Many automakers have a high-performance sub-brand.
Some have legendary reputations constructed by many years of racing success and the sort of lust-worthy fashions that make the entrance pages of automotive magazines over glittering horsepower numbers. Suppose BMW’s well-known M division or the Mercedes AMG store.
Others are smaller operations however win loyal fanbases. Purists don’t label them tuner outlets, however they produce high-performance fashions that get particular emblems and restricted manufacturing runs. Suppose Honda’s R badge or Volkswagen’s… nicely… R badge.
Hyundai’s is known as N. It’s new sufficient that it’s nonetheless establishing a status, however fashions just like the Elantra N and Kona N have impressed critics and gained grudging respect from fans. Their calling card is adjustability. Some tuner outlets select all of the settings they assume are greatest to regulate the automotive’s efficiency. N allows you to play. Hyundai N fashions enable the driving force to set the whole lot from the suspension’s stiffness to the exhaust word’s quantity.
What all these in-house outlets have in frequent is their method. They take the producer’s abnormal vehicles and attempt to modify them into one thing extraordinary.
The brand new child on the block is filled with concepts. Hyundai’s N crew is planning a high-performance electrical automotive.
First Reviews Beginning to Seem
Check drivers from Automotive and Driver and Motor Development bought their arms on the upcoming N model of the Hyundai Ioniq 5. A high-performance model of our 2023 Finest New Mannequin? We will’t wait.
Automotive and Driver calls it “a watershed second for Hyundai’s fledgling N efficiency division.” MT simply says it’s “insanely enjoyable.”
Neither publication bought the specs out of Hyundai, however each say it can boast greater than 600 horsepower (greater than even its Kia EV6 GT company cousin). The motive force can shift torque distribution “between practically full entrance or rear bias,” C&D says. That ought to let drivers create the whole lot from a grippy all-wheel-drive rally rocket to a slippery drifter.
Simulated gear shifts and engine noises will be switched on or off. There’s even an digital drift mode that, MT says, makes use of “delicate, nearly imperceptible digital interventions working to maintain the Ioniq 5 N arcing easily sideways by a flip.”
Each magazines examined a pre-production mannequin in camouflage, so Hyundai hasn’t finalized the automotive but. We count on its public debut at July’s Goodwood Pageant of Pace in England.