The Hyundai Ioniq 5 Is Car and Driver’s EV of the Year

That was good. Welcome to Car and Driver. This is the Hyundai IONIQ 5, and it is our EV of the year. We recently gathered all the newest and significantly improved electric vehicles you can buy. To evaluate them, we measured how fast they can charge, how far they can drive at real-world highway speeds, and how much cargo they can hold. We also tested performance metrics, like acceleration, braking, and handling. Lastly, we drove each of them back to back on the same roads for subjective analysis and feedback. To become our EV of the year, we consider four key attributes. The first is mission fulfillment, how well a vehicle serves its intended audience. The second is how that vehicle advances the technology within its segment. Three is how enjoyable a vehicle is to drive. And four is the vehicle's overall value. Doesn't this thing just look cool? Today's roads are dominated by these generic, amorphous, wind tunnel-derived, crossover, blob-shaped things. And here, instead, is this radical collection of hard edges and rectangles. And it just looks fantastic. One of our staffers compared it to a modern Lancia Delta, as seen through the lens of Minecraft. But however you want to describe it, it's hard to ignore that this thing just looks great. What's even better, though, is that it has a drag coefficient of just 0.29. That design confidence continues inside, where Hyundai isn't afraid to just try things out. The driver's seat, for example, has a padded seat and a power-operated calf rest for reasons. This entire center console slides back a good 5 and 1⁄2 inches, so you can access either seat from either side should the need arise. But past the weirdness or bravery, however you want to call it, this is a very large and functional interior. Part of that has to do with this vehicle's size. This is a pretty big car, bigger than it may appear in video. The wheelbase at 118 inches, I mean, that's full-size SUV territory. And consequently, you get a lot of headroom in the front seats and you get a lot of legroom in the front seats as well. Backseat passengers will also have more legroom than what you get in a Ford Mustang Mach-E or a Volkswagen ID.4. Rear seat space comes somewhat at the expense of overall cargo volume with the second row folded. We fit six carry-ons back here with the second row up. But once you drop it, we were able to fit 20 pieces of carry-on. That's a lot. You get a choice of a 58-kilowatt-hour battery or a 77.4-kilowatt-hour battery. The small one is rated at 220 miles of range, while the big one offers a rating up to 303 miles with rear-wheel drive. This large battery all-wheel drive version has a range rating of 256 miles. But that includes city driving, which EVs love. What happens on the freeway? Well, you get worse range. And that's why we test all EVs by running at a constant 75 miles an hour. Now, in that test, we logged 210 miles with this car. Even if those range results are good enough for most people, they aren't class-leading. What is class-leading is the 800-volt architecture and the rapid charging that it allows. On a properly working 350-kilowatt fast charger, which can be rare as of the time of this recording, but with that setup, you can go from a 10% fill to an 80% fill in 18 minutes. That's exactly what happened when we found a properly working fast charger. And if you compare that to an internal combustion engine, that's not that much longer than what it takes to do a fuel stop with a gas break and a potty break, as well. Now, on a properly configured 240-volt outlet at home, you can fill this thing from empty in 8 and 1⁄2 hours. But remember, you're not starting your charge at 0% full. So you can fully fill this thing well before you get a good night's sleep. What else? Like some other EVs, the IONIQ 5 can act like a drivable battery. With an outlet ahead of the rear seat and an adapter that plugs into the charge port, you've got 1,900 watts available for tailgating or keeping the fridge cold during a power outage. What good's a car if you don't like driving it? And the IONIQ 5 doesn't disappoint there either. We recorded 60-mile-an-hour acceleration in 4 and 1⁄2 seconds, which is slightly off the pace of a Mustang Mach 1, assuming it's been launched well. What really matters, though, is the 4.8-second 5- to 60-mile-an-hour acceleration, because that's a better indicator of real-world speed. That's what happens when you need to goose it to match traffic or accelerate up an on-ramp. It feels pretty good here. What's better is that this all-wheel-drive system is rearward-biased, and you can fully defeat stability control. We can't wait to get some snow tires on this thing and drive it over some fresh powder in the winter. That's going to be a lot of fun. That was good. But when you're just commuting and relaxing on the freeway, you find that this is a really quiet car. We recorded 67 decibels while cruising at 70 miles an hour. What else is there to like? Well, the adaptive cruise control works seamlessly and even helps you make lane changes. It learns and mimics your driving style, and you can manually adjust it too. We also like these paddles behind the steering wheel. They look like shift paddles, but what they actually do is change the level of regenerative braking from none to essentially one-paddle driving. It's a really nice, unobtrusive way to make that adjustment. For the price range that starts just over $40,000 and tops out at around $56,000 before you factor in taxes and rebates, the price of the IONIQ 5 overlaps with many other EVs out there. But this vehicle delivers a lot of what those vehicles don't. Style, for sure, but also an 800-volt architecture that you won't find in any other vehicle, at least at the time of this recording, that costs less than six figures, excluding, of course, vehicles that share this platform, like the Kia EV6 and Genesis GV60. The Hyundai IONIQ 5 delivers a good amount of range with an uncommonly quick DC fast charging capability, and you also get a spacious interior and a good ride. That's why it's our EV of the Year.