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3 months with the Ioniq 5 ?3

21:13 10-Nov-22


It's been almost three months since we got our Ioniq 5 and I wanted to update on the experience before I write about Polestar's earnings tomorrow morning.  Some things we still appreciate or have gotten used to, others have turned out worse than expected. 

General: I mentioned the on/off button right away, and we still find that to be mixed at best.  It's possible that one would still want the radio on after getting out of the car, but not with the alarm that goes off when you leave the car on.  That does keep us from wasting charge now, but mostly it just winds up being an unnecessary an annoying box to check.   Another poor design decision is the door handles which stick out at an angle which is prone to snagging while the car is unlocked.  You can manually push each of them in, but who wants to do that?

Driving: We do like how how the Ioniq handles - far better than other SUVs, like Volkswagen's ID4.  It's not as good as the Polestar 2, but coupe to SUV would not be a fair comparison.  I will test against the Polestar 3 soon, and maybe the Mach E, which was consistently unavailable when we needed to buy.  One niggle is that it seems to be impossible to completely and permanently turn off the automatic regenerative braking.  This means whenever I drive the Ioniq I have to flick a switch on the steering wheel to get it to drive to my liking.  My wife has simply set it to the lowest setting and grown used to that.  She also likes the exterior look of the Ioniq.  I am meh on that for both vehicles.  Unfortunately, the Ioniq's software really ruins the driving experience.  Errant driving alarms are routine in urban traffic, which winds up being at least borderline dangerous over time as the driver gradually learns to ignore them.  Some of them are just bizarre too, including alarms for objects ahead of the car when it is in reverse.

Software: The sub-par experience extends to the peripheral driving experience as well.  Maps are slow to load, out of date and generally inferior to Google Maps, when those work at all.  The system corruption issues from Google persist on the Polestar and can not always be easily reset as I initially thought.  A trip to the dealer seems to be necessary sometimes, and with the dealers getting busier and less responsive, that effectively means I just live without in the Polestar for extended periods until it spontaneously starts working again.  Getting back to the Ioniq navigation, useful destinations are not suggested as you type, and you do have to type, because voice control is generally poor.  Similarly, the phone app will only use your contacts with voice, rather than integrating with an internet search.  My wife typically plugs in her phone with a usb cable and uses the projection capability to navigate, but that can also be flaky. 

Charging: We remain happy with Ioniq's range, which is similar to the Polestars.  However, the charging cord routinely will not release, even when fully charged, requiring us to open a panel in the trunk to use the emergency release manually disengage it.  When this happens, the various key and process tricks documented by other Hyundai users do not work, and we find it ridiculous to have to go to such lengths.

Ultimately, it's clear that the Polestar 2 was a better car at a better price.  If we hadn't needed an SUV we would have gotten another, despite the Google problems.  It's still possible that we will trade up to a Polestar 3 once the factors that I documented on the investment side of this blog are alleviated, and the scaled back better ones will apply to Hyundais, probably more permanently.  That said, it does seem like the Ioniq 5 was the best choice available to us at the time of purchase.  It may be that some or most of the issues we are experiencing are fixable through software, and I wouldn't be surprised if Hyundai fixes them faster than Google.