Meet The Man Driving A Bone-Stock Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV To The Arctic Ocean

It seems that every other year, we hear about a specially prepared electric vehicle going to the edge of the Earth. While that’s cool, it’s not particularly relatable. You can’t buy an electric crossover with portal axles from any dealership in North America, and crawling over remote terrain doesn’t tell us a whole lot about everyday use. However, a regular person attempting to take a stock Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric crossover to the Arctic Ocean on public roads is relatable. It’s an extreme challenge, but it’s also on real roads, with a real person, in a real car. So who is this man?

Meet Patrick Nadeau, owner and road-tripper of a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5. Since taking delivery, he’s managed to put on nearly 100,000 miles, and gained notoriety with a road trip from Quebec to Mexico and back via Utah—a 9,755-mile round trip—on $630 Canadian (about $450 in greenbacks) of charging.

It’s a trip with little build-up, as Nadeau completed it with his Ioniq 5 being basically brand new and replacing a pickup truck that was costing him $1,000 Canadian a month on gas. With those savings, it’s no wonder Nadeau “won’t go back to gas,” but the first big trip was a mix of work and play that, aside from some PlugShare planning, seemed almost on a whim. In his words:

Well, my first goal was to go into Utah and Arizona, filming a VR experience of national parks, because I’m doing a travel conference with VR headsets.. And we also integrate that for a senior’s home, for people with disabilities and stuff like that, and school, we do the activities in school. So I decide that I want to go there. I went there all by myself, but my wife and the three kids, they need to get out as well. So I told them, just go to Mexico, we will rent a condo over there. and after my one month trip, we go there and reach you.

I already did that trip like two years before that point but with the gasoline truck, so I knew where I was going. I was supposed to do it with the truck, but then I realized I could do it with the electric car. So I went on the the Internet, like PlugShare, and I was looking at the the chargers and I found out that it’s possible but there will be some challenges like in Mexico and the west part of the USA, but there is electricity, so I could do it, so that’s how I decided to to go down there. At the at that time, I had the car for only three months, but I just looked at all the videos on YouTube. so I knew the car before having it. So I was confident I had to do that.

With the scenic round trip to Puerto Vallarta and back completed, it wasn’t long before Nadeau started thinking of other places to take an Ioniq 5. His wife had the great idea to form the Hyundai logo from trip logs across North America, but a more northern plan emerged—driving an electric car to the Arctic Ocean via the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and Vancouver Island. This means tackling one of the most fearsome roads in North America, the Dempster Highway.

Obviously, the Dempster is an inhospitable road. Formed from gravel and made for heavy trucks, when Car And Driver took a lifted, roof rack-equipped C6 Corvette up that stretch of highway in 2007, the magazine cracked a windshield, grounded out the chin spoiler, broke the front turn signals, and blasted the sills down to bare fiberglass. You probably wouldn’t want to take your personal vehicle up the Dempster, so Nadeau is taking one of Hyundai’s own units. Specifically, it’s a dual-motor 2025 Ioniq 5 with a vinyl wrap to protect the paint as the only modification. No all-terrain tires, not even the XRT trim, just a regular electric crossover. Okay, so there is one other tweak coming, but it won’t arrive until late in the trip. As Nadeau said:

I don’t wanna bring in a spare tire all the way to that, but in Whitehorse—around that place—I will take one with me. We do have something to repair a flat, but if you have a bigger hole in the tire, because it’s so rough, I will take the spare tire with me.

A spare tire’s a good call, even if previous trips have seen unscathed rubber, but keeping the tires happy isn’t the biggest challenge. As Nadeau said, “There is one place that doesn’t have any plugs, not even a level one possibility, no electricity for pretty much 400 kilometres. This is gonna be the most challenging part. It’s between Whitehorse and Eagle Plains.”

Whitehorse is basically on the level with Anchorage, Alaska, while Eagle Plains is about 60 miles closer to the North Pole than Fairbanks. We’re talking remote stuff, but it’s certainly not an impossible goal in a modern electric car. As for when he hopes to reach the Arctic Ocean, Nadeau has a special date in mind.

I would like—my birthday is a June 7. I would like to get there for June 7. But there is a possibility that it couldn’t happen because the Dempster Highway in winter is partially an ice road and there are a few weeks where the ferry is closed. If the ice did melt, I won’t be able to cross the river, so I will have to wait for the ferry. Usually it’s opening up on the first week of June. Hopefully it will happen, because the last time that I took a look at the weather in Tuktoyaktuk, it was feeling like -30º (Celsius, or -22º Fahrenheit) and I took a look like three days ago. The sun would be pretty much 24 hours in June, so hopefully the the snow will melt faster.

If this isn’t one of the greatest birthday road trips in history, I don’t know what is. Oh, and if you’re wondering why the date is more than a month into the future, it’s a case of road trip wisdom rather than mere charging stops. In Nadeau’s words:

You know, with all the range that the cars have today, sometimes I have to stop not because the car needs it, because I need it. You can drive like six hours without stopping if you want, four or five hours, but I’ll need to stop before that. I need to have coffee and take a rest. It’s a road trip. you have to visit things. I could do this trip faster than two months of course, but I won’t have any experiences. I would just stop at charging ports and hit the road, so that’s not what I call road trip.

Indeed, Mr. Nadeau, indeed. Road trips are made to be savored, from tourist traps to local eats to natural beauty. Cannonballing it is an efficient use of time, but if you really want to save time, why drive? Flying is for destinations, roads are for journeys.

Expect weekly Arctic Ocean EV road trip updates to soon roll out across Hyundai Canada’s social media channels, and they’re updates I’ll be following because I really want to know how this trip turns out. It’s amazing how we’ve gone from early modern EVs like the first Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi i-MiEV to the kickoff of this road trip in about 15 years. If a normal driver in a stock EV can make it that far north and back, where can’t EVs go?

Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal

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