Hyundai Ioniq 5 hatchback - Practicality & boot space
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 may look like a hatchback but it's sized to compete with crossovers
The Ioniq 5 is something of an oddball because while it looks like a hatchback in pictures, get closer and you'll realise it's fairly big. In fact, it's both longer and wider than a Hyundai Tucson SUV. Even more significantly, the distance between its front and rear axles (the wheelbase) is longer than you'll find on an Audi A8 luxury car.
The length of the wheelbase makes itself known when you open one of the long back doors because the Ioniq's interior is remarkably spacious. A completely flat floor also helps make it feel even more roomy, with limousine levels of legroom and large windows to make it feel light and airy. It’s an advantage over the Toyota bZ4X, which has a raised rear floor that pushes your knees upwards.
There’s a flat floor up front, too, so make sure your front-seat passenger doesn’t drop anything into the driver’s footwell by accident. Beneath the centre console is a large storage cubby which looks useful, but it’s quite hard to reach and a little oddly shaped. The storage area behind the cupholders is huge, allowing you to place items the size of a rucksack or picnic bag there. You get a big glovebox as well, which is oddly absent in the Toyota. The rear window tends to get dirty and lacks a rear wiper to clean it, however, the Ioniq 5 was updated in 2022 to allow a live camera view from the rear of the car to be fed into the rear-view mirror.
Boot space
The boot's floor is fairly high, presumably because of the batteries, and the cargo area is also quite shallow. Yet, because it covers a large area, there's an impressive 527 litres of luggage space on offer, easily putting the 380 litres of a Volkswagen Golf in the shade. The Volkswagen ID.4's boot is even bigger, though, measuring 543 litres. Fold the rear seats down and the 5 has 1,587 litres, just behind the 1,655 litres found in the ID.4.
Towing
While many electric vehicles aren't officially rated to tow anything, Hyundai says the Ioniq 5 can haul a braked trailer of up to 1,600kg. It's important to note that this only applies to the 77.4kWh model; the 58kWh version can only tow a 750kg trailer.
