Hyundai Doesn't Care If You Buy The Ioniq 6 N
Modern cars are, by and large, ruthlessly focus-grouped and market-tested. Automakers are for-profit businesses, they're not out here to make neat engineering exercises — they're here to make money, and cars are simply a means to that end. Hyundai, though, is taking a bit of a different approach with the new Ioniq 6 N. The company doesn't actually care whether you buy it or not. It's building the Ioniq 6 N to prove it can.
Drive.com.au spoke with Manfred Harrer, head of Hyundai's Performance Development Tech Unit, who said as much in an interview. Harrer knows the Ioniq 6 won't be a mass volume seller, and the N variant will be even more niche. To him, it's about building a performance car for the sake of it: "Normally, you're always running the business case first, and the investment, and the material cost and the volume behind it. ... But here, it was clear if we have the ideas to improve the car, make it faster, increase the performance, make it easier to drive, do it."
Many of our favorite enthusiast cars came from this same "Hell with the bean counters, we're doing something cool" mindset. Japan's economic bubble era allowed for the beloved tuner cars of the '90s, and the idea of conflict between enthusiasts and "bean counters" is the core thesis of an entire book by Bob Lutz. Mass-market crossovers look much better on a spreadsheet than high R&D cost, low-volume sports cars, and Hyundai should be commended for ignoring the former and choosing the latter. If only every other automaker did the same.
I'd tell you to go buy an Ioniq 6 N to support this kind of thinking, to show the higher-ups that there's a business case for cars like this, but that would defeat the point. The idea isn't that the Ioniq 6 N will sell in unforeseen numbers, but that it's worth building regardless of how few Hyundai sells. Automakers should make these swings, they should build feats of engineering just to prove they can. Good on Hyundai for getting it.
