MG5 EV estate - Reliability & safety

MG knows it has to persuade customers away from brands with more established reputations and it's offering a seven-year/80,000-mile warranty to help do this. Electric cars should inherently be more reliable than petrol or diesel models because they have far fewer moving parts under the bonnet. We expect MG's electric motor and battery pack will prove tough and resilient.

MG5 reliability

It’s hard to judge the reliability of the MG5 until we have owner accounts or it appears in our Driver Power owner satisfaction report. While the petrol-and-electric-powered MG ZS scored a top 10 result for value, it came 61st out of the top 75 cars in 2022; plus MG as a brand posted an even-more disastrous result. It came 28th in our run-down of 29 manufacturers, with a poor reliability score (35% of owners reported a fault in the first year of ownership).

However, it’s not known what proportion of owners bought an electric car, which should be more reliable. Customers also complained about the infotainment systems, but the brand-new system in the facelifted MG5 is much slicker than previous efforts.

Safety

The MG ZS SUV could only manage a three-star Euro NCAP safety rating, and we aren't expecting the 5 EV to do much better. However, it does come equipped as standard with the MG Pilot array of safety systems which include autonomous emergency braking, lane keeping assist, traffic jam assist, automatic high beams and adaptive cruise control. Hopefully, this means the MG5 estate will fare better than its SUV sibling.