Hyundai Ioniq 5
VIDEOS
By Tim Saunders
Time is the most valuable commodity. My time especially. You see my seconds, minutes and hours are devoted to the most important thing in my life, my family (my wife and three children) and keeping the wolf from the door and no one or anything will get in the way of this mission.
So when the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Line S 84kWh 228PS RWD is delivered to me and the driver says, “It’s got 60% charge, 180 miles but you can charge it can’t you?” I’m not surprised but am unimpressed. He adds: “It’s only got 600 miles on the clock.”
“I’m not surprised,” I mutter.
I do not have time to wait for a public charging point to become available and do not choose to have an unsightly box on my home. Range anxiety is no good for my health either. So I shall be using this vehicle – as I use all electric vehicles, purely for local driving instead of planned trips to Dorset and Oxford. Life, as I am sure you will agree, is all about priorities. So, instantly you can see that I am not the target market for this vehicle.
“I suggest that this car is best suited to either a singleton or a retired person with time on their hands,” says my wife, Caroline.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It takes a little bit of head scratching to figure out how to engage drive mode. While the push button start is easy enough to find on the dash I am left a little perplexed when I cannot find the usual gearstick. Ah, it’s been moved to the right of the steering wheel and is a stalk reminiscent of the gearshift found in some 1950s vehicles much like the one for the windscreen wipers behind it. It’s simple enough to turn to select drive, reverse or neutral. But how to engage the handbrake? Heidi (12) says press the button on the end of the handle. And lo and behold it works. All of this palaver is unnecessary, I feel. The stalk looks out of place to me. Change for change’s sake… And it doesn’t feel natural.
Recently, we’ve been moving things around at home – the cutlery drawer is now in the island – and I still find myself going to the old location because I’m so used to where it was. The exact same thing happens to me in the Ioniq. Will I feel more comfortable at the end of the test? I wonder.
From outside when it’s moving, there’s that electric buzz accompaniment once only associated with the hover boards on Back to the Future. I can’t say I’m a fan of that sound. This five door hatch is spacious enough inside with a good size boot. The seats are comfy and Henry (9) is at home with the ‘infotainment’. He likes scrolling the screen. The black interior does its job. Externally, it looks different from the competition thanks to the unique door styling and the matt paint finish.
Did I make the right decision about which car to take to Oxford?
The Friday rush hour journey started off with a major accident on the M27 which ultimately turned the one hour journey from our home to Oxford into a two-and-a-half hour one with diversions that made the journey longer. The full tank of fuel in our reliable old Corsa ensured that I had no range anxiety whatsoever but the journey was still stressful as we crawled along in start stop traffic for five miles and we wondered whether we could get to our destination that evening. Once in Oxford major construction work had meant that the usual routes had diversions in place adding many miles to usually short journeys and increasing journey times from five minutes to well over an hour, forcing unfortunate motorists through the clean air zone so that the council could charge drivers of petrol or diesel cars £5 a day – what a great money making scam for the council. So we had to pay £10 to the council before midnight on the day we returned or face fines. Despite this though we feel that this is £10 well spent because if we’d been in the electric car we wouldn’t have actually reached our destination and been unable to see anything of Oxford because we would've been hunting for charging points all the time.
Facts at a glance
