MG5 First Drive | Is this the estate car we've been waiting for? | 100% Independent, 100% Electric

foreign [Music] there we go the dulcet tones of Chinese electronics this is a Chinese car built in China imported into the UK right-hand Drive mg it's an mg it's the mg5 that is the mg5 estate and this is my garage because it's rained so heavily today we couldn't shoot anything outside so we're stuck in here and this is fully charged oh [Music] so the mg5 EV uh I just got to tell you this is this is one of those cars where you instantly love it and then probably as the day wears on you get to know the little quirks and fiddles of it I've just got to say this one thing right at the start because this is in a way a really serious genuine existential challenge to the established Legacy automotive industry this car represents it more if anything more than the mgze that we reviewed last year which was really impressive because it's so much cheaper this is the mg5 EV it's an estate car it's that's what we call it in the uku station wagon in the US it's a it's a it's but it's not an SUV there's a car that isn't a compact SUV what I'm saying about this the existential nature of this is because this is going to be these are going to get cheaper and cheaper though it's not just this company that makes the mg which was a British brand but clearly this is now a Chinese company but it's not just the fact that they're making electric cars they're making electric cars that are cheaper so the Legacy automakers that's every car brand you've ever heard of have all been making for sometimes up to 120 plus years combustion engines that's their business that's what they do that's their skill set and they're adapting and adopting as fast as they can electric Drive trains but you've got to say there's two groups of people that are just way ahead one is Tesla in the United States and the other is any of the multitude of startup electric car manufacturers in China they are streets ahead so everything about this car is more impressive than most of the European uh electric cars that I've test driven in terms of its range its performance its ease of understanding what the car is doing so I'm just having a quick look now at the fuel efficiency and how far I've got to drive so at the moment I've got 198 miles of range in the car and I'm uh achieving uh 3.6 miles per kilowatt hour which is not brilliant but it's a grim miserable day and I've been driving in heavy rain but it's very very good for a car this size and a genuine I think this is an important point a genuine pretty much all year round 200 mile range now the uh EV database gives this a realistic real-world average range of 175 miles which I think is very very fair and probably quite accurate but without question in the summer you could easily go way past that it's so dependent on your driving Style and what your where you're driving and how fast you're driving now it's got a I think a 52 kilowatt hour battery but the important point is it's 48.8 kilowatt hours of usable battery capacity so let's say 49 kilowatt hours just short of 50 kilowatt hours which does give it you know from my experience now and the way that the range is is dropping as I drive I'm very confident I could get 200 miles out of this car today without any problem now the other thing I think is important I really like this which is the thing that EV database put on their website is the vehicle fuel equivalent so this car if this car was a petrol car with the same energy use I've mentioned this once or twice before in other reviews uh this would be doing we would average at about 145 miles to the Gallup foreign [Music] so recharging the EMG five very very easy a lot easier than the mg Ze which was incredibly difficult and once again it's got the charging point at the front which as I said before is uh I think it's just much better so it's just an ordinary it's a CCS charger there but let me get the cable okay so there here we go I'm just going to plug it in now but here's the thing it takes a moment is it gonna do it so you think it's not going to charge and then it sort of goes just so now it's charging [Music] the naught to 60 speed is 7.7 seconds which I have to say it's quite I've got it on eco at the moment just because I'm an Eco vicar I like being on eco mode but if you floor it it will go now that you do not expect in a car like this and I've just been driving other cars you know recently that are made by European and Japanese manufacturers they don't do that this one's got a lot it's got a lot of grunt if you wanted to do that it's re it feels really well built and I just got to say this that I think still think my prejudices I've got to overcome and I think we all have to uh you know you think oh it's a Chinese car it's not going to be very good forget that scratch that from your your Prejudice database it's a Chinese car it's really really well built it's a very very nice car to drive the interior is stylistically I would say a little dated and you know how much I care about that not one bit so the Chinese are what I think they've done you know which we all know about and they've copied certain uh styling aspects of European cars and if anything probably made them better it's been embarrassing for us because this is what I think is going to happen is a company that doesn't have a legacy of making combustion engines doesn't have to worry about them and they can then price the car realistically they're going to be able to get the cheapest batteries you can get in the world because they're all made in China anyway at the moment um they can fit them into cars like this they know how much they cost they can price this car at a realistic level so that more and more people