Hyundai RN24: Electric Drift Kart

MotorTrend

Hyundai’s RN24 Prototype is an all-electric drift machine born from Ioniq 5 N roots and WRC engineering

Transcript

00:00I'm driving a 641 horsepower electric drift car.

00:19I'm Scott Evans from Motor Trend and this is the Hyundai RN24.

00:24And I promise you this is a real thing, really made by Hyundai.

00:27And it is an electric drift car.

00:31Like, they've made the coolest, funnest thing you can imagine here.

00:35But they didn't just cut up an IONIQ 5N to make this.

00:38No, they went all out.

00:40It's just the most radical thing you can think of.

00:44And the whole point of it is to be fun.

00:47And it makes drifting and getting sideways and smoky just so, so easy.

00:52But how did they do it, right?

00:54So the first thing they did, they had to shorten up that wheelbase.

00:57Get it smaller, get it lighter.

00:59So they took the battery pack and they took some of the stuff in the front,

01:01the inverters and the cooling system, and moved it up on top.

01:05And that allowed them to take six and a half inches out of the wheelbase.

01:08So now we got a smaller package.

01:10We kept the motors.

01:11It's the same 641 horsepower that your IONIQ 5N makes.

01:15But now they've added a mechanical limited slip differential to the front motor.

01:21And they've kept the electronic limited slip in the rear motor.

01:24But tune that up.

01:25And then that wasn't enough.

01:27So they put rally car suspension on it.

01:29And I don't mean that like a joke.

01:31Like they actually modeled the suspension off of their WRC rally car.

01:36And really crucially, they've invented the coolest thing, I think,

01:40the regenerative drift brake.

01:43So you know when you're at rally cars or drift cars,

01:46they always got the handle, the drift handle.

01:47They pull it.

01:48And usually what it does is it locks up a special brake caliper on the rear.

01:53And that makes the car get sideways.

01:55It locks up the rear wheels and they go.

01:57Well, on this one, they figured that's complexity.

02:00That's weight.

02:01That's cost.

02:01That's all this extra stuff.

02:04Instead, Hyundai's is all software.

02:07When you pull that thing, it activates a switch.

02:09And the switch tells the rear motor to do full regen braking.

02:12And I'm talking like more than what you get like normally driving around.

02:15Like really hit it.

02:16Locks up those rear wheels.

02:17And all it took was a stick and a switch and a couple of ones and zeros.

02:21But to really make this thing controllable,

02:23also put rally car steering in it.

02:26So normally the IONIQ 5N is a 13 to 1 steering ratio.

02:29But this one is 9 to 1.

02:31So when you're all sideways, just a little quick steering and you've got it.

02:36You hold it and you can just smoke the tires all day long.

02:40There's more that goes into it than that.

02:41There's a lot of software to figuring out how to send how much power to which motor.

02:45But really, at the end of the day,

02:47they took a rally car and an IONIQ 5N that you can go buy

02:50and they smash them together into this crazy thing.

02:53Put a roll cage on it.

02:55And they're going to let us go out and just absolutely destroy the tires.

02:59So let's stop talking and let's go drive it.

03:01I mean, there's not actually a point to this, I swear.

03:22It doesn't seem like it.

03:23But you may have got the clue that electric vehicles can be fun.

03:29And you can take racing technology and put it in electric vehicles

03:35and make them all kinds of cool stuff.

03:53Oh, best day at work ever!

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