MG Motor UK IM5 review

The IM5 has followed Tesla down the path of ultra-minimalism, so there’s very little actual stuff in here. The seats, dash, doors and steering wheel are all finished in leather, and only the lower reaches of the interior get the hardcore plastic treatment.

The floor mats don’t photograph well (check out the gallery), but good lord are they comfy – we’d happily have those in a living room.

The seats are well padded and we’ve no complaints about the driving position, although rear visibility is atrocious: the rear windscreen is barely more than a slit. To combat this, the IM5 has an easily-cued up rear-view camera so you can check what’s behind you, although judging distance with it is hard. The fact that there’s a tech solution for such an obvious design flaw speaks volumes.

So everything is in the screen?

Correct. The mirror adjustment, the drive modes, the ADAS, the nav… the only physical controls are a pair of scrollers on the steering wheel, releases for the doors (no handles in here), paddles for the cruise control, plus stalks for the drive selector and indicators. That’s your lot.

That puts a huge emphasis on the interface itself, spread across a sweeping 26.3in screen and 10.5in touchscreen. The latter is what you’ll interact with most: all the menus are listed on a column on the left (again, Tesla-style) with dozens of inputs covering all the IM5’s functionality. Like the Cyberster, an entirely new system was needed for foreign markets.

MG will argue that the customisability of the homescreen (you can set up your own shortcuts) means you can focus on what matters to you; we say it’s just the latest manufacturer to use that as a Get Out of Jail Free card for flawed thinking.

You spend so much time fiddling with it, it forces you to divert your gaze away from the road… then it’ll beep at you for not looking at the road. You can't win. On top of the bongs for the speed limit warning (it sounds like a toddler jabbing away at one of those Fisher-Price keyboards), speed limit change warning, and impending phantom head-on collisions. Hmm.

Credit where it’s due: everything is crisp and clear, and the nav layout is easy to follow. Though it didn’t pick up on a closed road on our journey when Google maps did. No doubt a bug fix that's already on MG’s to do list.

It’s almost five metres long and almost three of that is wheelbase. Space must be good?

Certainly is up front. Loadsa room to stretch out and while the seats could do with more lateral support, there’s enough for the kind of driving you’ll be doing. S’all good.

The rear is less roomy. Problem is the floor is quite high up, so your knees will be raised and you’re reliant on the driver or front passenger jacking up the front seats to give your toes some wriggle room. Still, it’s pretty airy back here thanks to the pano glass roof.

The boot is deep but narrow, with no underfloor storage. 457 litres is yours to play with (1,290 with the back seats down) – comfortably above average in the class, but not the outright leader for convenience. Can't find the release button? It's one of the dots in the IM logo on the tailgate - lovely little detail, that.

There’s an 18-litre frunk for odds and ends.

Any party tricks?

A couple. There’s a self-park feature that scans the spaces around you, and then whirls you into whichever one you pick. We tried this in the IM6 SUV and it popped us bang in the middle of the space, albeit at a speed that had us praying for the cars either side.

There’s also a ‘crab mode’ that uses the rear-wheel steering to make otherwise impossible parking manoeuvres… possible. We’re yet to test it, but don’t go picturing a full-on sideways parallel park.