300-Mile Hyundai Ioniq 9 EV Debuts Big, Bold Style – Video

Meet the newest and the largest member of Hyundai’s Ionic family of electric vehicles, the Ionic 93 row SUV. It’s a big one, but many of the parts of this formula are gonna be familiar to the smaller Ionic 5 and Ionic 6 EVs, which we already know are good, so great expectations here. Plus Hyundai’s take on this very popular and competitive class is a unique one that I think will make it a compelling option when it arrives next year. Let’s take a closer look. The Ionic 9 is a full-size 3 row SUV built, of course, on the Hyundai Motor Group’s dedicated EGMP electric vehicle platform. At its core is a 110.3 kilowatt hour battery pack, the largest the HMG has yet fitted, which the automaker promises will deliver over 300 miles for all three of its powertrain configurations. Speaking of those configs, the 9 will come standard with a single 160 kilowatt motor driving the rear wheels, but it can be had with dual motor all wheel drive, which adds a 70 kilowatt unit to the front wheels. At the top of the line, the performance all wheel drive spec steps up again to. Symmetrical dual 160 kilowatt motors, which works out to around 422 total horsepower and a 0 to 60 hustle in 4.9 estimated seconds. Here in the US, the Ionic 9 will charge via the North American charging System, or NAX, that’s the Tesla Pioneer plug that most automakers will be switching to here in the states, which opens access to like 17,000 supercharging stations as well as the current crop of CCS stations via an adapter. The move to next probably means we’ll also see a new version of Hyundai’s V2L power adapter. The design of the Ionic 9 is, I’ve got to say, one of Hyundai’s best yet. Now here at the front you’ll see a continuation of Hyundai’s digital pixel light motif which manifests most obviously in this sort of visor that covers the entire front of the vehicle but we’ve also got pixels down here for the daytime running lights as well as the projector headlamps. Now here in the middle we have what Hyundai is calling its intelligent cassette, the home of all of the forward looking sensors in the vehicle. So you’ve got our sonar sensors for parking, our front looking camera, our radar sensors for smart cruise control. They all are gonna live right here in this. Glossy black panel that gives the whole front end a very minimal look while continuing again the pixel motif if you look in here behind the glossy bits. Now the interesting thing about the digital cassette is that as sensor technology changes, Hyundai’s designers think that they’ll be able to integrate more sensors into this space. So maybe a future generation down the line has a more advanced radar sensor or maybe even a RoboTaxi version of this has a LIDAR sensor. You may find those things hidden in there, but that’s all future speculation at this point. Now moving around you have what I think is the most interesting and perplexing part of the design and that is these eyebrows that are integrated into the wheel arches. Now I spoke with Hyundai’s designers and they told me that this is sort of an echo back to the Hyundai 7 concept that this vehicle is based on that vehicle had a big squared off opening here, but with. Vehicles on the road for aerodynamics, you don’t want a big square opening because that introduces turbulence and that decreases range. So in order to get this sort of rounded look that they have here but still harken back to that, we have this very severe line here and in vehicles like the version that has black trim around here, it kind of creates a visual look similar to the concept. Now interestingly, I was also told that because this is a discrete panel, it allows some flexibility in reshaping the wheel arch so in the future if they wanted to put big knobby off-road tires on this or larger, more luxurious wheels, they could just reshape this panel and not have to adjust or disrupt the rest of the design of the vehicle. Does anybody want an off-road version of this? Let Hyundai know they probably got something in the works. Now as you continue to move along the vehicle, you notice that the roof line continues to rise till around here, right over the second row of seats, and then it smoothly drops off all the way to the end of the vehicle, and that gives what Hyundai’s designers call an aerodynamic boat tail, and that is. Further emphasized by this really strong shoulder at the rear haunches, the result is a vehicle I think that has more in common with the profile of a sport wagon than the upright looks of a large SUV in this class. I mean, from where I’m standing here at the rear of the vehicle, I can see the roof because of how severe that drop off is, which means that from some angles like. Like this one, you get that really low slung sporty aerodynamic pushing forward look but from here forward with the high roof line you still get that upright and commanding view of the road that people are actually looking for when they shop for SUVs over a sedan or a wagon, and I think that’s actually unique. There’s not a whole lot like this on the road. Now because of the way the roof line rises and continues rising all the way to a peak right here over around the back seats, you’ve got class leading headroom on the second row. This panoramic glass roof helps with feeling spacious and because the wheelbase is so long, you’ve actually got pretty good leg room back here on the 3rd row. Now here in the cabin, there aren’t very many surprises to be found in the dashboard. We’ve got a very fami. Familiar layout of physical and capacitive buttons for climate controls and shortcuts. We’ve got our dual 12-inch screens here serving as our gauge cluster, one in front of us as a digital instrument cluster, another dedicated to infotainment, except here they are curved. It looks more severely than they have been in previous Hyundai Ionic vehicles, giving you sort of a wrap around look here for the driver’s cockpit area. On the center console we’ve got a couple of controls here for uh terrain management and our wireless phone charging pad. The center console is interesting in that you can open it from the front but also from the back seats, giving more passengers access to the storage inside. And for even better access, you can actually slide this whole thing back a significant amount for even better reach. Now one of my favorite features looking around here is the plethora of USB Type C charging. We’ve got 3 ports here, 2 in the seats, another 2 on the back row, and many of those charging ports are 100 watt power delivery ports, which means that you can charge, by my estimate, 6 MacBook Pros while you drive around in this vehicle. Not that you’d need it, but it’s pretty interesting. The 2026 Hyundai Ionic 9 begins production here in the USFA at the automaker’s Georgia plant in early 2025. That American Assembly would probably qualify it for the full EB tax incentive, but who knows if that’ll still be around by the on-sale date. Either way, final pricing will be announced at a later date, but with similar tech and a slightly larger battery, I expect it’ll be somewhere near the KA EV 9 long ranges $60,000 starting point. Check out CNET.com for even more details and an early look at how the Ionic 9 stacks up to its competition from Tesla, Rivian, and Kia. Drive safe and I’ll see you next time.