Hyundai RN24 Prototype First Drive: Because Mega Fun Will Always Matter

No matter how convinced you are that electric cars can’t be cool and will never be any fun, you simply can’t argue with a 641-hp rally-inspired drift machine when you’re doing gymkhana donuts with billowing clouds of smoke pouring off all four tires. It’s as absurd and thrilling as it sounds, and it’s also a Hyundai.

No car company is doing more, publicly, than Hyundai to reassure us the electric future will still be fun. Not content to simply put one of the world’s most enjoyable performance EVs—the Ioniq 5 N—on the market, the Korean company’s N division decided to go completely off the rails and use the guts of one of those 5 Ns to build an all-electric drift car (perhaps better described as a kart?) called the Hyundai RN24. The result is easily the most fun we’ve ever had in an EV.

What the Hell Is That?

The concept is as simple as it is ridiculous. Combine a slightly modified Ioniq 5 N powertrain with a World Rally Championship (WRC) race car suspension to make the ultimate EV drifter. Remember what the late Ken Block did with that gymkhana Audi EV? Like that, but with off-the-shelf parts.

As much fun as the Ioniq 5 N is with its virtual gears, selectable sounds, and drift mode, N engineers are well aware it’s a large, heavy car. A primary justification behind building the RN24 was exploring how a smaller, lighter car with the same powertrain would perform. The “R” in Hyundai’s series of RN and RM prototypes stands for “Rolling lab,” which allows the company to build interesting one-offs that blend street and racing technology. More than anything, though, we suspect N built this car because it’s just so damn cool.

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Ioniq 5 N + WRC Car = RN24

While Hyundai is working hard on reducing the weight of its batteries and electric motors, N engineers figured they could explore the performance potential of a lighter car in the meantime by getting rid of most of the “car” part. Hence the RN24 prototype is pretty much exactly what it looks like: a battery, front and rear motors, lightweight forged wheels, suspension, a roll cage, seats, and a steering wheel. At just 4,144 pounds, it’s 711 pounds lighter than the Ioniq 5 N its parts were stripped from.

Not content with the Sawzall approach, Hyundai’s N engineers decided to shrink the package, too. Relocating the power relay assembly and battery management system from the front end of the battery pack to on top of it allowed them to shorten up the pack and take 6.5 inches out of the wheelbase, shrinking it to the size of a B-segment car (roughly the size of a Kona N).

Good as the Ioniq 5 N’s suspension is, the team knew it could do more with a full race setup, so it modeled the front and rear multilink suspension as closely as possible off the i20 N WRC Rally1 (hybrid) race car, which just placed a close second in the 2024 WRC Manufacturers’ Championship and won the Drivers’ Championship. N engineers also borrowed the rally car’s 9:1-ratio steering rack to replace the road car’s slower 13:1 rack. Along with it came the column and race steering wheel, plus the instrument screen.

In fact, all that’s left of the Ioniq 5 N’s interior is the panel with the start button and the gear selector. From the seats to the majority of the controls to the regen drift brake, it’s all race stuff. Rip the rear wing off a TCR-class race car and stick it on the back of the cage, and you’re good to go.

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Regenerative Drift Brake!

The coolest piece of all, and one of the only all-new components developed for the Hyundai RN24 prototype, is the regenerative drift brake. Rally cars and drift cars are equipped with extra brake calipers on the rear wheels actuated by a hydraulic system connected to a big handle in the cockpit. Yanking on the handle locks the rear wheels, allowing drivers to get the car sideways instantaneously on demand, which is great for both big, smokey drifts and getting around super-tight hairpin turns as quickly as possible. All the necessary parts, though, add weight and complexity, and because it’s a mechanical braking system, it needs to be warmed up before it’s fully effective. Hyundai tested just such a setup on an Ioniq 5 N prototype on the Central European Rally stage before coming up with a better idea.

Regenerative braking, by contrast, is much simpler than mechanical braking. Reversing the electrical current’s flow through an electric motor turns it into a generator that both charges the battery and applies a braking force. N engineers simply connected the drift brake handle to a switch and wrote a few lines of code so that when you pull it, the rear motor goes into extremely high regenerative braking and locks the rear wheels. Minimal parts, maximum effect. (The brake pedal engages both regenerative braking and the same mechanical brakes as a stock Ioniq 5 N.)

The only other drivetrain modification is a mechanical limited-slip differential in the front motor. The rear uses the stock electronically controlled limited-slip diff. To take full advantage, engineers wrote new drive mode software modeled after the mechanical torque distribution on the WRC car. With Tarmac, Gravel, Snow, Drift, and Drift+ modes, it can easily switch from gymkhana car to rally car at the push of a button.

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Monkey See, Monkey Do

Becoming the next Ken Block is as easy as pulling the handle, turning the wheel, and flooring the accelerator. The super-quick steering allows you to catch the drift immediately and control it precisely with short, quick inputs. Literally anyone who’s ever drifted on purpose before, at a performance driving school or in a snowy parking lot, can master this car. It turns anyone who isn’t afraid to be sideways or backward into the next Formula Drift champion.

In our experience, the hardest part of drifting is tying multiple corners together. It’s one thing to get sideways without going off the track or crashing and another thing entirely to swing the car back the other way into another drift going the opposite direction. Managing that transition at all, much less smoothly and calmly, takes years of practice. Unless you’re driving the RN24. It’s the ultimate cheat code. Absolute nobodies can suddenly become car control gods.

Best of all, drifting doesn’t create nearly as much heat in the battery or motors as hot lapping a racetrack, so the tires will explode long before the powertrain needs to reduce its power. Even the drift brake only creates a momentary spike in rear motor temperature, so you can pull it as many times as your heart desires and your tires allow. The engineers just carried over the stock cooling system, no modification needed.

Not only that, but frying tires takes less power than accelerating a car down a racetrack, so the battery lasts all day. We went through several sets of rubber, and there was still plenty of power left in the battery for another round or three.

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Coming Soon?

Aside from gunning for Travis Pastrana’s job, the best part about this craziness is Hyundai might actually put the regen drift brake into production. It’s such a simple system it wouldn’t cost much, and it would instantaneously make the standard Ioniq 5 N or any future performance EV from Hyundai cooler than any other EV on the road.This is assuming, of course, the legal department signs off, but if Ford can put a drift brake in the Mustang, why can’t Hyundai put one in its car?

Sound and “Gears” Optional

The top two ways Hyundai tried to make the Ioniq 5 N appealing to EV-haters are its virtual “gears” and “engine” sounds, both of which you can turn off. The same ideas were carried over here, with speaker boxes to amplify the artificial engine noises. As it’s set up today, it sounds like the WRC car revving up to near redline and holding there, though a rev-limiter sound could be implemented if desired. Right now, the RN24 doesn’t have simulated gears, but it’s a simple matter of programming to add them and will probably be installed in the future as N engineers continue to refine the concept.

Don’t expect to see more motors, though. The N team already played around with three- and four-motor models and hasn’t found enough advantage over the dual-motor and limited-slip differential setup to justify the cost and weight. At the end of the day, one of the RN program’s top goals is to keep the price down so any future technology transfer to street cars remains accessible. The Ioniq 5 N is, after all, a $67,575 car. That’s not cheap, but isn’t a billionaire’s plaything, either.