Lest we forget, MG, now in its 96th year, was founded by William Morris, the first Viscount Nuffield, out of a lucrative side-line for his Oxford dealership. Cecil Kimber, general manager for that dealership, had Morris models rebodied with racy Carbodies coachwork and sold as MGs. The name MG being an acronym for Morris Garages, not ‘Modern Gentlemen’ as mooted by Nanjing Automobile when it relaunched the marque at the Shanghai Show a few years back.
Lord Nuffield owned it, but Kimber ran the show, coining the adage that “a sports car should look fast even when standing still”. It didn’t last. It couldn’t last and when Nuffield eventually sold his skunk works back to Morris, it left the maverick Kimber taking orders from the dead hands of the company accountants, which eventually broke him.
MG’s history, while filled with remarkable promise and opportunity, ended its British chapter with much the same sadness, as the once-proud name was touted by The Phoenix Four, a quartet of dubious businessmen from the West Midlands, into the hands of two Chinese auto makers. The Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) got the rights to some of the technology which it packaged into a series of saloons badged as Roewe, and Nanjing Automobile bought the Longbridge production line and rights to the MG name. This all gave the Chinese authorities a monumental headache and eventually it banged heads together and MG is now a separate company owned and run by SAIC, the Chinese state-owned car designer and manufacturer.
It has no shortage of ambition, though, with plans to make over 50 per cent of its total sales battery or plug-in hybrid electric by next year. So, this, the new MG5 EV SW, is the company’s third electrified car, after the ZS EV and HS plug-in hybrid. It’s based on the SAIC Roewe Ei5 which is sold in China and is the only battery electric station wagon on sale in the UK.
Battery electric power has turned the motor industry on its head in the last year to the extent that avoidance of fines for breaching corporate CO2 requirements has become just as important as profit. Electric cars are seen as a way out of the conundrum, but they’re expensive and the fight is to get the price down. A couple of weeks ago Tesla boss Elon Musk boasted about a forthcoming £25,000 battery electric car, but with no date attached. Get with the program, Elon, it’s here already…
This little MG estate starts at £24,495 (after the Government’s £3,000 plug-in car grant – PICG) and it’s got good numbers to back it up. The range is, for example, is 214 miles, not far short of the standard Tesla Model 3. The MG’s battery takes 50 minutes to charge to 80 per cent on a 50kW DC charger and 8.5 hours on a 7.4kW home wall box. Charge on a home wall box, then, and if you do your sums right most of that will be done at about 10p per kWh – in other words about a fiver for a fill up.
Using 48.8kWh of its nominal 52.5kWh gross battery energy, this 1.55-tonne car does 4.38 miles per kilowatt, which isn’t bad and in the UK, its well-to-wheels greenhouse-gas emissions amounts to about 33g/km. It has a top speed of 115mph and 0-62mph acceleration in 7.7 seconds, which is pretty rapid for this sort of family vehicle. It goes on sale from this autumn via the company’s 112 UK dealer network.
There’s one drivetrain, with a 154bhp/260Nm AC synchronous motor driving the front wheels via a single-speed step-down gear. The lithium-ion battery pack is under the floor and suspension is McPherson strut front and a torsion-beam rear, with 16-inch wheels shod with tall 205/60/16-inch Bridgestone tyres.
It’s not much to look at as you can see, with an old-fashioned big-body-on-small-wheels style. Nor is this impression lifted by the weirdly waving swage line down the length of the coachwork.
The basic spec is pretty good, with air conditioning, all-round electric windows, electrically adjustable mirrors, a reversing camera, rear parking sensors, automatic headlights with LED daytime running lights and cruise control with a speed limiter function. The £26,995 Exclusive model tested here adds keyless entry, a sat nav, auto-dim rear-view mirror, automatic windscreen wipers and an electrically adjustable driver’s seat and faux-leather upholstery. Both models are covered by a seven-year, 80,000-mile warranty, which includes the battery.
