New MG IM5: The Ultimate Luxury Car Bargain!?
[Music] Hello. Welcome to my favorite place to be and least favorite place to film. We are at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2025 and there’s an awful lot of new stuff here. An awful lot of new electric stuff. This might be one of the most interesting of the lot. This is the new MG IM5. It’s the car that along with its IM6 crossovery sibling will launch MG’s new luxury subbrand here in the UK. And the headline is this. Model 3 price, Model S, space, tech, and luxury. Looks a bit tasty. It’s quite futuristic and it’s got some seriously interesting features. Shall we have a nosy round? It. [Music] Right. Then welcome to IM. What do we need to know? Well, first of all, we need to know that there’s music blaring over there and it’s a thousand degrees and cameraman Andy is that close to decking someone if they walk across our shot again. It’s filming at a festival. You know how it works. I’m not even going to apologize for it. Anyway, I am This is quite exciting. MG, clearly no longer satisfied with wiping the floor with everyone in terms of making really affordable, really useful electric cars, decided to venture out into the luxury segment as well. Now, affordable, attainable luxury. That’s how they’re characterizing this. It’s not super super high-end, but it’s definitely a little bit more Hillary swank than your MG cars that we’ve been used to here in the UK. It’s just under 5 m long, just under 2 m wide. So, think the MW5 series sort of dimensions. And it’s very swoopy, isn’t it? I would describe this design language as Chinese. It It’s definitely a Chinese car. I can’t really explain what I mean by that, but there’s a sort of flowiness to a lot of Chinese brands design language that I’m seeing lots of here. I think it’s quite smart. Underneath, it’s all new. This is not the MG4, MGS5 platform. This is all shiny and new and it’s seriously fast in terms of its charging and also performance actually. Charging. They say they’re getting close to 400 kW now. If you can find a quick enough charger, that’s pretty mad. Range, well, the small battery version, small has 75 kW hours. The big battery version will have 100 kwatt hours. And depending on which version you have, whether you have dual motor or not, the range is going to be somewhere between 300 or 400 miles, give or take. This one here that they’re launching within the UK, this is the fast one. This is the dual motor with the big battery. It does n to 60 in 3.2 seconds, which is that’s pretty fast. Yeah. Um I’m more interested in the fact that it’s got rear wheel steering as standard. All the cars get rear wheel steer. That’s fantastic. So that means when you’re going slowly, the wheels turn in the opposite direction to the front wheels, make the wheelbase feel really short. You get to, you know, chuck UI’s in tiny spaces. And then when you’re going fast, the wheels turn in the same direction as the front wheels, which extends the wheelbase, which for physics reasons makes the handling better. It can also use that feature to crab into parking spaces. Turn all the wheels in and just kind of park itself sideways in, reverse itself out. It’s got all sorts of clever parking features. It can reverse itself out of your driveway if you don’t feel like doing that yourself. MG says that in terms of autonomous capability, we have never seen anything like it in the UK. In terms of the slickness of the self-driving and the self-parking, they reckon this is a cut above everything else right now. Entry price, that’s quite important. So, this again, this is the fast one. Big battery, dual motor. Before long, we’ll have a single motor, rear drive, small 75 kWh battery version of this car. It’s going to start at less than £40,000. So, that’s almost exactly in line with the Tesla Model 3. That feels deliberate, doesn’t it? Ah, that’s better. Welcome to the aggressively airond conditioned, ventilated seats of the MG IM5. This is rather nice in here. Definitely immediately in terms of material quality. Just a little bit above what we’re used to with MG. Everything is soft. Everything is soft. This bit here padded. Don’t know why, but it is. And that makes it feel luxury. I’ve also noticed this. There’s no buttons. I’ve never seen less buttons. Um, and that’s usually quite annoying. But a couple things I immediately like. First of all, two fingers always for the fan speed. So, two fingers up and down for the temperature, two fingers left and right for the fan speed, no matter what you’re doing, what screen you’re on. That’s really good. And it’s helped by the fact that this screen is crisper than a bag of crisps. This software is lightning fast. Um, I’ve just opened the boots and I don’t know how to close it. There we go. I hope a child’s head isn’t in there. Oh, good. It’s not. Anyway, no buttons, lots of screens. The Chinese uh buyer is much more into minimalism and lots of customization. So, that’s very much the thrust of this interior. It’s clean, it’s simple, you can change everything in terms of the themes of these two screens. I’ve just noticed as well, you’ve got a teeny tiny folding rear view mirror, which is almost completely useless because the rear windscreen is like that. But it doesn’t matter because if I scroll up on this little wheel on the steering wheel, there’s my rear view mirror there in the screen. And if the weather’s bad, you can do the same thing for your wing mirrors. You can have them up on this middle screen or you can have Apple CarPlay, which is as standard. Wireless. Very nice. quite like that. Cameras everywhere, both inside and outside. Surround sound speakers. I can see one, two, three, four speakers just in the headliner above me right now. They’ve packed a lot of tech into this thing. You can really really tell that they want to make a point that a this is not your average MG and b, you get a lot more than you do in a Tesla Model 3 for the same cash. Okay, speedy back seat jack test. Now then, ooh, I saw the swoopy roof and I was concerned, but that’s really quite good. Gosh, leg room very happy. Seats way back in my position. Knees not too high. Headroom better than I would expect given the shape of the car, I would say. If I want to, I can press my head into the glass, but it really is quite good. And of course, if you need a bit more headroom, that’s where the taller, higher riding IM6 comes into play. All in all, pretty impressed on first impression. I mean, for the money, staggering, quite frankly. Slightly put off by the complete lack of buttons. Going to have to live with the software a bit before drawing final conclusions. But the software looks really good, so might be all right. Let’s go see the six. Quick bonus feature that I’ve just been made aware of that’s rocked my world. The door handles pop out. You pull on it. You open the door. But you don’t have to. What if you just are too luxurious for yanking on door handles? Find it univilized. You can just put your hand in there. Right. Here we go. Over to yonder MGM6. the slightly taller, more crossovery alternative. Not that crossovery, I will say. Just a little bit more roof line. Sort of Model Y vibes. It’s not a SUV. It’s just got a big forehead. Do you know what I mean? I know about those. I won’t get too close cuz there’s music blaring. Um, not many differences other than the higher roof line, more space in the back, presumably a bigger boot. This you can have with air suspension. That’s nice. that you can’t, but it does have adaptive suspension. And then the other thing was price. This costs a little bit more. I don’t know about the entry price, but I know that the all all singing all dancing dual motor performance version of this costs four grand more than the all singing all dancing version of that. One assumes the same goes for the entry level price point, which means that this is starting at sort of 434,000. That’s not a lot of money for a luxury car with rear wheel steer as standard. and air suspension and telepathically fast infotainment. This looks like being another bombshell moment for the MG brand or the IM brand in this case. These guys are in a serious run of form at the moment. The MG4 basically a game changer for small affordable EVs. That S5 I drove the other day, really, really surprised by how much I liked that. Now they’re coming in to eat the lunch of the luxury brands as well. Eat your lunch. Is that the expression? Eat your lunch. Andy, come over here to eat your lunch if you have been. Thanks for watching. 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Jack heads to the iconic Goodwood Festival of Speed 2025 to check out the all-new MG IM5 and IM6. Are these the ultimate luxury car bargains of the year?
00:00 Intro to Goodwood Festival of Speed
00:20 Design
02:30 Charge & Performance
02:45 Range
03:15 Steering, Self-Driving and Self-Parking
04:05 Price
04:30 Interior
05:20 Software & Tech
06:45 Back seats
07:50 MG IM6
08:45 Price
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