MG S5 EV review: Perfect EV if you don’t want something huge?
Good day. I’m Paul. Electric cars, they’re becoming cheaper here in Australia and with the influx of Chinese brands. A lot of them are starting to push down the prices. So, you have alternatives over all the mainstream stuff. MG is the latest. So, this is called the S5 EV. Sits on the same platform as the MG4, but is sort of SUV shaped. Retains the rear wheel drive architecture. Available in two battery sizes. This one here is the topsp spec uh 62 essence. So priced at a little under $50,000. So today we’re going to do a detailed review of this. So if you want to skip ahead to other parts of this review, you can use the time codes that are on the screen or if you’re on YouTube, you can scroll down and use the chapters below. Now on the design front, uh it actually doesn’t look too bad, especially here in the red color. Big MG logo up the front. You’ve got headlights that are split. So you’ve got a section up the top there and then the main headlight beam down the bottom. Around the side here, you’ve got Arero wheel covers. So, machined finish. And then the piano black arrow wheel covers. And that’s sitting on an 18in alloy wheel on Bridgestone tires. Bit of wheel arch cladding there as well. Indicator built into the wing mirror with a camera down there as well. And then if you have a look at this section, they’ve broken up the paint colors with a sort of plastic part down the bottom. It kind of just gives it uh gives it a bit of separation there between body color and the bottom of the vehicle. They do this a lot on SUVs to make them look like they’re sort of off-road ready, but um this is obviously rear wheel drive only, so not not off-road ready. Uh you’ve got uh roof rails here, panoramic glass roof with privacy glass, and then come around to the back with me. Around the back, you’ve got LED tail lights that stretch across the top there, MG badge just there, and then MG S5 EV down the bottom. Uh aside from that, it’s all sort of pretty straightforward. So, let me know what you reckon about the pricing. Do you think this is too expensive compared to the outgoing uh it was the MGZ SUV that they were doing for like $30,000 drive away or thereabouts? So, um this has been a big step up in price and it’s part of MG’s push to be a whole lot more premium. Keen to see what you think about the pricing on this. Let me know in the comments section below. We’re inside the S5. This is what the key looks like. You’ve got lock, boot, unlock, and then MG on the back. It’s a proximity sensing key. Once you’re inside, you’ve got uh just a brake pedal. You just push that and then the car is ready to rumble. Uh so, in terms of the design of the interior, this has the latest version of MG’s infotainment system. So, really nice and quick, snappy, high resolution. Uh it’s it’s just an overhaul of what they used to have, and this feels like next generation stuff, which is good. Uh and it’s connected as well. Head of the driver, another display that gives you all your critical information. Uh in terms of touch points, so nice and soft there. and soft on the door as well. How soft are they? We’ve got our durometer. We’ve tested the main surfaces in this cabin. If you do want to see how this car compares to others that we’ve tested before, there is a link in the description below. Now, build quality. What’s it like? All feels pretty good. Bit of a shake test. That’s what the door slam sounds like. So, let’s talk infotainment. Uh the main screen here just under 13 in in size. Uh in terms of features that it comes with, you’ve got in-built satellite navigation, which is great. Normally, you don’t see that uh on this sort of spec of car, typically they just leave it to smartphone mirroring, but that is in there, which is great news. Means you don’t have to have your smartphone mirrored if you don’t want to. You’ve got AM, FM, and DAB digital radio. And in addition to that, you have a six speaker stereo. Sound system is okay. Nothing to to really write home about. Um outside of those things though, you do have smartphone mirroring. Both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Both of those are wireless. I’ll show you what Apple CarPlay looks like. There it is. There. Um, look at it while you can because sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes it’s quite often that it doesn’t work. Like when you get back in the car, it just won’t connect and you try and connect it manually and it just won’t work. So, you then have to remove your phone, restart the car. I don’t know. It’s just a very poor integration and hopefully something they can fix with a software update. It wouldn’t accept voice commands. like just a lot of stuff there that just wasn’t working for me and super buggy. Um I have iOS 26, Sean has iOS 18. Both of us had the same problem. So it’s either an Apple thing or an MG thing, one of those two, but um definitely not related to the new firmware. So very frustrating. Um this is what Android Auto looks like. So yeah, same story. Uh nice full screen integration. Don’t know how well this works compared to Apple, but um you know, hopefully it doesn’t have the same problems that we have with the Apple one. Um, looking at the screen ahead of the driver, this is a bit more straightforward. It’s only a small display and then has digital elements off to the side. I did find that both of these displays were really bright at nighttime and even when I tried to turn it down all the way, it was still just way too bright. So, uh, and that is something that’s common across other MG products. So, hopefully that is something I can work on in the future to reduce the brightness so that it is a bit easier to be able to concentrate at night time with h having the