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 automobile 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 named 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 received grudging respect from fanatics. Their calling card is adjustability. Some tuner outlets select all of the settings they assume are finest to regulate the automobile’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 observe’s quantity.
What all these in-house outlets have in frequent is their strategy. They take the producer’s bizarre automobiles and attempt to modify them into one thing extraordinary.
The brand new child on the block is stuffed with concepts. Hyundai’s N crew is planning a high-performance electrical automobile.
First Experiences Beginning to Seem
Take a look at drivers from Automobile and Driver and Motor Pattern 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.
Automobile 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’ll boast greater than 600 horsepower (greater than even its Kia EV6 GT company cousin). The driving force can shift torque distribution “between almost 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 might be switched on or off. There’s even an digital drift mode that, MT says, makes use of “delicate, virtually imperceptible digital interventions working to maintain the Ioniq 5 N arcing easily sideways by means of a flip.”
Each magazines examined a pre-production mannequin in camouflage, so Hyundai hasn’t finalized the automobile but. We anticipate its public debut at July’s Goodwood Competition of Velocity in England.
