MG MG5

This is a review after 1 month of ownership. Although purchased as a new car, it didn't come with any manuals, but the dealer sent me a pdf version which might have been the official one. THE GOOD: #1. Seats, driver position: This is a very comfortable car to sit in and to drive, with lots of seat and steering column adjustments available. #2. The acceleration, braking and handling are excellent.

#3. The setup of these (e.g. regenerative braking level, responsiveness of accelerator) is easy via the main, infotainment touchscreen.

#4. The range: Really does look like 400Km is practical for planning purposes, provided speed is limited to 80kph most of the time.

#5. Considering the above, this is pretty good value for money, once you have organised your workarounds for the bad points below.

THE BAD: #1. Switching from Drive (Forward) or Reverse to Park, getting out of the car and walking away DOES NOT TURN OFF ANY OF THE CAR'S FUNCTIONS: if the radio was on, it will stay on, and if it later gets dark, the headlights will come on and stay on until the battery is flat. The car will not give you any warnings or reminders. If you want to leave the car unlocked, either lock it again and then unlock it (not certain this works, though) or find "Power Off" in the correct submenu of the infotainment system (safer).

#2. Storage space is not quite so good as it might seem at first sight, with zero provided in the half-empty front compartment (bonnet), and a depression in the floor of the rear hatch which can be covered by a lid if you need a flat storage space - but that lid doesn't seem tough enough to handle my 30-40Kg SCUBA gear!

#2. Rear vision: (a) Just adequate in daylight with no rain, but the tiny rear wiper covers a totally inadequate area, half of which is obscured by the centre rear headrest, and (b) THERE IS NO REVERSING LIGHT!! Only a tiny reversing indicator light to satisfy regulations. - and the dealer warned me that fitting a usable reversing light would void the warranty. So reversing into an unlit driveway at night, the driver is virtually blind (the rear camera is not capable of operating in the dark, so the area behind the car is simply black).

#3. Collision Avoidance: There is no front proximity detector, so although there is protection against collision with obstacles at the rear, objects hidden below bonnet level at the front will not trigger alarm or braking, nor will an accidental creep forward in a traffic queue.

#4. Automatic Speed Limit Detection. This exclusively uses the A.S.* system to try to find numbers in the camera views and guess whether (a) the images really do contain numbers, and (b) whether those numbers are intended as speed limits. It works about 70% of the time, which is really good. However, it hallucinates 30% of the time, which is not quite so good, especially if it suddenly tells you the limit has increased to 100 in an 80 zone or 40 in a 100 zone. The output (DONT USE the automatic speed limiting!) is a 5+ second verbal announcement followed by a series of beeps, which blend in with the beeps from the 'hazard ahead' warning when the system notices there are cars parked at the sides of the wide road you are driving down

#5. Driver Interface screens and buttons. This is where the MG really falls down. Everything seems to be designed to draw the driver's attention away from the road ahead. The driver's central information screen is cluttered with low-priority inessentials, road speed is shown half way down the screen in less than generously sized numbers, any preset speed is off to one side, and pride of place is given to the vehicle's frequent guesses at the local speed limit. All the controls except lights and wipers are instantaneous-type pushbuttons, so there is no tactile feedback, and the status of the control has to be found by searching the screens. There are 3 independent systems for reaction to the random guesses of speed limit: (a) a simple warning system, with a long spoken announcement followed by beeps, controlled from one of the infotainment display submenus (b) an automatic speed limiter and (c) a standard cruise cotnrol. There are just 2 buttons on the left of the steering wheel which control many of the "driver assist" features, and their functions can change according to the order in which they are pressed, the direction they are pushed (5 directions for one button, 1 direction for the other) and how long they are pressed. These functions include cruise control and automatic speed limiting, and the driver can easily be surprised when the button which had just been used to initiate cruise control now changes to speed limiting. Just to confuse matters further, automatic speed limiting can suddenly self-self-enable after it had been turned off. I am sure there is a control sequence somewhere to enable/disable this function, but I can imagine nasty accidents during overtaking.

#6. Alarm and warning sounds. There are 2 different sounds which alert/confuse the driver to all manner of events. Sometimes it is just the presence of another vehicle, sometimes it is a car door not properly shut. There is also a voice warning, which is useful to identify a minority of issues, but more often there is little to indicate the source of the irritation. Sometimes, there is an inscrutable indication on the instrument display - such as "Warning: Ready Mode", which turned out to be an unsecured passenger door when attempting to change from Park to Forward.

#7. Charging is simple superficially -but the manual states that power must be turned off before commencing - and doesn't say how to do this. (the simplest way is to locate the "Power Off" button hidden in a submenu of the infotainment screen, otherwiselock the car - after unlocking it to connect the charger - then lock it again before turning on external power. According to the dealer, the car will actually power down automatically when external power is connected, but given the warning in the manual, I wouldn't trust that for rapid chargers, in case the switch is subjected to excessive stress. The manual also states that balance charging must be undertaken at certain intervals or after the battery has been discharged to a low level. Although references to this function occur in numerous places in the manual, NOWHERE is there any indication of how to accomplish this! (Eventually I found a UK version which told me that it happens automatically when needed, once normal charging completes and trickle charging has begun).

#8. The manual. As previously indicated, this is woeful. The English is good (no doubt proofread by AI), but extremely unhelpful. The instructions for the cruise control (p240-248) took a long time to decipher, owing in part to poor naming of features and failure to put diagrams on the pages that refer to them. As and when I have time, I will edit/rewrite parts before printing a copy fit for quick reference.

* A.S. : often misnamed A.I. but that's still in the future: there are specialist, algorithm-driven systems, and then there's A.S. Personally I'd rather trust H.S. (human stupidity), because it's more predictable.

Got one of these as a hire car in Melbourne the vibe trim level with 4 cylinder 1.5 engine and cvt it drove quite well no complaints apart from the grindy brakes but being a hire car it’s probably abused