MG HS Review & Prices

The MG HS is one of the strongest value-for-money options among family SUVs. It’s big inside, comes with lots of standard equipment, and it even looks smart. There’s a choice of petrol, self-charging hybrid and plug-in hybrid engines for a wide choice, but the petrol is thirsty, the interior is a bit fiddly and alternatives feel sharper to drive.

MG might not have the upmarket image its badge enjoyed many decades ago, but buying the HS is a bit like ordering a family meal at a decent pub. You’re not expecting Michelin-starred sophistication, but everybody gets plenty, the surroundings are nicer than you might expect and the bill at the end is very reasonable.

These days, there isn’t any shortage of other SUVs offering a similar more-for-your-money approach, particularly from Chinese brands. The HS goes up against cars such as the Omoda 7, Geely Starray, BYD Sealion 5 and Jaecoo 7, but if you’d rather stick with a more established manufacturer you could opt for the Citroen C5 Aircross or Kia Sportage.

The MG’s sleek styling is right up there with the classy Omoda 7 and eye-catching C5 Aircross. It has slim, pointy headlights, a detailed rear light bar and generally sharp detailing. For something designed to tackle school runs and supermarket car parks, it’s surprisingly handsome.

The interior makes an equally strong first impression. You’d never guess the HS was so cheap from behind the wheel. The upholstered dashboard looks classy and feels good, and the pair of 12.3-inch displays are set under a single seamless surround. It looks much more expensive than the price tag suggests.

The illusion slips a little when you start poking around the lower part of the cabin, because there are plenty of cheap, hard plastics and creaky trim pieces. You can say the same about most of the alternatives, though - what’s more annoying is that the MG’s infotainment system is sluggish to respond and relies too heavily on the touchscreen. With very few physical shortcut buttons, even simple adjustments can involve more tapping and swiping than they should.

You can’t criticise the amount of space on offer, though. Four six-foot adults can get comfy in the MG HS without any difficulty at all, and the 507-litre boot is a good size. Even better, you don’t lose boot capacity by choosing one of the hybrid engines like you do in all this car’s alternatives.

There are three engines to choose from. The most basic is a 1.5-litre petrol with either a manual or automatic gearbox, but it feels sluggish for a car this size with not enough power for a fully laden HS. It’s not very efficient, either. Much more appealing is the self-charging hybrid, which has a lot more power and should return around 50mpg.

The plug-in hybrid is the star of the range, though. It combines a 1.5-litre petrol engine with a powerful electric motor and a big battery for lots of power and an official electric-only range of 75 miles. That latter figure makes it one of the longest-range PHEVs on the market, and is super-useful, allowing you to cover most everyday journeys without any petrol at all.

The downside is that the HS still isn’t particularly rewarding to drive. Its soft suspension makes it reasonably comfortable around town and it settles down nicely on the motorway, but it can feel a little floaty over bigger bumps. The steering is light and easy when parking, yet gives you very little idea of what the front wheels are doing on a country road. It’s perfectly acceptable family transport, just not much fun.

Verdict

The MG HS is one of the most convincing affordable family SUVs if you care more about space, equipment and a smart interior than driving enjoyment. The Citroen C5 Aircross is more comfortable and the Ford Kuga is better on a twisty road, but the MG combines plenty of room and kit with a price that’s difficult to ignore. The excellent plug-in hybrid makes an especially strong case for itself.

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The MG HS starts at £26,495, making it more than £4,500 cheaper than the entry-level Citroen C5 Aircross. It’s also comfortably less expensive than mainstream family SUVs such as the Kia Sportage and Ford Kuga, although newer Chinese alternatives such as the Omoda 7, Geely Starray and BYD Sealion 5 mean the MG no longer has the budget end of the market to itself.

The range is refreshingly straightforward. Basic SE trim starts at £26,495 with the petrol engine, while Trophy costs £2,500 more. The hybrid engine adds another £3,000, and the plug-in hybrid a further £3,000 on top of that.

SE models are already well equipped, with twin 12.3-inch displays, a reversing camera, adaptive cruise control, keyless entry, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto among the standard kit. Trophy adds niceties including heated front seats, electrically adjustable leather-style seats, a powered tailgate, 360-degree cameras, an eight-speaker sound system and wireless phone charging.

