Are the Kids Alright In Our 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE Long-Range?
Racking up the miles with lots of errands and a few surprises gives us a lot of time to reflect on how an electric sedan handles kiddo-hauling duties in an SUV-mad world.
Picture this: You’re middle-aged, outdoorsy, with a suburban house, a partner, a couple of rambunctious kids, and almost nothing within walking distance. The American dream, a low-density transit desert, or a little of both? Consider all those errands, school runs, grocery pickups, visits to the grandparents, trips to the beach, trips to the car wash with the good vacuums to suck up the beach the kids brought back with them—that sort of thing. Whether it’s consumer preference or Pavlovian marketing conditioning, we bet all this conjures up images of an SUV, bikes hanging off the back, a kayak up top, and a smiling couple headed off to the hills. Escape your suburban shackles! But make sure you’ll be back in time to drop off the kids at school while one-handing a half-cooked toaster pastry. Tasks for the superior capability, cargo-hauling capacity, and higher seating position of a crossover.
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The 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 is no crossover, that’s for sure. It’s a sedan that appears pulled from (and, maybe, better suited to) a before-time. But we’ll press it—old-fashioned body style and newfangled powertrain and all—into suburban kid-hauling duty. Can it hang with the SUVs, or will we cast it aside for the other two SUV options in the driveway, as has most of the American car-buying public?
The Floor, Not the Ceiling
One of the best parts of the Ioniq 6 (and its E-GMP platform-mates) requires you to look down, not up. There’s a cavernous valley between the front seats and the rear, a flat void of great utility. At first, it may seem odd to praise the copious rear legroom. After all, the rear headroom in the swoopy-roofed 6 is insufficient, at best, for many adults. My kids can’t appreciate the ability to stretch out; they can’t even touch their feet to the carpet.
But the first time I had the Ioniq 6 out in a downpour, in a hurry, waiting for a distracted kid to dig a toy out from some bottomless pit near the booster’s base while my hoodie lapped up the freezing rain and sent it straight to my back, I had a realization. “I could probably crouch back there,” I thought, “Out of the rain, and with enough room to get the kid’s harness buckled.”
And so I could.
It’s the same trick some quad-cab full-size pickups pull off, but without the need to hoist yourself skyward to access the canny valley.
Where I can stand, so can the kids. Muddy pants? No problem, here’s the spare set out of the bag; stand in front of your seat and put ’em on. Too many bags for the trunk on a road trip? The kids don’t need that legroom, so toss a few duffels in there. A full seven-eighths of a snack container of Cheerios dust hits the deck? With no driveshaft hump, it’s easy for any vacuum attachment to tackle.
See? The floor’s cool.
In and Out
With smaller arms, shorter bodies, and underdeveloped decision-making skills, getting kiddos into and out of a car can be an event. We’ve had test cars with doors that are simply too heavy, or handles that are too awkward, for the kids to operate themselves (in situations where that’s safe, of course). And lots of modern cars still have the door-mounted child lock tabs. It’s either on, or off, and it’s impossible to change on the fly.
The former’s inconvenient, the latter’s rarely a problem, but I’ve come to appreciate the Ioniq 6’s pop-out door handles and convenient door/window child lock button. First, the door handles provide a quick visual indicator of whether the car’s locked, which can be tough when you’re juggling an armful of soccer gear and can’t recall if you hit the (sometimes unresponsive) door locking pad on the handle.
Second, they give the kids a bit more leverage and an easily grasped handle for getting in. The big, integrated door pulls on the inner door cards give them options to get leverage and purchase—there’s even a useful, shallow cubby on them that’s a good place for easy-to-forget items like sunglasses. And the doors are light enough overall for them to operate.
The child lock button is great, because there’s a clear visual indicator on the center console as to whether it’s active or not. Don’t have to open the rear door and eyeball it. It makes dropping off the older kid at his school’s drive-through drop-off easy: Just push a button, he lets himself out, push it again to reactivate.
On that note, even this near-base Ioniq 6 SE has something my own midgrade Ioniq 5 SEL lacks: a locking button on the hatch/trunk. It’s great to push one button and walk away on the 6; the 5 only has a hatch closure button, so you have to rely on the fob (dig around in your pocket), or the doorhandle button (good luck!), or the BlueLink app (which takes a geological age to process).
Likewise, there’s a dash-mounted charge door button on the Ioniq 6, which is more convenient than the somewhat janky solution on the Ioniq 5 in which you must press hard enough on the charge door for a molded tab to touch a physical button inside (or fish out the fob, yet again, and press a button). These trivial things add up over time to make a small but meaningful difference between these two very similar vehicles.
Peace and (Sometimes) Quiet
Even hopping into and out of this red electric sedan and into my much louder 4Runner (with its knobby all-terrains) or Corvette (with a mild aftermarket exhaust) can sometimes not fully convey how quiet the Ioniq 6 is. Sure, there’s no engine noise nor exhaust note, but there’s still wind noise, tire howl, and surrounding traffic. No one will mistake the Ioniq 6’s aural profile for that of a Rolls-Royce.
But there’s an entire species of background noise that’s absent, and the total decibel load my kids, wife, and I experience is much less than in comparable internal combustion engine vehicles. When the kids (or, frankly, we parents) are about to lose it, the calmer cabin environment adds less to the unconscious brain-stress load, and it also makes it easier to hear whatever’s playing on the audio system.
