The 7 Best EVs From the New York Auto Show 2024
The year of electrification begins in New York — and with it a whole slew of innovations.
The 2024 New York Auto Show looked a bit different than in years past. There were fewer shiny debuts, fewer pop-up parties up the gargantuan floors of the Javitt’s center, and more people walking down the street. To where? To the HQs of Genesis, Rivian, and Tesla, which offered intimate looks at their electric vehicles.
After all, to own the coming electric boom, you need to give people an experience with a type of vehicle that they’ve, more often than not, never owned before. If you’re spending this week in the Big Apple, we recommend taking a walk down the High Line to visit the aforementioned carmakers’ venues. If not, take a hint from this list of the most exciting new releases and head over to a dealer to see these EVs for yourself.
Genesis Magma GV60
The Genesis Magma GV60 looks the part of a performance EV.
Genesis showed off four Magma concepts, just shy of a full hand of flaming orange cars designed to scream that Genesis has arrived in the same sporty space as BMW’s M-Motorsports division and Mercedes’s AMG.
And since the GV60 is already a very good luxury EV, giving the recipe a hit of hot sauce can’t hurt — and, no, you won’t be forced to order yours in orange. While Genesis didn’t officially confirm production, they went into a level of detail that makes it obvious they’ll make a Magma GV60.
No, we don’t know exact output specifics, but because it’s based on the same platform as KIA’s EV6 GT, which produces 576 horsepower, as well as the 641-horsepower Ioniq 5 N, you can bet Genesis’s version will be at least in that ballpark. And visually the GV60 Magma looks the part of a high-performance grand-tourer, with blistered fenders, roof fins, and a prominent tail-mounted wing. If Genesis was that “other” luxury brand you kind of knew about, the intention of Magma is to sear the label into your brain.
Genesis Neolun
Bi-folding doors are back, baby.
You may not know it, but Genesis, Kia, and Hyundai are all part of the same brand group. A few years ago, at the L.A. Auto Show, Kia showed a concept that is now the production EV9, the brand’s three-row electric SUV. See that car in person and it’s just about as stunning as it was as a concept — until they ditched those incredible bi-folding doors.
Here, on Genesis’s concept Neolun (“new moon”), those doors are back, and this time the carmaker says they’re feasible for production, meaning you can basically open the entire side of the car and enter the upscale, lounge-like quarters, where front seats swivel to meet the rears, and flexible OLED screens can be lowered from the ceiling and used as displays.
The show car has LEDs in the seats, radiant heating in the floor, and incredible lighting on this concept’s exterior, where the front and tail lamps sit completely flush with the car’s sheet metal, giving the appearance of a glowing epidermis.
Hyundai Ioniq 5N
Hyundai is trying to capitalize on the Inoniq’s success with this high-powered performance variant.
Awards milestones in the car world tend not to matter to buyers. The fact that Hyundai’s won the 2024 World Performance Car Award for the Ioniq 5 N, though, is a strong mile marker for EVs, since it means an electric “hot hatch” once again beat out a gas car, the BMW M2, and the same thing happened last year when the twin of the Ioniq 5 N, Hyundai’s EV6 GT, also beat gas rivals to this crown.
As mentioned, with Genesis using this chassis for their forthcoming Magma GV60, you have to wonder if they’ll push farther beyond the N’s 641 horsepower. Why ask? Because the hotter Ioniq 5 is already more than doubling the standard Ioniq’s output, and gets significant suspension and chassis tuning. That makes for a significantly stiffer car, and at $66,000, not a cheap one, either. Genesis probably wants to charge even more — and somehow not cannibalize sales from Hyundai. All of this makes us wonder how much EV buyers want to spend on the performance segment where three of the same cars all start with the same platform and powertrain.
Rivian R2
Rivian’s R2 packs a lot of the features people loved about the R1S into a much smaller vehicle.
Just ahead of the show we took a spin to see Rivian’s R2 at their Manhattan space. One executive there said the quiet part out loud: This was Rivian “flexing” onto car show turf, because they aren’t actually exhibiting at the NYIAS. And so what? While Rivian debuted the R2 to the media in California a few weeks ago, this is a way for anyone to go see the car in person.
