I have really been getting into the things that are different about EVs. The big one is acceleration.

Our MG4 has fantastic acceleration from the moment you push on the accelerator and there are no gear changes. It has maximum torque right from the start and even as you get up speed the torque is still available.

Unlike internal combustion engines (ICE), the power is immediately available. Electric current comes straight from the battery and drives the motor instantaneously. Getting the energy from petrol to the wheels is a different matter. The poor old ICE has to suck in air, compress the air, squirt in fuel, ignite the mix then use the expanding gas to turn a crank. AND it has to do this in a number of cylinders, many times a minute. It is exhausting (pun intended) just thinking about it. There is almost no power when the engine is going slowly (it can easily stall when you release the clutch) and lots of power when it is going faster. But you can’t go too fast or it will blow up, so you have to keep chasing the power by changing gears.

Now I think the MG4 has fantastic acceleration, but it is in the shade compared to the Ioniq 5. I feel another experiment coming on…

My iPhone has an app to measure and record acceleration. I was a passenger in my friend’s Ioniq 5 and recorded the explosive acceleration when he took off from the lights. I then asked him to do an emergency stop in a safe spot. I recorded that acceleration as I was hanging out of the seat belt with my eyes bulging out of their sockets. When I got home I downloaded the data and plotted both accelerations against time. (Engineers love a good graph). It turns out that the car reached an acceleration of 0.7 g and only took half a second to get there. That means that a 100kg man would be pushed back in his seat with a load of 70kg force!

No wonder I had to straighten out my neck afterwards. The emergency braking deceleration also got to 0.7g in half a second, but it continued to 1.1g at which point there was definitely rubber being torn from the bottom of the tyres.

The long and the short of it – in the first half a second, the Ioniq 5 can get to the same acceleration going forward as it does going in the opposite direction, during emergency braking. In other words, in that half second, you will be pushed back in your seat at maximum acceleration as much as you will be hanging out of your seat belts when emergency braking.

So, EVs are great for overtaking, without those pesky gear changes, but they can also be quite gentle when parking.