buy them there are now as we are seeing with Elliot in China uh you know more and more electric cars that are sub 10 000 pounds or ten thousand dollars in the sub ten thousand dollar range some of them are very small City cars some of them are kind of beginning to be more like more usable and then they've all got ranges of between 150 and 200 miles or you know 180 to 250 kilometers that is very very becoming very common now many of those cars will never make it to the shores of Europe or the United States that's they're meant for the their internal Market is quite big these cars are going to become more and more common on our roads and you know you would not be a radical idiot if you bought an mg5 this car is a really solid stable just just one more car it's the maintenance is going to be really low the fuel costs are going to be really low so the price of the ng5ev starts at 24 495 so just twenty four and a half thousand pounds which is uh where the uh equivalence in dollars and Euros will appear as if by Magic under this image um which is pretty pretty cheap for a car this size with the performance that this car has with the range this car has with the with the um you know the the trims the trim the trim level is I would say medium high it's not super high but it's got heated seats it's got it hasn't got a heated steering wheel which I've never quite I've never wanted one of them uh it's got very good uh the uh D misters and all that stuff very very good and for 24.5 that's after the government grant but actually that means it's still if with no grants or anything it's a it's a Well sub 30 000 pound electric car and most of the cars we've been reviewing that aren't like high-end 50 60 70 000 pounds have been around thirty thousand so this already undercuts that and it's not a small little two-seater City Runabout for 24 Grand it's a big comfortable estate car with a 200 mile range that is pretty impressive [Music] this is really useful so this is just a trip meter how many miles you've done to the uh kilowatt hour how fast your average speed is how far you've driven so obviously here's all the heater controls they're all actual buttons that you press and do that and that's pretty straightforward that's straightforward there here is the um that that's now in Drive that's in Reverse it goes puts on the reverse camera so you know that's all and then Park is just that that is kind of very very simple and sensible work instantly you get it you don't have to faff about wondering how to use it so it took me a moment to work out because I knew that curse was the regen breaking and then I eventually noticed this tiny little symbol right down here so it's in one at the moment which is virtually nothing you push it Forward once and it goes to two and then you push it Forward again it goes to three which is maximum regen the screen itself is a little leaves a little bit to be desired so like there that's really hard as you can see this is not easy W1 oh look it hasn't done the W there's W gone I find this very hard to see that so look I'm pressing W now it's come up yeah no I mean I think that shows that that is not terribly easy to use [Music] so my overall impression for this car is I think it's really good there's some really peculiar I guess a bit Chinese quirks this is a good one the number plate this is a UK standard number plate size it's not a special one it's not an extra big one it kind of overlaps the uh the sign there you know there's just like little things like that definitely doesn't matter doesn't make the car less energy efficient or less useful but it's just a bit it's a bit chunky isn't it that's all but you know not in a bad way because the Chinese number plates are much smaller so you know they haven't really taken that into consideration you know they'll get that they'll work that out anyway the back is impressive the back has lots of room so there is the that's the charging cable bag but you know even that is really really impressive if you and then there's a there's room for a spare wheel oh oh that's exciting because a lot of cars don't get hasn't got a spare wheel but it could happen it would fit in there it's uh it's you know so there's really really a lot of room in this car it's that is very impressive if you put the seats down and it gets much much more put I'll put one lot of seats down now okay see it's a huge it's huge it's an estate car it's a proper estate car with a big big lot of storage in the back but spacious it's a 1400 liters with the seats down and about 450 normally so it's a big it's a big boot that's all really that's all we've got we can't do anything else because it's just been so the weather has been so variable today we've really had to struggle with it's been raining pretty much all the time and when we decided we'd film this bit in the garage it stopped raining so please do subscribe to fully charged please tell your friends and family about the show if anyone you know is interested in electric cars tell them to come and watch this have a look at the patreon link which is beneath this video see if you want to support what we're doing and struggling on to do in all weathers and that's really basically all I should just shut up and get back in the car and go for a drive in the rain so if you have been thank you for watching [Music] thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 391,632

Keywords: robert llew, electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, grid storage technology, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, crowd funded youtube, kryten, fully charged show live, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged

Id: doo6UWrOaFs

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020