thing blaring. Uh there’s also no auto dimming rear vision mirror or side mirrors. And I haven’t driven many cars that are on the market today that don’t have those features. So again, just a lot of brightness going on and taking your uh gaze away from actually concentrating on driving. Now, in terms of your connectivity options, you’ve got uh two USB C ports, a 12vt outlet as well, and then in addition to that, you’ve got wireless phone charging just here, plus a little nook there to hold your phone. Um couple of cup holders and storage down here as well. Look at the glove box. That’s pretty reasonably sized. Sunny’s holder up there as well. So, on the parking front, you’ve got just rear parking sensors and a 360 camera. I’ll show you what that looks like. There it is there. Quality of that is pretty good. You can switch between different uh view angles there as well. So, not a bad little setup. This is what the horn sounds like. Now, on the comfort front, you’ve got single zone automatic climate control. Would have thought dual zone top spec, but anyway. Uh you do have heated seats and a heated steering wheel, though. And then you got these shortcuts down here. So you got temperature, fan, and then uh direction of the where it’s blowing. And then a volume knob, too. So I guess that’s not a bad little layout there. In terms of your controls on the seats, uh they’re like this interesting combo. You’ve got like a leather and then this fabric material. They are electrically adjustable, so you can go forwards, backwards. You can move uh the back of it up and down, but not the front. Can move the back rest though. Uh and no lumbar adjustment, unfortunately. And then on the steering front, it offers both tilt and reach adjustment. And on our reach test, uh, most of this stuff is easy to reach while you’re driving. Now, second row, uh, the room here is actually not too bad. You’ve got decent knee room. Tow room is not bad. Head room is good. Mat pockets. Uh, you’ve got air vents, USBC outlet. U, I did notice this. We kind of just grazed this with our tripod and it’s already like scratched the living hell out of that material. And it’s all just quite scratchy plastic here. So if you have kids and stuff when they sort of lose their marbles and throw things going to damage your brand new car. So um yeah, would have thought they’d go gone with a much more durable material there. But anyway, uh you do have center armrest here with a couple of cup holders there. And it is quite a spacious place to be seated. Now our window test. Does it go all the way down? It is just auto down. No auto up. Oh, so close. Now let’s talk cargo space. So you’ve got a power tailgate. You have around 450 L available for you. Little bit of underlo storage as well. And then here in this tools container, you’ve got tire repair kit because you do not get a spare tire. Uh and then by the look of it, you can drop that out of the way too. So not a bad amount of storage there in terms of getting things in given it is rear wheel drive as well. They’ve sort of packaged that quite nicely. If you do want more space though, you can expand it by dropping your second row, and that gives you around 1,500 L worth of space. So, let’s talk battery charging and range before we go for a spin. Charge ports located at the back here. You’ve got both AC and DC charging. Uh, this lights up to give you an idea of uh where your charge is at. So, once it’s charging, it goes green, and I’m sure you get get the idea. Uh battery size is around 60 kilwatt hours and it’s an LFP battery. So a battery that’s uh all good to charge up to 100% regularly. In addition to that, you’ve got an AC charge rate of around 7 kW. DC charge rate peaks at around 150 kW, but the average is closer to about 90. So it’s going to take a little little bit of time to charge it uh once it sort of settles into its average. Now this is the the kind of interesting part. They have NEC rating of well over 500 km which is absolutely unachievable and I’ll explain why when we go for a drive. A WLTP driving range of over 400 km which is also in my opinion pretty unachievable too. So run you through all of that when we go for a spin and explain uh its inefficiencies. Okay, we’ve just hit the road in the S5 EV. Uh, like a lot of the Chinese cars on the market at the moment, um, it has all of that annoying beeping and bong stuff. So, I’m going to switch all of that off now. It’s literally like a one minute procedure each time you drive the car cuz it will do your head in. So, uh, speed limit recognition because it can’t properly recognize speed signs. The lane departure assistant, uh, turn all that off. And then the driver distraction monitor as well. Turn that off, too. Okay, there we go. Now, there is an MG pilot custom feature that allows you to disable everything and and save it here so that you can recall all of that stuff being switched off quickly and easily. Yes, great that it can do that, but just annoying that it doesn’t actually work to start with and that you need to disable it every time you drive the car. Right now, let’s talk about what you’re getting here. So, I mentioned earlier on that this shares a platform or is based on the platform that the MG4 is based on. So that means it’s rear wheel drive architecture. Pleasant change from a lot of the other competitors in this segment that are frontwheel drive. And nothing wrong with a front-wheel drive electric vehicle. It is just harder to get that power down because they’re constantly scrabbling for grip. That much torque on a front-wheel drive, especially in the wet. Just makes it a bit unhinged at times. Whereas rear wheel drive just gives you a better balance and also in theory should improve handling dynamics as well. So we’ll test that out a