At £32,495 in SE form, the plug-in hybrid HS undercuts the plug-in hybrid Citroen C5 Aircross by more than £6,000 while offering a considerably longer official electric range.

A decent engine and impressive plug-in hybrid - but the HS doesn’t handle corners or ride bumps as well as the best family cars

In town

The HS has pretty soft suspension, so it can handle bigger bumps without too much thudding - at the expense of feeling a little uncontrolled. Hit a speed bump too fast and you’ll feel the car bouncing a little. The steering is quite heavy right off the centre before becoming very light, which is a little disconcerting but doesn’t take too long to get used to.

Visibility isn’t amazing - the windscreen pillars are quite thick, and you can’t easily see the front corners of the bonnet. There’s also a big blind spot over your shoulder thanks to very chunky C-pillars.

However, all models get a reversing camera and the Trophy spec comes with a really useful 360-degree monitor which can even give a ‘transparent chassis’ effect - using the camera feeds to show you what’s underneath the car as well as around it.

The plug-in hybrid is the best engine to choose for town driving. With up to 75 miles of pure electric range - and plenty of power from the electric motor - it truly feels like driving a regular electric SUV, making it very smooth and pleasant. The automatic petrol, by contrast, is a bit jerky, while the manual has a light action albeit with a slightly rubbery shift.

On the motorway

Both the regular petrol and the plug-in hybrid HS are impressively refined on the motorway, with very little engine noise allowed to penetrate the cabin. Wind and road noise is quite well-contained as well, making the HS much quieter than many budget SUVs.

There’s ample power from either engine, but the petrol’s 169hp does rather trail the 299hp on offer from the plug-in hybrid. The former feels adequate to haul this large family SUV up to speed, but it does need working quite hard on a sliproad or to execute decisive overtakes.

The PHEV, meanwhile, has loads of power in reserve, even when it’s running as a pure EV it feels impressively peppy right up to the legal limit. The self-charging hybrid sits in the middle, with 224hp.

The HS’s soft suspension irons out bumps on faster roads well, but like at lower speeds it has a tendency to bounce around if it hits a sharper pothole or crevice.

MG’s full suite of driver assistance aids come with the HS, and the adaptive cruise control is a pretty good system - it works well and the alerts aren’t too annoying. More on the rest of the car’s safety assists later, however…

On a twisty road

The HS isn’t much fun to drive on a twisty road. You can go for the manual gearbox for maximum driver involvement, or the PHEV for the most power - but both have dead, lifeless steering that doesn’t communicate what the front wheels are doing, and limited grip that leads to the car washing wide in fast corners.

The body can lean quite a bit in bends, too, so for the sake of your family in the back it’s probably better to take it easy on a twisting road. A Ford Kuga is much more fun to fling about in the corners.

Lots of space in the back, but limited storage for small items and alternatives have bigger boots

Front-seat occupants in the MG HS are quite well-treated. The seats get electric adjustment and are wide and reasonably supportive. It’s a shame that they don’t adjust for tilt, though, as long-legged drivers will feel like they need a bit more under-thigh support.

There are a pair of cupholders ahead of the gear lever and a wireless phone charger ahead of it, plus a small space under the armrest. The glovebox is a reasonable size, as are the door bins - the only thing that’s really missing is a quick place to stash keys or wallets that isn’t out of sight. It’s also a shame that, while there are two USB ports, they’re USB-A and not the more modern and universal USB-C that more and more cars are including.

Space in the back seats

A six-foot passenger can sit behind a six-foot driver with room to spare, so it’s fair to say that rear seat space in the MG HS is easily on par with a Citroen C5 Aircross or Kia Sportage in this regard. The centre seat is quite narrow, but the bench is pretty flat so it doesn’t feel like you’re uncomfortably perched way up.

Rear passengers get a totally flat floor with plenty of foot room, large rear windows for a good view out and a fold-down centre armrest with a couple of cupholders. There are also door bins which can accommodate a bottle of water, plus a couple of USB-A ports in the centre for keeping gadgets charged.

Boot space

With a 507-litre boot, the new HS has addressed one of the issues of its predecessor - and impressively, despite the large battery, the plug-in hybrid doesn’t lose any boot space. That means that while the petrol’s boot is smaller than a Citroen C5 Aircross (580 litres) or Ford Kuga (526 litres), the PHEV’s is actually bigger than the equivalent version of either of those cars, which only get 460 and 475 litres of space respectively.

