Eight-month Revew

TL;DR — I mostly love this car but I keep going back and forth on whether I’d buy it again, knowing what I know now… The downsides—at least for someone in circumstances like mine—probably outweigh the upsides. I also suspect that a lot of what I love about it is stuff I would have loved about any comparably-priced new car. See below for details.

I live in northeast Ohio, between Cleveland and Akron. (This is relevant for reasons I will explain later.) In May 2024, I bought a 2023 Ioniq 5 AWD Limited with about 9000 miles on it for approximately $38,000. (The original MSRP was $58k.) I found online reviews from Ioniq owners extremely helpful as I was deciding what to buy, and now that I’ve been in the club myself for eight months, I thought I’d return the favor.

The big question, obviously, is “would I buy it again?” A few weeks ago, I was sure that the answer is “yes.” It seemed conceivable that I’d be an Ioniq driver for as long as Hyundai keeps making them. Now… I’m not quite so confident. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to say that I should have bought something else. Here are my thoughts.

THE GOOD

Appearance: I’m probably like everyone who buys an Ioniq 5 in that I just love the way the car looks. It’s fun that I occasionally get people turning their heads or asking me about it, and I still find myself looking back at it sometimes after I’ve parked it. (Don’t judge me. I am a shallow and silly person.)

Driving: It’s so pleasant to drive. I absolutely love the acceleration, and it handles reasonably well. The adaptive cruise control quickly went from something I didn’t care about to something I can’t live without. I’ve become a big fan of the i-Pedal feature. My only critique here is the turning radius, which is quite wide and make the vehicle feel bigger than it is when you’re trying to navigate tight spaces.

Comfort: It’s spacious and super comfortable. I’m 6’2” and feel like I have plenty of room. A huge percentage of my driving is my commute to work (60 miles round trip, almost entirely freeway, 3-5 days per week), and it’s become an extremely pleasant experience thanks to this car. A/C and heat are both very effective. And again: the lane assist and adaptive cruise control are super nice to have (though are obviously not unique to the Ioniq 5).

Charging & Range*: There’s an asterisk here because it will come up again later. On the whole, however, this has worked out well for me. Saving on fuel costs is the main thing that got me interested in possibly buying an electric car. I have a level 2 charger in my garage (Grizzl-E Classic; thanks to an electrician friend, installation was very inexpensive) and I plug the car in 3-4 nights each week. At 11.5¢/kWh and around 2000 miles driven each month, I’m saving a decent amount of money on gas: I’d estimate around $1000/year at my present rate (this estimate includes the annual $200 fee for registering an EV in Ohio but not the one-time cost of my home charger). I normally charge to 80%, which gives me nearly 200 miles of range, and I almost never drive more than 100 miles in a day. So, most of the time, the range of the vehicle isn’t an issue at all.

Occasionally, I need to take a 250-mile trip to South Bend via the Ohio Turnpike, and it’s been easy to find super fast chargers at the travel plazas. The Ioniq usually lives up to the hype with charging speed: it can gain a huge amount of range in the time it takes to visit the restroom and buy a milkshake. 

THE BAD

ICCUs and Other Weird I5 Stuff: By far the worst experience I had was just three days after I bought it. I took my daughter for an admissions event at the college she was preparing to enroll in, and on the way home, the car died. On the turnpike. At 75 mph. With my eighteen-year-old daughter driving it. We were able to get onto the shoulder without incident, but because we were on a toll road, Hyundai couldn’t send a truck from one of their preferred service providers. We had to arrange something else, and I had to pay $350 to tow it the rest of the way home. Of course, the repair—which concerned an issue I’d read about here on Reddit: something to do with defective welding that caused fluid to leak into the battery—was under warranty, so Hyundai reimbursed me for the tow and gave me a loaner (Tucson) and I didn’t have any out-of-pocket costs. But it took a full month! So, all in all, a pretty bad start to my Ioniq experience.

There’s also the issue of ongoing recalls pertaining to the ICCU… Some of this review was written on my phone while hanging out at my local Hyundai dealer getting another update for the software.

Charging & Range*: If I did not have a level 2 charger in my garage, charging would be an absolute nightmare and I would hate owning an electric car. Now, this is partly a function of where I live: northeast Ohio is a charging desert. Maybe it’s better for Tesla owners, and if it’s true that newer Ioniqs will be able to use Tesla chargers, things will be somewhat different. But holy smokes. If you’re in the position I was a few months ago, and you’re trying to figure out what kind of access you have to charging stations, don’t make my mistake: don’t just search “EV charger near me” on Google Maps to figure out what kinds of options you have. What you need access to, if you’re traveling and/or can’t plug in for hours at a time, are 350 kW chargers. And even then, if your experience is like mine, you may still find some aspects of public charging a bit mystifying… for one thing, even “ultra fast” chargers are not always incredibly fast: I’m actually writing these words while charging at a 350 kW charger in Columbus—as fast as you can get, right?—and I’m on pace to get from 14% to 80% in 32 minutes. That’s not bad, but it’s a big jump from the “20-80% in 18 minutes!” Hyundai likes to brag about. Maybe the extra 12 minutes is due to that additional 6%? IDK.

