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

New York
CNN Business
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Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, an electric-only design with a sharp-edged design and style, was named Vehicle and Driver’s Electric Motor vehicle of the Yr. It’s only the next yr the award has been provided.

Auto and Driver staffers lauded the Hyundai’s general performance — it receives up to 320 horsepower from two electrical motors — extraordinary quick-charging functionality and its fairly affordable cost. Selling prices start at $41,245 for a rear-wheel-travel car or truck capable of up to 168 horsepower and 220 miles of range. The more impressive all-wheel-travel model Vehicle and Driver examined price $57,490.

The most hanging detail about the Ioniq 5 is its layout, in accordance the publication.

“Is this not the coolest design on the street?” Automobile and Driver editor-in-main Tony Quiroga wrote in an post about the award.

The Ioniq 5’s typical shape is like a significant hatchback or a small-driving SUV — it could be observed either way — but it’s coated in sharp creases and straight edges. The taillights and front daytime lights glimpse like some thing out of a very lower resolution personal computer activity. Amazingly, although, the Ioniq 5 has a reasonably slick .29 coefficiency of drag this means it’s only a tiny much less aerodynamic than a Tesla Model 3.

The car’s quick-charging 800-volt electric procedure and its uncomplicated-to-use and purposeful driver-help systems were also elements in the award, Quiroga reported.

As opposed to most vehicle awards, these types of as Motor Development Vehicle of the Year, in the Car or truck and Driver’s EV of the 12 months a previous winner can contend once more the pursuing 12 months. That indicates that final year’s winner, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, was in the operating all over again this yr.

But the magazine’s staffers thought the Ioniq 5 was essentially a very little much more entertaining to travel than the Mustang, claimed Quiroga.

“Fun to drive” was a single of 4 categories in which vehicles had been rated. The other people were price, how perfectly the automobile carried out its meant functionality, and technologies.

The Ioniq 5 was also competing from the Lucid Air, which gained MotorTrend Automobile of the Yr, and the Rivian R1T, which gained MotorTrend Truck of the 12 months. The Hyundai defeat them, in part, due to the fact of its extra obtainable value and improved worth. The Lucid Air that Vehicle and Driver tested expense over $140,000 and the Rivian expense $93,000.

It was also competing versus the Kia EV6. Even though they run as individual companies in the United States, Kia and Hyundai are closely associated firms at the world-wide amount. Hyundai’s dad or mum company owns a controlling fascination in Kia.

While the Ioniq 5 and EV6 glimpse extremely various from a person one more — equally are strikingly unusual in their overall look but in distinctive techniques — they share a lot of their engineering, thanks to that partnership. Functionality assessments by Automobile and Driver on the two products yielded equivalent success and they are also similarly priced with the EV6 Car and Driver tested costing only $3,000 less than the Ioniq 5. Again, although, staffers considered the Hyundai was just a little bit far more satisfying to push than the Kia, Quiroga reported.

A third motor vehicle, the Genesis GV60, also shares the identical engineering platform as the EV6 and Ioniq 5 but, with its increased price, it missing out on price irrespective of garnering praise from the judges, Quiroga stated.