That could be the built-in Hyundai Sounds of Nature soundscapes; it’s not something we turn to often, because they’re repetitive and sometimes less calming to us than their producers may have intended, but it’s an option. And one that can be programmed to use one of the configurable “star” buttons on the steering wheel and/or dash. One push and you have something playing, anything, and maybe that makes a difference.
That said, there’s an awful lot of dinging and bonging going on. Whether it’s the hyperactive and oversensitive parking distance sensors, or the startup and shutdown sounds, the reverse and forward motion warning sounds, the blind-spot warning chime, and the “check for passengers in the rear seat, who are not asleep anymore because of this chiming reminder” alert, it’s not really possible to avoid some child-waking sound during some part of the drive.
We did a lot of frantic button-pushing when the parking sensors went haywire, generally at stoplights, to try to keep a kid just transitioning to a much-needed nap from bobbing awake. And, in that respect, the vibration and underlying white-noise-like sounds of an internal combustion engine (without auto stop/start) would’ve made all the Ioniq 6’s various noises less prominent.
Cramped Style
It’ll be no surprise that with the abruptly plunging roofline, the copious rear legroom isn’t complimented by generous rear headroom. Kids in boosters or car seats will be fine. Grown-ups with longer torsos might be uncomfortable. On the plus side, the rear bench is wide enough that a smaller adult can fit in between a couple of car seats, in a pinch. (And it was a pinch.)
The roofline drops into a droopy rear, making the trunk opening narrow. Used to tossing the kids’ 20-inch bikes in the back of the Ioniq 5’s taller hatch area, it didn’t even occur to me that the bikes wouldn’t fit without some disassembly. Suitcases? Fine. Really, it’s just the outsized stuff that can’t be turned or folded easily that’s a problem (and not one unique to the Ioniq 6). But it really proved that the 5’s hatch is superior for zero-hassle loading of, well, just about anything. With the 6’s profile, maybe a liftback would have been, ultimately, a superior choice.
Speaking of cramped access, the large tray under the center console is both a boon and a bane. You know the spiel: With kids, lots of stuff. Water bottles and snacks and devices and crayons. There is no vehicle on the planet that has, or could have, enough accessible yet secure storage. We parents will expand our load-out to overmatch any storage solution. The tray down there seems like a great place to store various things, but we found that the stuff we ended up, in desperation, snaking down to that cubby were things like oversized water bottles, open snacks, and so forth—instead of the purses, bags, or umbrellas that would make more sense.
It was also a little difficult to access, presenting a narrow gap from above. Things inside are also obscured mostly from view by the cupholder bridge above but painfully visible standing next to the car. The mechanically similar Genesis GV60’s console splits the difference between Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6 in a smarter way and arguably would have been a better move (however restyled) here.
Yearnin for Wide-Open Spaces
Whether or not the biplane bridge in the Ioniq 6 appeals to you, we found we missed the large, open area between the front seats in our Ioniq 5. It’s the perfect place to set large items that won’t roll around, like a duffel bag, while still providing easy access when needed—a crucial characteristic for truly superior family vehicles. And although the cockpit isn’t snug, the larger center console gives it the feeling that it is. But we don’t want to end things on a dour note, so we’ll say that the phone cubby (which is also a wireless charging pad on higher trim levels) is in a great place, nestled underneath the HVAC controls in a shallow yet accessible cubby. It beats the pants off of the weird Ioniq 5 spot (which will change in 2025, for the better) and the GV60’s awkward angled slot.
So, Kid-Tested, Parent-Approved?
Sure, with some caveats. We didn’t experience any dealbreakers, but one of the remarkable things about the E-GMP cars being so similar and also so differentiated, is the ability to look across the offerings and compare which model adopts the best set of attributes for a particular owner’s needs. The Ioniq 6 is a perfectly capable kid-hauler, but in our experience it’s not nearly as specialized as the Ioniq 5 for that role, which simply has better interior utilization of the same footprint, and only a few convenience drawbacks, like the lack of the trunklid locking button.
The security of the trunk is a real asset, and although it can’t swallow a gaggle of kiddo bikes, it’s perfectly fine for a regular load of groceries, backpacks, sports gear, you name it. Plus, the 6 is a non-zero amount less expensive than the 5, so you’ll have that much more to send to the orthodontist. Or the pediatrician. Or the … you get the idea. Kids are expensive, so if you want a very capable electric sedan for your family, at least now you know exactly what you’re getting into.
More on our Long-Term Hyundai Ioniq 6:
Like a lot of the other staffers here, Alex Kierstein took the hard way to get to car writing. Although he always loved cars, he wasn’t sure a career in automotive media could possibly pan out. So, after an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Washington, he headed to law school. To be clear, it sucked. After a lot of false starts, and with little else to lose, he got a job at Turn 10 Studios supporting the Forza 4 and Forza Horizon 1 launches. The friendships made there led to a job at a major automotive publication in Michigan, and after a few years to MotorTrend. He lives in the Seattle area with a small but scruffy fleet of great vehicles, including a V-8 4Runner and a C5 Corvette, and he also dabbles in scruffy vintage watches and film cameras.
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