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With its punchy turbo engine, the $29K MG5 Essence seems a total steal – even if it falls short in many areas, not least of which safety
There used to be a thriving segment of cheap new cars in the Australian automotive market but that now largely seems to be a thing of the past.
To be fair, prices have risen in tandem with expectations for higher levels of standard equipment, performance and standard-issue safety.
But that doesn’t mean the market for affordable new cars has disappeared.
Enter vehicles such as the MG5 sedan. With the base Vibe grade on-sale for $25,990 drive-away, this is the cheapest sedan you can buy brand new in Australia. And that’s something that’s quite welcome to buyers on the sorts of budgets that otherwise limits choice to the risk-addled used car market.
While we’ve done a video review on the base MG5 Vibe, today we’re testing its pricier higher-spec brother, the $29,990 turbocharged Essence.
The Essence adds a more powerful engine, replaces the Vibe’s CVT transmission with a dual-clutch unit and adds additional equipment, as detailed below.
Typical of highly affordable new vehicles, the MG5 can entice as it makes for strong showroom first impressions.
As ever, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I reckon it looks pretty great from the outside, with an almost Audi A5-esque fastback roofline, a front-end that’s almost copycat Hyundai i30 and the rear, a bit of Genesis.
There are exhaust tips as fake as fake can be, while a large and somewhat throwback ‘Turbo’ bootlid badge is a warning to anyone unsure of the vehicle they are about to pick a fight with.
The optional Misty Grey Metallic paint, meanwhile, gives our test car a psychedelic, purple pearlescent look like it’s just come from an Auto Salon custom car event from the last century though, to be fair, it’s actually one of the most intriguing car colours we’ve seen in a while.
A four-door, five-seat small sedan made in China, the MG5 (at 4675mm in length) lines up size-wise against the likes of four-door versions of Hyundai i30, Kia Cerato, Mazda 3 and Toyota Corolla.
So it’s unsurprising that the Chinese upstart plays the value for money card by pitching in a high-spec variant at a price point that is roughly similar to the entry point to its rivals’ lineups.
There are just two grades in the MG5 range, the base $25,990 Vibe and the $29,990 Essence, both prices driveaway. Outlay wise, the MG5 is very sharp by new car standards.
For $29,990 drive-away, the MG5 Essence brings:
Aside from the different engine and transmission, the additional $4000 over the base Vibe gets you:
You do miss out on some safety equipment, which we’ll get to shortly.
The MG5 Essence drives reasonably well and we enjoy the extra power of the turbo engine, even if we have a few gripes with its suspension, transmission, general refinement and dynamics. So, nothing major then…
The Essence’s uprated turbocharged 1.5-litre inline-four produces 119kW at 5600rpm and 250Nm between 3000 and 4000rpm, gaining 35kW and 100Nm over the base Vibe. Pop the bonnet and the little turbocharger is easily visible at the front of the engine bay.
While it’s no sports car, the Essence has fairly good power and accelerates eagerly, the turbo providing some noticeable additional midrange urge between 2000 and 3000rpm, which is helpful for overtaking.
However, the engine does soon run out of lungs in the upper revs, where the engine itself sounds a bit thrashy. There’s not much of a turbo personality to the engine either which, based on sound alone, you’d guess was a naturally aspirated unit.
MG is obviously keen for you to explore the acceleration as the MG5 Essence comes with an in-built 0-100km/h acceleration timer, including “best record” and “last record”.
Interestingly, MG makes no actual performance claim for either MG5 in its official local literature. As a barometer, the best Chasing Cars has managed independently testing the naturally aspirated Vibe is a leisurely 11.32sec…
While the engine isn’t bad, we can’t say the same thing about the transmission. Compared to the constantly variable transmission (CVT) of the base Vibe, the Essence pairs its more powerful engine with a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox.
This complex design is a risky engineering decision for a newer car company in a budget application, and one that hasn’t really paid off.
The transmission programming always leaves the broader powertrain feeling highly strung and a bit stressed, and yet it’s easily caught snoozing and can engage its clutches with a jolt.
Hardly the last word on smoothness or refinement, we would have preferred MG use a smoother, torque converter unit.
That’s especially given that there’s no sporting pay-off – as one might expect for a dual-clutch transmission – as even using the steering wheel paddle shifters in manual mode it’s not particularly responsive up and down the gears.
The MG5 Essence’s ride quality is good, but MG could do a bit more work on the spring and damper combination.
It feels like it’s got very soft springs – aiding some ride compliance, undoubtedly – but then there is a harsh edge over some pot-holes and road joins, as if the tyres are over-inflated (when they aren’t).
As for outright dynamics, for its combination of a torsion beam rear suspension, soft suspension and fairly underbaked 215/50R17 Maxxis Premitra 5 tyres, it’s not clumsy nor particularly capable at the same time.
For its most sporting pretensions, the Essence is not the sort of vehicle that encourages you to deliberately take it to challenging and winding roads.
The MG5 Essence isn’t the most quiet or refined vehicle either. You can hear a lot of external noise, including tyre noise and suspension clatter. Less noise intrusion into the cabin together with some attention to underpinning NVH would no doubt improve matters considerably.
That does make a lot of complaints. It’s actually not too bad overall, though there’s little to actually praise or recommend about the on-road MG5 experience.
While its black and charcoal theme is quite dark, the MG5’s cabin is a smart place to be, with decent material choices, reasonable fit-and-finish and a good amount of nooks and crannies in which to store things.
That’s even if it’s obviously a place that budget has been kept perpetually front-of-mind, with the entire dash-pad and door cards trimmed in hard, scratchy plastic.
