3 Reasons We Still Love the 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 (And 1 We Don't)

It’s good to have confirmation.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time with the angular 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 this past year. There was the first drive late in 2021. This past spring, we spent a week with the Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV6, its platform sibling. And just before that, we crowned the Ioniq 5 our AutoGuide Green Car of the Year. So when the opportunity presented itself to get more seat time, of course we had to do it. You know, to make sure we made the right call.

Recently, the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada put on its yearly EcoRun. The event gathers a variety of the most efficient vehicles out there—and this year, that meant a bunch of pure electric vehicles—and puts them on a massive road trip across Ontario. We found ourselves back in the Ioniq 5 for one of the journey legs, and it only reinforced why we’re so smitten with Hyundai’s first dedicated EV. Here’s what sticks out—or, in the case of our one major bugbear with the car, what doesn’t.

We challenge you to find any car with a sticker under $60,000 that gets more attention than the Ioniq 5. There were two examples at the event, and even the white one we drove drew plenty of admiring glances and curious questions. Look at how the crease in the bumper lines up with the slash along the doors—this is cubism in car form. Zoom in and there are surprise-and-delight details all over, like the independently-moving “nostrils” that open and close at the bottom of the bumper, or the arcade-chic rear light bar. Even the wheels, with their intricate basket weave design, manage to take something classic and reframe it in a modern context. All this while avoiding that most common element of modern car design: aggression. No angry face for the Ioniq 5, nope.

Hyundai continues to play with paint choices with its EV not-a-hatchback, including a matte gray as well as the very cool Digital Teal paint on the second EcoRun car. It stays true to its name in most lighting conditions, but find the right angle and it shifts just a bit to a dark purple. So cool.

It’s still hard to gauge the size of the thing in isolation: the 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5’s retro-futurist design and hatchback shape gives off Golf vibes, but park it next to a Tucson and they’re remarkably close. That brings us to the next point …

The Ioniq 5’s cabin is an excellent space to share with friends and family over long distances. The flat window line and large glass roof panel floods the interior with natural light, while the low-profile dashboard design carves out more usable space. As is the case with the exterior, the cabin uses a handful of repeated design elements for a more cohesive look; in this case, the contrast of hard-line strakes and smooth lozenge shapes. Hyundai has pared back the controls to only what’s necessary here, with a thin bar of controls for infotainment and climate just below. We admit that the latter does require a little more concentration than we’d prefer, as touch-sensitive controls aren’t as simple to operate on the move. We have no such qualms about the useful head-up display (HUD), which was bright and easy to read as it kept us pointed in the right direction.

Space in the back is very adult-friendly, with legroom for even your gangliest of friends. One of the main reasons we preferred the Ioniq 5 to the EV6 in our comparison earlier this year was its additional headroom. Part of that is the Ioniq’s more upright shape; part of it is that the non-opening glass roof doesn’t eat into that space as much.

The whole point of EcoRun is to extract the most efficient performance out of these vehicles. Within reason, of course—as far as we know, nobody pulled up within a few feet of an 18-wheeler to draft, or taped up their vehicle’s shutlines. For us, it was also an opportunity to test the Ioniq 5 in better weather. We last saw it in the dark depths of winter, and the launch event was in a soggy, windy San Diego.

So of course it rained for most of EcoRun.

Nonetheless, even with the on-and-off drizzle and unseasonably low temperatures, the Ioniq 5 comfortably beat its official figures. And that was on our leg, which was predominantly country highways—not exactly an EV’s ideal testing grounds. Hyundai Canada quotes a 414-kilometer (257-mile) range for the Ioniq 5 Long Range AWD, which translates to an efficiency rating of a hair under 18.7 kWh/100 km, given the I5’s 77.4-kWh battery pack. (That’s 3.32 miles per kWh for Americans.) Our figure? 17.1 kWh/100 km, which works out to an additional 10-percent range. The earlier legs of the journey, which saw a little more low-speed travel and a little less hills, produced efficiency figures as low as 12.9 kWh/100 km, the lowest figure of the entire event. Could someone keep that going for an entire charge? Probably not, but a hypothetical 600-km (373-mi) range is pretty darned impressive. Not only that, but cars on the E-GMP platform use 800-volt architecture, ensuring they’ll be able to pull in more charge quicker and more consistently from DC fast-chargers.

Unfortunately, the rainy weather served as another reminder of our one major issue with the Ioniq 5: the lack of a rear wiper. Almost immediately after setting off in the rain, it was tough to see out the back, even with the defroster on. Word is Hyundai will be adding one for the 2023 model year, which at this point is likely what you’d end up with should you order one from the dealer.

That wasn’t enough to detract from our time with our reigning Green Car of the Year, however. The Ioniq 5 remains, in the words of contributing writer Thomas Hundal, “the coolest mass-market vehicle in ages.”

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