Road test review: MG HS Excite

Thursday, 30 July 2020

• MG HS EXCITE

• Base price: $35,990

• Powertrain and economy: 1.5-litre turbo-petrol four-cylinder, 119kW/250Nm, 7-speed dual clutch transmission, FWD, combined economy 7.3L/100km, CO2 168g/km (source: RightCar)

• Vital statistics: 4574mm long, 1876mm wide, 1685mm high, 2722mm wheelbase, luggage capacity 463 litres, 18-inch alloy wheels.

• We like: Fantastic build quality, eager and flexible engine, impressive value for money.

• We don't like: Driver’s seat too high for taller drivers, transmission can occasionally dither, sluggish navigation.

When China’s Nanjing Automobile (later acquired by SAIC Motor) relaunched its newly-acquired MG marque back in 2007 it tried to convince the world that MG stood for ‘Modern Gentleman’. That didn’t work, but it still comes as a surprise to some people that A) MG is Chinese-owned and B) the company now primarily makes SUVs.

So does that mean that MG is now an insulting facade cashing in on an illustrious past?

Well, only if you consider “an illustrious past” to be either building wheezy crapboxes that couldn’t keep oil in or rain out, or increasingly awful rebadged Hondas. If you do, you also probably consider unreliability in a car to be character-building.

**READ MORE:

* First drive review: MG HS

* China's new MG medium-SUV for New Zealand

* New Auckland outlet for China's MG brand

* MG relaunches in New Zealand

**

No, the fact is that you can dismiss both rose-tinted nostalgia (MG was only every really great pre-WWII, everything since was somewhere on the “average to bad” spectrum) and lazy generalisation/casual racism (all Chinese cars are cheap, nasty and badly built) as far as the modern incarnation of MG goes and the HS is the most compelling argument for that so far.

Okay, so to start off, it is cheap: at $35,990 the HS Excite we test here is particularly cheap in the medium SUV segment that it plays in – the, shall we say, ‘visually similar’ Mazda CX-5 starts at $40,995 for the GLX, although to get something with similar levels of equipment you would need to look at the $43,495 GSX – but that doesn’t mean it is in any way nasty or badly built.

Quite the opposite, in fact – the HS boasts an eager, flexible and characterful engine, a comfortable and well-equipped interior and deeply impressive levels of build quality.

Did you forget to add ‘for a cheap Chinese car’ to the end of ‘deeply impressive levels of build quality’?

Absolutely not. The HS has impressive build quality by the standards of any modern car in its price range. And several notches above its price range, for that matter.

Good quality materials are used throughout, while soft-touch materials dominate in contact areas. Everything you see, touch or operate is of an equal or higher quality to any of the competition from Japanese or Korean manufacturers, even if the styling is still quite derivative of a number of them. And the Euros too – check out those circular air vents lifted straight from a Mercedes-Benz…

But derivative styling doesn’t matter much when it is good, and the HS’s interior is a pleasingly modern and ergonomically sensible place to spend time. Comfortable too, with its nicely supportive seats.

So no grizzles then?

Let’s not go too fast there, because those comfortable and supportive seats are a sticking point, particularly for someone my height (184cm) and taller. Well, the seats and the mirror.

The seats are set quite high, even adjusted down at their lowest setting, while the mirror and its base that contains all the radar and camera bits for the driver aids and rain-sensing wipers, etc, come quite a way down the windscreen, with everything conspiring to create a wonderfully irritating blockage in the middle of your vision.

Moving your head to look around it quickly becomes second nature, but it shouldn’t have to. Although a fix for this is as simple lowering the seat height, so is something the factory could conceivably amend quite quickly.

Another niggle is the infotainment touchscreen that, while brilliantly minimalist (with nice, large virtual ‘buttons’ on screen) is a tad sluggish, while the embedded sat nav takes an age to boot up.

What about on the road? Any whinges there?

Not particularly – at least nothing specific to MG.

The HS’s 1.5-litre turbo petrol engine is a little gem, and is hooked up to a seven-speed dual clutch transmission that displays all the excellent qualities of this type of transmission, as well as a few of the foibles – slick and fast in its operation, it can be caught wrong-footed in lower speed situations, much like all of its kind do.

But overall, the nicely flexible engine works impressively well with the transmission and even finds time to sound decent, with a pleasantly characterful growl up in the revs.

Handling wise, the HS is pretty much what you expect from the segment, with pleasantly predictable handling that will ultimately default to understeer when pushed beyond its comfort zone, but feels nicely sharp and responsive when kept within it.

Ride comfort is up there with the segment standards as well, with a particularly pleasant ride around town.

Any other cars I should consider?

There is no shortage of options in the medium SUV segment, but if you are looking in the MG’s price range you will struggle to find much that will match it for quality and levels of standard equipment.

The Suzuki Vitara Turbo comes the closest, with the FWD model starting at $33,990 and packing roughly equivalent levels of kit, but with 103kW and 220Nm it is down on the MG’s power and its interior quality is nowhere near what the HS offers.

While from the ‘we haven’t driven it, but it looks good on paper’ file, fellow Chinese manufacturer Great Wall offers the H6 medium SUV from its Haval brand, with similar levels of equipment and a considerably more powerful 145kW 2.0-litre petrol engine.