little bit later on. This uh being a single motor variant means that you only choose battery sizes. You’ve got the smaller battery and then the bigger battery fitted to this car. That means that this is slower because the motor outputs the same power regardless of which battery size you go for. Bigger battery means more weight and then a slower vehicle. So 125 kW of power and 250 new m of torque is what you have to play with. What does all that mean and feel behind the wheels? So if I give this a little punch here, you’ve got a power meter just off to the side. You know, it feels okay. It’s sort of punchy enough. I did notice earlier when we were uh doing our faster driving earlier in the day, sort of topsyturvy filming today, once the battery gets down to about 30% uh and and you’re really sort of pushing pushing the battery and the electric system, it tapers off so much. It sheds a lot of power. So, this definitely isn’t built for endurance. And it’s one of the things that you’ll notice once it does get to lower battery levels that it lacks the punch that you get when you have more charge in the battery. You do get that across pretty much all EVs, but here it’s really noticeable. Now, let’s talk about economy. Uh, this is probably something that surprised me, but not in a good way. I’ve been driving this around for a few days now, including highway driving and just a variety of different roads. And what I’m finding is that it’s really inefficient. So, right now, I’m averaging around 17 kwatt hours per 100 km, but that is the lowest it’s really been. It’s sort of been more sitting around the 1920 mark. For a car this size, that is really bad. And it means that you’re only getting realistically around 300 or 350 km worth of driving range per tank or per charge. And that is if you really try and extend it as much as you can. And I think that is pretty disappointing. I think they need to work on the efficiency here and get it up to the level where a small vehicle like this that really doesn’t weigh that much should be far more economical in terms of its uh energy use. Now, on the ride front, they’ve actually done a a reasonable job here. I thought that the ride was probably going to need a bit of work. The Chinese market cars often aren’t built for Australian conditions, but this one is actually not too bad. So, we’ve got our sine waves coming up here. We do the sine waves at 130. It’s the maximum speed limit in Australia. And uh also just simulates a country road if you ever go for a country road drive. So, let’s dial up 130. So, this is designed to test what body controls like. And you can see right there, like it’s it’s not amazing, but the body itself is controlled quite nicely. You do get a little bit of side to side movement as the car traverses those sine waves, but it’s not the end of the world and it’s not going to upset the balance too much. It’s worth pointing out as well, there is a single pedal drive mode that tends to work pretty well. uh can be a little clunky at times, but it does what it’s meant to do, which is slow the vehicle down, brings it to a stop, and allows you to have that stronger braking that you need uh when you want to bring the car to a full stop without having to touch the brake pedal. Okay, it is bouncy road time. We do this at 90 kph. It’s representative of a shocking quality road here in Australia. So, see how well the suspension handles all this sort of stuff. Yeah, nice. Actually, doesn’t feel too bad. We’ve got our condensed sine wave coming up here as well. Yeah, it’s very nice and composed over that too. Yeah, just surprised how well this rides. They’ve done a great job with it. Okay, now turn to your drive modes. You’ve got normal, sport, comfort, snow, and custom. So, let’s pop it into sport. Do a lap of the ride and handling track just to see uh what this feels like. We test all cars back to back in the same way just to see how they feel when they’re pushed a little bit harder. So, being a rear wheel drive, hopefully this um feels decent through the corners. Steering feel isn’t too bad. There you go. It’s pretty dy. This is the thing. I wasn’t expecting it to be as sort of uh sort of zippy as it is. doesn’t sort of pull your face off being just a single motor, but it’s getting along pretty nicely. And good body control when it hits bumps midc corner, too. Brake pedal feels strong. Um, curious to Yes, there you go. I can see the stability control light flashing there when it catches bumps as you trail off the throttle and it does that when it tries to do regen. Uh, and then you get the brake pedal just disappear on you as well. Probably a little bit of work to be done there. I don’t think they’re billing this as as a sports car or anything, but um I’m pretty surprised how how well the body is controlled here through these faster corners. Shows you they’ve put a bit of effort into tuning that ride and handling combo. So, yeah, not a bad job. Now, let’s talk about road noise. Um, you’ve got a fair bit of it. The this really does lack the type of sound insulation and deadening that I would expect from a car like this. You’ve also got motor noises as well. It’s going to be a bit hard for our audio to pick up. But whenever you get on the throttle, you can hear the motor. It’s quite noisy. And, you know, it’s not the end of the world cuz it’s not like an internal combustion engine where it has different different tones. It’s just something that you do notice on occasion and and I think could be ironed out with a bit of uh bit of refinement and just on road noise as well. You do get a bit coming into the cabin, especially on coarse chip roads. We did put it up against our calibrated sound meter to see how it would go. And uh you can actually compare this to other cars that