Be warned: What’s here is still a concept. So some of the plastics, and aspects of construction are still kinda “beta,” but we got to sit at the ovoid wheel and play with Rivian’s mouse-like scrolling wheels nestled into the steering wheel. These are simply brilliant, since they allow the driver to quickly mouse through functions to toggle, say, from audio input to navigation, while haptic feedback informs whether you’re at the surface level (say, into a new menu) or with a simple push, drilling deeper into that function.
What’s harder to perceive in shots are the excellent proportions. This is a five-person Rivian that’s actually a bit shorter than a Tesla Model Y, but just as roomy inside since Rivian’s pushed its wheels to the very corners of the footprint. A part of that is functional — it enables safer 4x4-ing — but the more practical benefit is it makes for a roomier cabin with large-human-sized legroom in the second row and a flat-folding hatch bay.
What the production model brings and whether it can actually arrive at $45,000 — Rivian’s broken price promises before — are questions we can only answer down the road.
Volkswagen ID. Buzz 2024
Finally, the ID. Buzz is coming to North America.
How Long have we been waiting for the ID.Buzz? Nearly a decade. The BUDD-e bus concept dropped at CES way back in 2016, and finally, you’ll be able to drive an electric Volkswagen bus at the end of 2024. Volkswagen has to hope that the wait isn’t too long, but they’re lucky to have a niche that pretty much nobody else is chasing — Americans are numb to the practicality of most minivans.
The ID.Buzz isn’t most minivans, though. Obviously, it looks amazing, and that alone should help it sell. We’ve driven the standard-wheelbase, Europe-only version already and it’s fun, quicker than you’d guess, and even sporty. (And there’ll be a yet-sportier GTX version, too).
But the basic goodness of the ID.Buzz should be enough to turn heads. Americans will get a longer van, one with more cargo and a third row of seating not offered elsewhere, and the upside against SUV EVs is all about having a massively roomy cabin with a low floor and easier piling in for little kids.
Polestar 4
No rear window? No problem.
At the show, we had a brief chat with Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar’s CEO. Ingenlath isn’t your standard corporate type — he’s largely credited as the designer who took Volvo from dowdy to slick. With Polestar he’s pushing boundaries as well, so the newest drop, the Polestar 4, is a tech tour-de-force, especially as the brand pushes toward better autonomy. Ingenlath explained that LiDAR (lasers that enable 3-D mapping) is the key to advanced hands-free driving, and made it clear that Polestar wants to stake this out as a distinguishing characteristic of its cars.
As for the Polestar 4, the $54,900 long-range (300-mile range) single-motor hatchback arrives at the end of 2024, and it’s fairly critical to the success of the company. Along with the Polestar 3, which is more of an SUV, both cars are much larger inside than the diminutive Polestar 2, a VW Golf-sized hatchback that’s more apt for European drivers than American ones.
Beyond safety tech, Polestar has been a quiet pioneer in seamless software integration, running their cars on Google’s Android Automotive OS as well as Google built-in. Part of that experience is never turning the car “on” or off. Just walk up and the car unlocks and you can drive away. Exit, and it turns itself off and re-locks, no keys or button pushing required.
Honda Prologue
Honda is playing catchup with its upcoming electric Prologue SUV.
Honda’s hopefully going to have a whole bunch of its own EVs to sell in the coming years, but the Prologue is a big deal for the Japanese carmaker and you can kick the tires on the Chevrolet-based Prologue in person at the NYIAS. It’s roughly the size of the gas-powered Honda Pilot, costs $47,400, has 296 miles of range in the base, and Honda’s saying it will offer access to both Tesla Supercharger stations as well as EVGo and Electrify America’s network.
While it’s not upscale inside, the interior is clearly Honda-practical and comfy-cozy, and the somewhat lower-than-SUV-ish ride height should make for a recipe that lots of families are going to want. Honda still has a lot to prove in the EV game, especially since it’s behind its Korean peers, but the Prologue, which goes on sale later this spring, shows promise.