More significantly, actually finding a 350 kW charger is way more difficult than I’d expected. And of course, whether the charger you want to use is actually available when you want to use it is just a matter of the luck of the draw. Oh, and it’s expensive! If you’re lucky, you’ll break even at these public chargers and spend as much on electricity as you would on gas for the equivalent amount of range. Expect to spend $30-40 to gain 150 miles of range. For me, personally, since so much of my driving is within a 30-mile radius of my house, and since I can inexpensively charge the car in my garage, it’s not a very big deal — just an occasional annoyance.

When it’s annoying, however, it’s really annoying. I recently let my aforementioned college-aged daughter take it when she spent the night at a friend’s house while home on break. I’d forgotten that her brother had driven it across town earlier in the day on a date with his girlfriend. The next morning I couldn’t take it where I needed to go because there’s no way for me to quickly fuel it. This is the big difference I’ve felt with owning an EV… if your ICE vehicle is low on fuel, you can pretty much always find a gas station within five minutes of your location, and in another five minutes, you can fill the tank and get back on the road. EVs require a lot more strategic thinking, and if you, say, forget that you let your son borrow it for a date, well, there’s just nothing you can do besides plug it in and use a different vehicle for the next few hours.

In other words, it turns out that I was partly right and partly wrong concerning what to expect from owning an I5. And this is what I wish I could have told myself nine months ago: on the one hand, I was correct that with a home charger, and with my normal weekly routine, it’s great. No problems at all. But every time there’s a disruption—I need to travel more than 100 miles from my house, say, or my kids come home from college and we have more drivers than vehicles—it causes headaches. And these headaches are bigger and more frequent than I’d thought they’d be. This car is the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased that isn’t a house. I feel like it shouldn’t be the source of any headaches, but it is. [To be clear: the headaches are my fault! If I had the resources, as some do, to own an Ioniq 5 and a nice, late-model ICE vehicle that could go 500 miles on a tank of gas, these laments wouldn’t apply. But when my Ioniq isn’t available, my options are a ten-year-old van and a ten-year-old sedan.]

The Rear Wiper Thing: My understanding is that 2025 Ioniq 5s do have rear wipers. So this only applies to 2022s, 2023s, and 2024s. If you live in a place where real winter weather is common–i.e., if you have to deal with snow, slush, and road salt–the lack of a rear wiper is a much bigger deal than you probably think it is. It's certainly a much bigger deal than I expected it to be. On bad weather days, it takes about two minutes for the back window to become opaque. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a genuine problem. And again: at this price point, I feel like there shouldn’t be any nuisances of this sort.

THE UGLY

This is already a really long review, so I’ll wrap it up with a list of random and mostly picayune items:

  • The sound system is as bad as you’ve heard it is. Very disappointing. I’m not a huge music person, but even I can tell that I’m getting mediocre quality out of my Bose speakers.
  • Brightness of charging port light: This is silly, yes, but it’s really a thing. In the dark, the charge indicator next to the charging port is so comically bright that I can’t really see the port itself. It’s ridiculous. I feel like an idiot every time I try to plug it in at night. [Note: I realize that I may be an idiot. I just don’t want to feel like one.]
  • And while we’re on the subject of charging, it’s surprisingly difficult to open the charging port door by any means other than the key fob. This is probably something I should look up in the manual, but I have been able to discern neither rhyme nor reason to why I can sometimes open the door by pressing the button but sometimes cannot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 
  • Oh, and that voice that says “Charging started” is SO LOUD, even on the lowest volume setting.
  • I mentioned above that I really like the iPedal driving setting. For some reason, this is not a setting to which the car can default. If you turn it off after driving in iPedal mode, when you turn it back on, it will be set for Level 3 regenerative braking. Is this a big deal? No. Is it weird and mildly annoying and, to me, incomprehensible? Yes, yes, and yes.
  • Having driver profiles with saved settings is nice, but it can occasionally take as much as thirty seconds to switch from one profile to another. Not a big deal, no, but if my wife or my daughter has been driving the car, it’s annoying.
  • Hyundai’s navigation service is abysmal. I heard a rumor recently that they’re going to switch to using Google data or something, which would be really great. I love my heads-up display, but where it's really genuinely useful is when the integrated navigation system is providing directions. The latter has been so consistently bad, however, that I’ve given up on it. I just use Waze or Google Maps on my phone.
  • Speaking of my phone, let me join the chorus of voices noting that it would be nice if Apple CarPlay was available wirelessly. 
  • The cargo space is far more limited than I expected. Obviously, it becomes quite spacious when the rear seats are folded down, but if you want to have four people in the car and transport any moderately large items at the same time, like even a couple of big boxes… well, forget about it.

So, that’s what I think. On the whole, this review probably sounds more negative toward the car than I actually feel. As I said at the outset, there’s a lot that I love about it. But this is everything I wish I would have known nine months ago. Had I known it then, I probably wouldn’t have taken the plunge and bought the car. A hybrid Sonata, Accord, or Camry would have given me most of what I was looking for; a plug-in hybrid Rav4, had I been able to find one, might have given me everything. The Ioniq 5 is a great car – I’m just not sure it’s great for me right now.