MG ZS EV Essence car review

First impressions

You have two choices of model in EV – the Excite and Essence. You pay $4000 more for the Essence which gets you numerous upgrades, chief of which is the panoramic sunroof. The sunroof makes it feel spacious and airy. I thought it was worth the price as it’s not a big car. I felt hemmed in as a very tall individual, so the illusion of space was welcome.

The electric versions are instantly recognisable by having a fully enclosed, body-coloured plastic ‘grille’ at the front – it doesn’t need a regular grille to cool the radiator since there isn’t one. Aesthetically, it’s not the prettiest part of the car but the rest of it, inside and out, is quite nice.

The cabin has a large, clear infotainment screen and the traditional gearstick is replaced with a low-profile dial. The dashboard itself is digital too. The most common controls, such as stereo volume and fan settings, can be adjusted by a series of switches below the infotainment screen.

How we test

Each vehicle we trial gets the same treatment: a week of commuting in rush hour from Lower Hutt to Consumer HQ (a round trip of 28km); a run to the supermarket; and a drive over the Remutaka Hill and back, to see how it goes on a longer weekend trip. In total this makes for about 270km of motoring.

We record fuel use (both actual and on the trip computer) and measure electricity usage where appropriate, with PHEVs and EVs. The actual fuel use is measured by filling the tank to the brim at the start of the trial and then again at the end, and comparing numbers. It’s an inexact science that we use as a check, but it’s still a real-world appraisal – just one you take with a grain of salt.

Commuting

One curious thing I noticed was that the ZS has some very loud indicators! Or perhaps they only seemed loud since the clacking sound pierced the serene silence of driving an electric car. It’s no deal breaker, I just wished they were quieter.

As a daily driver, it’s great getting off the line at lights and roundabouts. The instant push you get with an electric motor is most welcome when you’re driving in town. Since it’s an EV, it’s also cheap as chips to run. It cost me $1.70 a day to commute to work and used about 10% of the battery.

The infotainment system took some getting used to. Namely, when I was trying to change the climate settings on the touchscreen to make the air come out at my feet because my hands were getting chilly. It wasn’t that intuitive but, luckily, I’m a real fiddler so a few prods at the screen unveiled how to do it.

Supermarket trip

The boot isn’t particularly long, but it is deep. That would have made shopping hard to pack but the good trick of the MG is that you can raise the boot floor up so it’s easy to slide bags in and out.

When you need to buy something bulky or tall, you can lower the floor again. Nice! There is a price to pay for the cheapest EV on the market, by way of a manual boot that you need to lift yourself.

There’s a great feature that you can play with when parking. The car has a 360° camera, but you can change the perspective with the press of a button so it looks like you’re viewing the car from the outside. It’s very cool and while I’m unsure of the practicality, you can show it to people who are in the car for the first time to wow them with the technological wonders of your MG.

Like the MG HS EV, it doesn’t have front parking sensors so the change of perspective in the camera can help you judge the distance.

Longer journey

When settling in for the road trip, I turned on the adaptive cruise control and was pleased with how well it worked. The sensors even pick up when you’re following a car or truck and a wee picture is displayed on the dash in front of you – it even picked up that I was following a motorbike at one stage! I was impressed by that detail.

I was, however, squished by the end of my journey and I really needed to get out and stretch after an hour. The seats are comfy but I’m just too big for this car. It definitely suits a smaller individual, as you’ll find out yourself if you take one for a test drive.

MG claims up to 320km of range for a full battery. The car itself was telling me it had about 280km when the battery was full, and I used half of the charge in the 140km trip – so the car’s estimation is pretty accurate. When you look at the built-in navigation system, it shows how far you’ll get with your current level of charge.

Once I got home and plugged it into the charging port at the front of the car, my three-point plug took 16 hours to bring it back to full. It’d be much faster with a dedicated charging box on the wall.

Final thoughts

It was easy to see why these cars are selling well when I drove it for a week. It does everything you need it to do, it’s full of tech and is easy to live with – I expect that you’ll see a lot of them on the roads over the next few years. Would I buy one? No, but that’s only because I don’t really fit.

It’s currently the cheapest EV around, so it’ll be on a lot of people’s radar to check out too. The main competition is the BYD Atto 3, which sells for $55,500. But the somewhat wacky internal styling of the BYD may push more people towards the conventional MG.

MG claims 17kWh/100km for the MG ZS EV. The trip computer measured it at 17.9kWh/100km. Our actual measured usage came in a bit higher at 24.7kWh/100km.

The vehicle was kindly lent to us by MG NZ.