Hyundai Says The Ioniq 5 N Is Selling Well Despite It Making Up Just Five Percent Of Ioniq Sales

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is a performance EV that's actually amazing to drive, and that's not just something we're saying here at Jalopnik — it's backed up in the automotive world as a whole. Since its debut in 2023, the Ioniq 5 N has racked up award after award. It was the 2024 World Performance Car of the Year, Road & Track named it the 2025 Performance EV of the Year in their sub-$100,000 category, it recently received the Driver's Choice Award from MotorWeek, and it even beat the Chevy Corvette in a MotorTrend comparison test.

The Ioniq 5 N's performance for the price point is nothing short of astonishing. Here's an EV that costs less than $70,000 that's just three tenths of a second slower to 60 mph than a PDK-equipped Porsche 911 GT3 and is only a couple seconds slower around the Nürburgring than a BMW M2 CS. Any enthusiast should appreciate that kind of performance. According to Hyundai, there aren't that many buyers going for the Ioniq 5 N, but that doesn't mean it's a flop — despite its low volume, Hyundai sees the Ioniq 5 N as a sales success.

Road & Track spoke to Hyundai's senior product planning manager Mike Evanhoff about just how well the Ioniq 5 N is doing for the brand. Like most automakers, Hyundai doesn't separate sales numbers for specific trims of a single model when reporting quarterly sales; every Ioniq 5 sold is grouped into one big number. While Evanhoff couldn't exactly say how many Ioniq 5 Ns have been sold, he did give a rough estimate. From Road & Track:

"It was never intended to be a huge mix," Evanoff tells Road & Track. "So it is less than 5% and below ... but yes, it's selling well, and it's a very niche product."

The Ioniq 5 N being a niche product isn't exactly surprising. The buyer pool for those who want a near-$70,000, 601-horsepower electric hot hatch is only so big. Some might see that percentage and call the Ioniq 5 N a flop, but crunch the numbers like Road & Track did and you'll see its sales results aren't really out of the ordinary.

Let's do some quick math. The Ioniq 5 N went on sale in Q2 last year, and Hyundai sold a total of 37,578 Ioniq 5s in the United States from Q2 through the end of 2024. If around 5% of those were N models, that'd put 2024 sales just under the 1900 mark. Considering that Evanoff suggested the proportion of Ns was 5% "and below," however, the actual number of sales could be well below that, perhaps dipping closer to 1500 than 2000 for the year.

Around 2,000 units sold of such a niche performance product sounds pretty good to us — Porsche sold 2,693 Taycans in the U.S. over the same time frame, for example. Road & Track mentions the Ioniq 5 N's sales results also line up with the Elantra N's sales, which they estimate to be about 5,500 during the same time last year. And things could always be worse. Consider that Kia once said that the performance version of the Forte sedan, the Forte GT, made up just two percent of Forte sales. When you consider that Kia sold almost 140,000 Fortes in its last full year on sale, that amounts to fewer than 2,800 being the Forte GT. Now that's a flop.

The Ioniq 5 N also seems to be bringing in buyers from other brands. Road & Track pressed Evanoff about what kinds of cars Hyundai seeing people trade in for the Ioniq 5 N. While he didn't name a specific brand or model, Evanoff did say that buyers are coming from both gas and EV models. "A lot of it, it's coming from you know either higher horsepower cars or just pure ICE cars. This is their first EV, but they want a performance EV," Evanoff told Road & Track. So don't let the low sales of the Ioniq 5 N fool you. It's selling just fine for what it is.