First Impressions: The Fastest Ioniq Yet:-
An efficient EV is a fast EV. Think about it. The further you can go on a charge, the less you have to stop to charge, the faster you get to where you’re going. And in that sense, the old IonX 6 with its slippery, streamlined silhouette was a very fast EV. But now there’s a new one, and it’s fast in a more traditional sense. This is the new Ionic 6N, an EV that through a combination of weaponsgrade hardware and sci-fi software claims to be able to hold its own with the latest and greatest petrol-powered super saloons. And not just in terms of performance, but fun, too. That’s a big claim, but if anyone can do it, it’s this lock. This This is our first look at the new facelifted IonX 6 in any guys.
UK Debut: Hyundai Sends a Message:-
They thought to bring over here to the UK for us to have a look at. That’s interesting. It speaks to how excited Hyundai is about this car. About the facelifted IonX 6 because think it’s a huge improvement from a design standpoint. The six was always interesting, but just not quite right in certain ways. And really, what they’ve done is simplify, less complexity, less detailing, cleaner surfaces. They’ve elongated the nose. It’s even longer and lower now. That’s good for the drag coefficient, which was pretty good to begin with. And basically, all the detailing has been simplified and brought lower down. So, instead of the big blob of headlight there, we’ve got these super slimline technical daytime running lights. And then the main beams are sort of hidden behind tinted glass down here in the black bit. About this trend a lot about how all cars soon, just like all cars now have a light bar, all cars will have little skinny DRLs and then a big blob of main beams. And often don’t like it on your i7s and what have you. Looks a bit weird, but it’s actually well hidden here. That main beam when it’s off, it’s kind of invisible and your eye is just drawn to this beautiful skinny DRL. Anyway, bottom line for the new facelifted IonX 6 and it’s the same with the back. less complexity, lots of skinny horizontal details to create this added sense of width. And think it’s so much prettier than the outgoing car.
Refreshed Design: Cleaner, Meaner, and More Purposeful:-
And here’s a spoiler of one of the many clever EV performance gadgets and features that this car has. Battery preconditioning. That’s a thing that we typically associate with charging, right? Your battery gets ready to plug in and then it gets really fast charging speed straight away. Tesla’s been doing it for ages. This has a different kind of battery preconditioning. It’s got a drag racing battery preconditioning setting. It’s got another one for hot laps and yet another for endurance track work. Each of those preheats the battery to a different temperature to optimize it for each of those things. Good lord.This wheel design it tells us a lot of things because on the one hand this is a lightweight rim. It’s perforated that makes it lighter holes lightness. Everyone knows that. But at the same time we’ve got this rim around the edge which is for airrow purposes. And likewise, this Nshaped intake at the front that’s funneling air over this arrow wheel, creating an air curtain. So, it’s two things at once, performance and efficiency. The IonX 6 was all about being slippery, maximizing range through aerodynamic efficiency. And it’s nice to see that with this bonkers performance one, they’ve not just chucked all of that in the bin. Hyundai says it can be both. This can be an electric vehicle that’s clever and uses its battery to the maximum through aerodynamic design. It can also be fast. As we come along the side, that the facelift ionic 6 looks wider.
Smart Aerodynamics: Performance Without Waste:-
The N is wider in addition to looking wider. So, it looks really wide. It’s 30 mil wider on each side. These flared wheel arches and a slightly more protruding side skirt as well. Always thought that the old six didn’t quite have the stance. It just looked a bit thin at the back and it didn’t it just didn’t quite work. This one sits pretty. It’s mean and low and wide and menacing. Suspension. We’ll talk about that again when we get to the really nerdy stuff later on. But it’s clearly lower as you can see. More stiff even than the Ionic 5N. This is something want to make clear early on in the video. It’s not just Ionic 5N underneath. There’s some stuff, quite a lot of stuff that is bespoke to this 6. So, the suspension setup is completely different, completely different hardware, slightly different priorities as well. More on that in a moment.
Surprising Practicality in a Super Saloon:-
This is a high performance EV, but it’s not completely chucking the whole efficiency malarkey into the bin. In doing so, new bit of diffusery going on back here. Much prefer the back end of this newly facelifted car, this pixel brake light thingy doesn’t go the whole way across the back. We’ve got the two kind of blocks of brake lights and then just the little teeny pixels across this back panel. Could it be a new car that doesn’t have a light bar? You know, it’s a popular trend these days to give performance cars black trim, right? And the more black bits, the more performance appears to be the general understanding. It’s not just the bumper now. It’s actually kind of rising up. It’s the whole back of the car in this instance. In years from now all performance cars will just be black and you just get to choose the color of the roof.
