the grippy inserts in the center of the seat on both sides and we have hardly made people giggle and laugh harder than we did while taking them for joyrides in the back of this car. It’s insanely fast, it handles like it is on rails, and it will make your passengers, especially those who have never been in something with this much power geek out like they are on a roller coaster.
Lastly, outside of the range annoyance that, frankly on any other week of the year would not have even registered on our radar, I truly and utterly enjoyed this car. Passenger comfort marks were very high, available storage and utility space behind the back seats is ample and frankly copious, and the actual operating dynamic of the car is nothing but fun. If you are a person who (a) wants to install level two charging in your house (b) doesn’t have a 150 mile round trip commute to work every day and (c) wants something that is fun as hell and can absolutely wax 99% of the performance cars on the road at will on the daily, you need one of these.
In closing, this is the hottest hatch in the world, performance wise. It will absolutely blind you with speed out of the hole, it will hang in the corners like few other cars of this genre can, and it will do it all while keeping you comfortable. My issues with the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N had zero to do with entertainment, functionality, or performance in the race sense. They just had to do with the nagging, grinding feeling one gets when they know they’ll be planning out charging and logistics simply to get home and back to work.
If they can ever turn the 190 mile range in a car like this into 250-300, I may be one of the first guys in line to own one.