we’ve tested before. There’s a link in the description that will take you to a list of all the other cars we’ve tested and their equivalent ratings. Now, in terms of visibility, uh I can see clearly down the front there. That’s all good. Wing are nice and big. Visibility out the back isn’t too bad. It’s got a decent sort of camera system as well, so you can easily see uh what’s going on around you. Now, I want to show you what I meant uh earlier when I was talking about the low speed maneuvering on hills. Uh so, I had to parallel park on a hill and I was quite impressed with my parking effort. Uh but when it came to leaving um obviously I had parallel parked on the hill and there was a car in front of me and this hill here is probably a good example of how steep it was. I just want to show you what it does. So if you pretend that the car is is parked here like this. Um you put the car in reverse and then you want to back up. So, you just apply the throttle and it just starts rolling forward to the point where I I basically need to have my foot all the way in the firewall for it to actually go backwards. And because I didn’t know it was going to happen, it just started rolling forward and I thought I was going to hit the car in front. Had to slam the brakes on. So, it’s so weird. They almost like it doesn’t have a hill hold and then it allows the car to just roll forward instead of just holding it in position. And it seems to be linked to this um to this mode here where you’ve got uh heavy press or light press for the throttle. But even when it is in its light press mode, it will still roll forward and requires you to have quite a healthy dab of throttle to bring it back up. So yeah, just a weird one and something that I think they probably need to get sorted because um it sort of catches you off guard and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to just run into the car in front of you when it rolls forward. Okay, so let’s test our semi-autonomous systems. We do this on our bowl at 70 km an hour. So quickly get this set up for 70ks an hour and then we’ll switch on the assisted driving feature. All right, steering wheel is blue. So we use our three out of lanes here to see how willing it is to hold itself in the lane. So in this first lane, it’s not too bad. It will jump over to the next lane. See how this goes. All right. Whoa. Not very good. It just veered towards the line at the last second. It sort of swung back in. So, I guess it’s okay cuz it didn’t go across the line. But, um, little bit clumsy there. Uh, let’s just see what it’s like up on the top lane here. All right. So, wait for that to go blue. Okay. No, that’s just not willing to do that. So, yeah, look, it’s it’s okay. Uh just not not amazing. Okay, time to do a little bit of performance testing. Uh so, we’re going to go 0 to 100, then all the way through to 120 just so we can see what the uh 80 to 120 overtaking time is like. I think the official figure is something like 9 seconds or so. Turn stability control off. have that in sport mode. Okay, here we go. Tiny bit sluggish off the line. I think they try and limit torque. Uh, all right. So, there’s 90, 100, and 120. Okie dokie. Let’s see how that feels. All right. So, we are talking 0 to 100 in 8.6 6 seconds and 80 to 120 in 5.78 seconds. So, you know, okay times, nothing sort of uh too crazy there and about what you expect for a vehicle in this price bracket. Okay, let’s see what the uh brake and tire package is like. Stop from 100. Here we go. Sorry, stuff went flying. actually felt pretty decent from here. Let’s have a look. So, 100 to zero. Nice. 2.54 seconds. 35.62 m. That is a very impressive stopping distance. Uh, anything between 35 and 40 is is really good. So, if you want to see how this car compares to others that we’ve tested before, there is a link in the description below. Now, how fast does it go in reverse? Here we go. All right. 41 km an hour. Okay. So, MGS5 EV. What do we think? Um, look, I don’t love it. Especially not here in the top spec. I think if you were going to get one, you’d probably get the bottom spec and take a hit on your driving range knowing that it is just going to be used in and around the city. stepping up to this is is more expensive, but the driving range still isn’t very good. The efficiency isn’t very good. It’s missing stuff like the auto dimming mirror that annoys you if you’re doing a lot of highway driving. Um, so they’re the negatives. The positives are that it actually drives really nicely and rides beautifully, handles well, and it’s got a lot of standard features. So, I think it’s offset by the fact that, you know, you’ve got all of that stuff. But ultimately, I think there are better options out there. So, let me know what you reckon in the comments section below. Have you had a look at one of these? What do you think about the pricing and the features? Would you buy one? Have you bought one? What is it like? Let me know your thoughts. 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We’ve finally had a chance to drive the fully electric MG S5 EV, which hits the market as a single motor read-wheel drive electric SUV. But is it big enough or good enough to take on some of the more established players? Paul Maric finds out.
Hardness tester, noise and lane keeping results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/121Auf6HGvaBqRToYcuAz94alin7Sw55SpOPECBDlnKE
Read the full review: https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-reviews/2025-mg-s5-ev-review
Skip Ahead:
Intro: 00:00
Exterior: 00:39
Interior: 02:08
Infotainment: 03:08
Practicality: 05:17
Charging: 07:59
On the Road: 08:58
Self driving technology: 18:02
Acceleration & Braking: 19:06
Verdict: 20:56
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