Power & Performance Specs: Familiar Foundation, Sharper Focus:-
Very big boots on the IonX 6. Always amazed by just how deep it is. It’s full of stuff at the moment. It’s absolutely huge. At least the seats in my position and just astonishing amount of leg room. Headroom less good. less good. You do sit higher than would like in the IonX 6 N or otherwise. Technical performance details, shall we? And what better place to get technical than from the most technologically intense cockpit maybe of any car ever. There’s a lot of buttons on this steering wheel. Getting used to that fact from the Ionic 5N. We’ll come to this in a minute, but let’s about how this thing stacks up against the 5N. In terms of battery, horsepower, it’s all the same. That means an 84 kWh battery and 650 PS from the dual motor setup when in NGB mode, which stands for N grin boost. That’s all the same. What will slightly change inevitably is the range. This is a slipperier car.expect it to have slightly better range than the Ionic 5N. Reckon close to 300 miles real world, unless you’re really, really, really giving it the big. and acceleration expect to be slightly less than the i5N.
Bespoke Hardware: Not Just a Reskinned Ioniq 5N:-
That’s all still here. But there have been tweaks and upgrades. They have even further improved the Ionic 5N recipe. So, hardware, the suspension is all new, all bespoke for this car. The springs, the stabilizer bar, the hydraulic hardware, all new, all bespoke, all different from the 5N. And it’s geared towards stiffness and sharpness, again, more so than the Ionic 5. They about this car in the presentation being more track biased almost than it is road biased, which kind of raises an eyebrow for me. A because don’t think that many people are taking EVs on track in 2025 and B because we have terrible roads in the UK and fear that it’s going to be too stiff. They assure us that they’ve done plenty of testing on our terrible UK roads and they’re going to make sure that it works just fine even in pothole strewn blighty, but we’ll see. And then as far as software performance goodies, mean just more than you could shake a stick at. So all the stuff from the 5N is present and correct. We’ve got the N grin boost button that gives us an extra lump of horsepower. We’ve got the N active sound which means that the car makes noise. It’s actually a lot better in this than the 5N. They’ve slightly tweaked the sound, but they’ve also improved the speakers, the hardware.
It was tiny in the 5N. It’s a lot throatier and deeper and bassier in this. A piece of software that just rocked my world in the Ioni 5 and absolutely blew me away with just how well dialed it is. It’s back and it’s better than ever. They’ve adjusted the gear ratios, which is never a thing thought I’d say about an electric car, but they have they’ve given it shorter gearing just so you get to play with those shift paddles more. They’ve had some fun with this, as you can tell, because now the ambient lighting in the car is also a shift light. Look, my whole dashboard glows red when it’s time to upshift. Even the inserts inside the doors, it would be quite intense driving this thing in a performant manner at nighttime be like 650 horsepower disc. And then if we go into here, let me just turn off the idling. There we go. Uh this is where things get properly bonkers. So if we go to setup and then gosh, where’s it even going to be? Vehicles. We’re looking for the drift stuff. Think is gimmicky and just not going to get used that much by owners. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t spent an awful lot of time tuning it and dialing it. And this is their latest creation inside the end drift optimizer, which we did have on the 5N. We now have these customizable settings.
A New Era of EV Fun:-
So, three sliding dials, drift initiation, drift angle, and wheel spin. They’re actually going to rename that one smoke, they told us today. All of these things can be adjusted. Basically, meaning that whoever you are, whatever your level of driving ability is, you’re going to be able to get very sideways in this car without putting it on its roof. And the idea is that you slowly improve as a driver and you slowly ease off these settings. But the one that really rocks my world and this for me just sums up how far ahead of everyone else Hyundai is in terms of making electric vehicles exciting to drive. Initiation. One of the things that this car can do is apply the regenerative braking to initiate a slide to make the back end step out. Think about that. the regenerative braking, which on most cars do nothing other than slightly increase your range around town. In this car, it does that, but it also initiates big sideways skids. It’s just astonishing. We used to think about battery technology as a limiting factor when it comes to making exciting performance cars. But stuff like this, it’s clear that Hyundai is kind of taking it as an opportunity to try weird new stuff, not as a hurdle to overcome. Worth also noting that you can now have the fake gearbox switched on, not just in normal sport and end mode, but in eco mode, in launch control, and in drift mode, so you can be fully crossed up in second gear, upshift, third gear, holding the slide in an EV.