Hyundai’s website crashes as biggest Ioniq EV drop attracts frenzied response

Hyundai’s latest “drop” of its sought-after Ioniq electric vehicles has again caused controversy, with reports that the company’s website crashed within minutes of the cars being made available on Wednesday afternoon.

Hyundai has been able to offer only a small supply of its multi-award winning Ioniq 5 electric SUV – despite interest from tens of thousands of prospective customers – and has chosen to offer these through a series of monthly “drops” – a first come, first serve scramble on its website that has been compared to buying tickets for the Rolling Stones.

On many occasions, prospective buyers have been frustrated at the sight of “sold out” signs appearing within minutes of the online offering. But Hyundai has persisted and on Wednesday proposed its biggest drop ever, including 300 of the newly released Ioniq 6 electric sedans, and another 170 of the Ioniq 5s

However, problems quickly arose. Just two minutes past the 1pm opening, reports of the website crashing started to emerge.

One perspective buyer took to a popular online forum, at 1:02 pm to report that the frenzy of Hyundai’s Ioniq electric model hopefuls had crashed the ordering page: “And… the site is down,” he wrote.

Another Hyundai Ioniq 5 order hopeful elaborate on what error they were seeing due to high traffic:

“This is so dumb. Have a door buster rush for lottery allocation, but your website can only handle 3 people at one time else it gives 500 internal server error.”

The team at The Driven tried the website just before 2 pm and received a similar error notice.

Frustrated by the rush of visitors to the website and it crashing initially, the first buyer than had some luck just minutes later at: 

“Every now and then I get through to the config page and see what’s still available. Looks like Blue and Gold still available, all else sold out (at least with the Dynamiq option as its the default ticked). Can’t get any further though.”

The demand for the 470 electric vehicles on offer was so high that even those lucky enough to get through found the process a bit confusing, with the website taking buyers back to the start page just as they were about to order online:

“Same thing happened to me,  really annoyed by the whole process,” one wrote. “Tried to buy as soon as the site opened, got all the way up to paying, clicked finalise payment and it took me back to the start page, multiple website crashes, ugh idiots. No idea if I’ve bought one or not.”

Then the same Ioniq 5 hopeful shared his feedback on why the biggest drop at the same time,  which consisted of 170 of its award-winning Ioniq 5 SUV and 300 brand new Ioniq 6, was not such a good idea:

“Doing the Ioniq 6 release at the same time as the Ioniq 5 was an extremely dumb move”

At this drop a total of 300 Ioniq 6 sedans were released for the very first time which were split across three variants:

• 229 Dynamiq 2WD
• 36 Techniq AWD
• 35 Epiq AWD

Similarly for the Ioniq 5, this drop was slightly smaller than a bigger one where 250 EVs were on offer in January. That one sold out in only 15 minutes.

From the indication that Hyundai gave last week, the brand anticipates the next batches of the EVs would be dropped in both March and April.

The Driven has reached out to Hyundai to find out more about the sales results, and the web problems.