It’s easy enough to get comfortable but we would have liked some steering wheel reach adjustment – it’s tilt-only, leaving the steering wheel to feel permanently a little bit far away (for this road-tester, anyway).
The 10.0-inch central infotainment touchscreen takes pride of place in the middle of the interior and for good reason – it’s the highlight of the entire cabin, something MG splashed a little bit of money on.
The slim, landscape-shape display lends the MG5 interior a high-tech feel, with nice high resolution and well-integrating Apple CarPlay.
Even the infotainment software itself isn’t perfect. With the key air-conditioning and heater controls contained in a touchscreen menu, changing the temperature is a bit distracting.
More than once, the home screen shortcut button stopped working entirely, so we couldn’t change fan speed or temperature. Not ideal.
When you do get to the air-conditioning menu screen, there are slider graphics for the fan and temperature which, at about 3.0mm wide, require quite a lot of accuracy on the part of your (left) index finger – and a fair bit of time with your eyes off the road.
Attention-to-detail is lacking a little as well. For example, when one of the rear doors is open, the little overhead car graphic in the binnacle says that both are open.
The instruments are a partial digital/analogue display, with a small central screen displaying trip information and other basics, while revs and speed are displayed using old-school digital readouts (appearing not unlike an old Casio watch). It looks pretty good and works well.
The back seat is nice and large with lots of space, for knee room especially. It’s also surprisingly comfy, using a supportive, deeply padded bench. There are two sets of outboard ISOFIX points and three top tether anchorages.
You can spot some money-saving tactics in row two such as the lack of rear centre armrest, the single rear air-vent, and the fact that the seats are not 60/40 split folding. If you want to fold them down to increase the usability of the 401-litre boot, you need stow the entire, single-piece rear backrest.
One curious aspect of the MG5 is that despite looking like a liftback it’s actually a sedan, ming only the boot lid opens, rather than an entire hatch hinged above the glass. This somewhat impacts the useability of the boot, whose opening is significantly smaller compared to an actual liftback.
Under the boot floor, the MG5 has a space-saver spare wheel.
The MG5 Essence comes with the following safety features as standard:
Famously, the MG5 sedan has been subject to a controversial and widely publicised zero-star safety score from the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), which independently purchased and crash-tested a base MG5 Vibe.
ANCAP criticised the MG5 for not just poor occupant protection – by its latest new-car assessment protocols – but also for lacking some important safety feature omissions.
During the assessment, the MG5 achieved the following results in the four key areas of testing:
When testing the MG5 range, ANCAP penalised the affordable sedan for its crash performance in front-on and frontal-offset collision test, with particular condemnation applied to the protection provided to the head and neck of the child dummies in front and side impacts, with three out of four assessed with a ‘weak’ result.
Driving the MG5, the omission of safety equipment is notable compared to almost every other new vehicle we test. There is no adaptive cruise control, no rear-cross traffic alert, no blind-spot monitoring, no lane-keep assist or lane departure warning.
Why some potential owners might like this situation – especially as some new vehicle manufacturers are struggling to master the calibration of these systems, making you want to turn them off anyway – the MG5 is clearly not in step with current expectations of new car safety.
MG boasts that the Essence offers a 360-degree view parking camera, though the resolution could be better – its fisheye camera perspective is not unlike what you’d find on a video doorbell display.
It’s not ideal when you’re trying to spot obstacles you don’t want to reverse over, though it does fit reversing sensors.
Of course, the MG5 trades the absence of safety systems for sharp pricing. It might still be safer than some used cars at a similar price point.
In 2024, a spokesperson from MG told Chasing Cars the MG5 “will receive a safety pack upgrade which will increase the overall safety of this model inline with ANCAP’s rating system.
“These planned enhancements for the MG5 will reiterate our commitment to customers and ensure further passenger safety with a much more advanced ADAS systems including Autonomous Emergency Braking, Speed Assist systems, Lane Assist systems and Pedestrian Protection safety systems as seen in some of our other models.”
Of course, these amendments are purely proposed at the time of review and the actual impact it will have on the vehicle’s safety, ultimately, remains to be seen.
MG claims fuel economy of 5.9L/100km. During our test, leaning largely on assessing the performance of the turbocharged engine rather than outright frugality, we saw closer to 9.5L/100km. We’d estimate general fuel use around 7.0L/100km.
Unlike the base Vibe, which can run on 91RON, the MG5 Essence requires premium 95RON unleaded fuel. The fuel filler cap can’t be opened externally either.
Servicing is required every 12 months or 10,000km, whatever comes first. MG offers seven years of capped-price servicing. The MG5 Essence’s five-year servicing cost totals $1831 – which is reasonably expensive for an otherwise cheap-to-buy vehicle.
Impressively, the MG5 comes with a seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty, mirroring established brands like Kia and Skoda. MG includes roadside assistance for the duration of the warranty period.
The MG5 Essence is actually okay to drive, with a good amount of usable torque and decent ride quality in most conditions. The interior is pretty good too, with heaps of space in the back, and will certainly satisfy anyone upgrading from an old Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore.
But this continues to be a car trading heavily on price to the sacrifice of areas of the ownership experience.
By new-car standards, it feels like an old car underneath, with suspension that’s unresolved, a dual-clutch transmission lacking refinement and fuel consumption that’s higher than claimed and worse than expected.
But beyond all of this, the compromises in acceptable levels of safety is the big concern for MG5 ownership.
That all said, you get a reasonably well-equipped, brand new car for $29,990 driveaway that includes a seven-year warranty. Whether or not that compensates for most of the MG5’s ails is debatable.
If we had to buy a new car for around the $30K mark, the MG5’s key rivals from Korea and Japan are easier to recommend.
Key specs (as tested)
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