Like the coachwork, the facia feels quite old school, with analogue instruments and a pleasing mix of conventional switches and buttons, and a rotary gear selector. The materials choice and fit and finish isn’t going to keep Volkswagen or Ford design engineers up at night, however and the Exclusive model’s ersatz upholstery is quite unpleasant. The eight-inch centre touch screen doesn’t have the most intuitive control logic, but that’s hardly damning since even premium rivals are in a lot of cases, worse.
With the battery under the floor, you sit quite high in the cabin, but there’s plenty of room around the front seats. They aren’t very comfortable, though, with a strangely-shaped seat back and the steering-wheel adjustment is highly limited so the driving position isn’t great. The rear bench has a better shape and there’s plenty of head and leg room, but the front seats adjust so low that rear passengers can’t place their feet under the seats, which means taller passengers have to twist their bodies uncomfortably across the seat.
At 464 litres, the boot is larger than most in this size/price bracket, though the loading aperture is quite narrow and the load lip is high. The rear seats fold 60/40 per cent onto their bases but the resulting load bed has a massive step. There’s a standard rubber mat on the boot floor and underneath the base is a spare wheel well with a space-saver spare wheel.
The specification doesn’t run to any sort of lane keeping assistant or automatic emergency braking system and while the MG5 has yet to be crash tested by NCAP, its SUV sister, the MG ZS EV model achieved five stars.
This is a surprisingly simple car to drive and the throttle response is well judged, so it’s easy to manoeuvre, especially with the tight turning circle. There’s a strange pedestrian warning noise, which disappears as you speed up.
And this is a remarkably fast car, not Tesla quick, but more than fast enough to leave even conventional rivals far behind. The response is immediate and the shove in the back keeps on shoving far above the national speed limit.
That 260Nm of torque stresses the grip from those 205/60/16-inch Bridgestone tyres, though. You become accustomed to the front tyres chirping as you pull out of junctions and the steering wheel tugging around in your hands as the torque hits. Controlling it is relatively simple and the traction control system eventually kicks in, but it all demands rather a lot of the driver compared to rivals in the class and in the wet, you need to have a care.
Yet the ride is quite good, with those tall tyres soaking up the worst of the small bumps and a nicely judged steering response. The initial ride quality is soft and there’s a fair bit of body roll, but that’s in keeping with the car’s purpose and you can actually hustle this MG along quick briskly if so moved.
The brakes are powerful and beautifully balanced allowing a seamless slowing, which few rivals can rival. There’s also a three-stage regeneration braking system, which isn’t quite a one-pedal operation, but works well nonetheless.
On a long motorway run, it’s really refined, and while there’s a fair bit of motor whine, the wind and tyre noise is nicely subdued. And motorways don’t murder the MG’s range, either, with an indicated 185-miles at that speed, though hills, cold temperatures and even faster speeds will reduce the range even further.
The small estate market in the UK isn’t that strong, and even £25,000 gets you into some really nice small estates such as the Ford Focus, Vauxhall’s Astra, or the Skoda Octavia. For company car drivers, however, the tax benefits of the battery MG might prove tempting, but rival electric cars such as the Peugeot 208 e, Renault Zoe, Astra e or Nissan Leaf might convince buyers to forgo the cheaper price and larger capacity of the MG.
MG needs to up its design game and its interior spec if it is to really compete in these markets, but there’s a wider point here. If the current generation of battery electric cars has an approximate useful life of about a decade before the battery starts to fail and a replacement is beyond economic sense, then why spend more than this?
That might make you wonder why you want a first-generation battery electric car at all, but if you decide that you do, then the MG5 EV should surely be worth a look.
MG5 EV SW
Price: from £24,495, £26,995 as tested with £3,000 plug-in grant
Motor: single AC synchronous electric motor driving the front wheels via a single-speed transmission
Battery 52.5kWh (gross) 48.8kWh (net) lithium-ion unit
Power/torque: 154bhp/260Nm
0-62mph: 7.7 seconds
Top speed: 115mph
Range: WLTP 214 miles
Efficiency: 4.28 miles per kWh
CO2 emissions: zero at tail pipe, well-to-wheels 33g/km
Keyword: First Drive: MG5 EV SW