Suspending disbelief: The Ioniq 5 N’s fake engine noises | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

And then the i5N came in for testing and for the first few days I just tooled around in this astonishingly rapid machine. I’m not going to dwell upon it, but we have reached a pretty place when a family hatch like this is damn near as fast to 60mph as a McLaren F1.

Anyway, it was not obvious how to activate the stupid noise setting and I didn’t go rummaging around in sub menus to find it because I just wasn’t very interested. Until professional rather than personal curiosity forced me to sample it, just once. To be able to say that I had.

I found the button on the touchscreen, pressed it and despite all I knew, was still genuinely surprised to see a rev-counter appear on the instrument pack and what sounded like a twin cam Ford-Cosworth BDA motor settle down to a deliciously lumpy idle under the bonnet. What witchcraft was this?

So, off we set, me listening to the virtual engine revs rise and fall with uncanny accuracy. Pull a paddle. Yup. It’s got a virtual gearbox, too and, far more importantly, virtual gears, the power delivery in each higher ‘ratio’ meted out to mimic the effects of longer gearing as if it were real.

Now partly appalled but mainly fascinated, I started playing about with the gears, discovering it’d even deploy different regeneration strategies to simulate authentic engine braking.

One last test – press the right foot to the floor but don’t pull a paddle. Surely it wouldn’t… Surely it would. Wind it up near 7000rpm and you’ll hear the unmistakeable staccato buzz of an engine parked right on its non-existent rev limiter.

So, I then headed off to the hills and used it in real world, fast road driving and with every passing mile I became more and more hooked. It wasn’t ‘quite’ like driving a car with a highly tuned, four-cylinder twin cam motor under the bonnet, it was just like that. Afterwards, every time I got in the car, turning on the ‘engine’ became as much part of my pre-flight ritual as turning off the lane keep assist.

Did the fact I knew it was all an illusion trouble me? No more than it troubles you every time you go to the cinema. For the duration of the time you’re sat in that seat, you just deem what you’re experiencing to be real. Humans are clever like that.

Besides, I wonder if most people even realise how curated the sound their real engines make is? If you bought a new Derby-built Bentley 90 years ago, it would come with a handle on the floor which, when pulled, opened a flap in the exhaust, making its sound at once lower and louder.

The game has moved on somewhat with incredibly sophisticated systems now being installed to manipulate the sound signature of most modern cars up to and including (in more cases than many would credit) enhancing engine sounds using the in-car entertainment system.

And we never complain about that, partly because the car sounds better for it, but mainly because we’re completely unaware it’s even happening. Drive a BMW i8 – one of my favourite cars – and you’ll not believe how good a 1.5-litre three cylinder engine designed for Mini can sound. And yes, much of that sound is generated elsewhere but, no, I couldn’t care less.

So, mark my words: this Hyundai is going to change the way sporting EVs are made. Many manufacturers are currently pursuing an unrealistically purist approach, saying it’s ridiculous to make an EV sound and behave like an ICE car.

But to me it’s pure common sense: if you can remove at a stroke one of the most fundamental drawbacks of EV motoring just by writing a few million lines of software, why wouldn’t you? When EVs have so many other far more intractable issues, such as range, weight and charging times, why would you not address one that is so easily solved?

And why not go further? Sample a bunch of proper engines and let the customer decide: go to work with a Colombo V12 under your bonnet, come home with big banger 9.2-litre Can-Am spec Chevrolet V8? Doesn’t sound that terrible to me…