Living with the MG ZS EV: Our thoughts after a few months behind the wheel
Sunday, 18 June 2023
The typical day begins with a cat walking across my face or a jarring alarm emanating from my better half’s side of the bed.
She heads to work before sunrise, having recently decided to ditch her once traditional morning coffee. I scroll through the night’s motoring news developments before either whipping open my laptop to write a quick news article or making breakfast (ham, lettuce, tomato between two bits of wheatmeal, generally).
How an electric car fits into a person’s daily routine is, I think, as big a hurdle as any for those sitting on the fence thinking about making the transition. Range anxiety, limited choice when it comes to public chargers, the bevy of apps – I understand how it can all sound so jarring.
Although, whether it’s as jarring a prospect as the need to pay more than a hundred bucks a week on liquefied dinosaur juice is well and truly up for debate.
If I had to come up with a word to define the time we’ve spent living with our MG ZS EV Essence long-termer, though, ‘jarring’ wouldn’t crack the top fifty. Probably not even the top 100.
To recap, this ZS EV has been used across the Stuff Motoring team as a daily driver, grocery getter, fast-food delivery utensil over several months. I’ve been driving it for my daily Auckland commute from Pahurehure to Grey Lynn, my offsider Nile Bijoux did the same from his post out in Te Atutu. And our partners have been taking it for a spin, too. It’s been a full team effort.
It has weathered a few trips to Hamilton, Nile’s mother’s dog has shed approximately 3kg of fur in the boot and back seats, and an untold amount of spiders hitched a ride in it when we filled it up with harakeke (or flax) for my fiance's primary school class.
My biggest question leading into this project was how the ZS (and how we) would fare with frequent weekly charging at home.
Normally when an EV press car pops up in our calendar, the full battery it comes with lasts the duration of our testing, perhaps with a little ‘splash and dash’ charge at the end. Such is the progress of the modern-day EV batteries and their range.
Some nerdy numbers to sink your teeth into. My partner’s daily work commute is a 26km round trip consisting of roughly 90% motorway driving. My commute, meanwhile, is a 66km round trip. It’s also mostly motorway driving, although typically at least half of the morning leg is spent in stop-start traffic. Contrary to some of the posts you might see on social media, EVs are excellent in stop-start conditions – and certainly more efficient than an internal combustion engine car sitting at idle.
Our charging regime for the MG was as entry-level as they come. No wall chargers, limited public chargers, just a nightly three-pin trickle charge when required. Sometimes we would plug it in as soon as we got home, other times we would schedule charging to kick off at midnight. We wouldn’t plug it in every night, only when its battery level was at the point where it wouldn’t be able to perform the next day’s round trip.
All up, we estimate the ZS costs us about $20 a week in electricity when used by both of us – a significant chop on what we would spend on petrol using our 15-year-old Toyota Corolla. There are plenty of other (quite boring) numbers we can dive head first into, but to do so would skirt what I consider to be the most important takeaway of this whole endeavour.
How we charged this car was perhaps the most agricultural, least optimised method possible. And even in these conditions, the ZS was able to showcase the clear financial benefit of electric when compared to petrol. If we took the plunge and actually bought this ZS, there are all sorts of things we could do that would shrink that power bill even further. Switching power providers to a company that offers free charging in off-peak hours and investing in a beefed up home charger being steps one and two in that process.
That all sounds pretty rosy, doesn’t it? I suppose I can talk about some of the ZS’s struggles to balance the ledger a little.
My partner and I both had complaints about the humble MG’s seatbelts. From my side, the driver’s seat belt (and presumably those for the rest of the five seats) is quite short. Those like me who sport a huskier build will find that the seat belts don’t have a heck of a lot of extra length coiled up in reserve. Those who are vertically challenged meanwhile, like my partner, might get a little frustrated with the lack of seat belt height adjustment.
Speaking of frustration, the MG’s infotainment software is perhaps one of its weakest aspects. It follows trends that we see in lots of other new Chinese cars. Its presentation is neat and tidy. But, things fall apart a touch when you actually start using it. Menus are slow to load and scroll through, the air conditioning page is an unintuitive mess, and the screen struggles in general with recognising touch inputs.
The camera tech is also worth a mention. The 360-degree camera and its adjoining surround-view monitoring system are both surprisingly capable (Opel could learn a thing or two from the 360-degree camera in particular). But they’re let down by the actual camera hardware used, which doesn’t cut the mustard relative to what everyone else is offering in 2023.
And what of the ZS’s build quality? Well, things have been mostly smooth sailing with exception to one of the lugs securing the parcel shelf to the tailgate deciding to give up the ghost within our first few weeks with it. Otherwise, the electric MG has been a smooth and comfy daily runner.
What comes next? Well, after finishing up with this 51.6kWh Standard Range ZS, MG is lobbing us the keys to the Long Range 72.6kWh flagship to see what’s what. Colour us curious.
Bonus images