It’s roomy, but not very clever - you don’t get any bag hooks or tie-down points, and while the seats do fold down totally flat you have to walk around or reach through to do so. There’s a small space under the floor which can accommodate a few bits and pieces, such as the hybrid’s charging cable.

The most luxurious MG interior yet, but software still leaves a little to be desired

The HS’s dashboard looks like a million dollars compared with the old car’s - it’s modern and uses some pretty high-quality materials in places. The dash is dominated by two 12.3-inch screens, one for driver information and the other for infotainment, while other physical controls are limited to those around the steering wheel and a row of shortcut switches underneath the central display.

You don’t have to prod around for long to find cheap materials - the door cards, glovebox lid and lower part of the centre console all feel hard and scratchy, but that’s to be expected in a car as cheap as this.

The infotainment software is the same as you’ll find in the MG3 and MG4, which is to say it’s not bad but could be improved. There are too many fiddly menus to contend with, some of which don’t feel like they’re well optimised for a touchscreen.

While there are physical shortcut buttons to demist the front and rear windscreens, plus one to turn the climate control on and off altogether, we’d prefer if these took you to the car’s various menus instead as they don’t really save you too many button presses.

The driver display isn’t as good as alternatives, either. While it can display a full-screen map - which is nice - you can’t get a proper analogue rev counter, which can be annoying in manual models. There’s quite a lot of wasted space, too, with tiny readouts surrounded by big swathes of nothing.

Starting with the regular petrol HS - the official mpg figure of 38mpg isn’t too amazing, but when we ran an automatic one as a long-term daily driver we managed to beat the claimed figure and achieved 40mpg. That’s pretty good for a car this size without a hybrid system, and manual models are more efficient still.

CO2 emissions of 168g/km for the manual and 173g/km for the automatic mean you’re unlikely to recommend this as a company car, however, as tax bills will be quite high.

There’s also a self-charging hybrid available. It’s much more powerful than the petrol, and emissions are much lower at 126g/km. Claimed economy of 51mpg is much better too, though our experience with this engine in the smaller ZS and MG3 suggests it won’t be as frugal as the numbers claim. Given the petrol’s efficiency and the PHEV’s tax-friendly figures, we don’t see too much point in this interim model.

The PHEV, however, has the potential for extremely low running costs indeed. Official tests peg the fuel consumption at more than 500mpg, a product of its huge 75-mile electric range. That’s among the highest ranges of any PHEV on sale, beaten only by a few much pricier cars.

This is thanks to a battery that’s actually bigger than the one you got in a first-generation Nissan Leaf full electric car - an impressive showcase of how far PHEVs have come. It endows the HS with official CO2 figures of just 12g/km - punting it into the 5% band for company car tax. This means it’ll be a good couple of hundred pounds per month cheaper as a company car than the equivalent Sportage or Kuga PHEV.

Fuel economy obviously depends on how you drive it, but 75 miles of EV-only range is enough to encompass the overwhelming majority of daily journeys without ever having to use the petrol engine. And with impressive performance from the electric motor, you won’t feel the need to call on the engine just so you can keep up with traffic, either. When we get a chance to test the HS PHEV on a longer route we’ll tell you how efficient it is (or isn’t) with a discharged battery.

One slight shame is that you can’t fast-charge the HS, like you can with some other large-capacity PHEVs. At a maximum rate of 7kW from a wallbox charger, it’ll take more than four hours to charge - not a problem if you’re topping up overnight, but it means you can’t really take advantage of public charge points to replenish your batteries on a long run.

MG HS Euro NCAP Score (2024): 5/5

Adult occupant: 90%
Child occupant: 85%
Vulnerable road users: 83%
Safety assist: 74%

The MG HS - like the previous score - holds a full five-star safety rating from Euro NCAP. A particularly impressive rating of 90% for adult occupant protection is great to see, as is 85% for child occupants, and should quash outdated notions about MG models being behind the back in terms of safety.

The usual roster of safety equipment is all standard - autonomous emergency braking, speed limit assist, lane-keeping aids and more. Some of these systems work better than others, though. We found the lane-keeping to be unobtrusive and we were happy to keep it on, however the driver attention warning was so annoying that it actually reduced the attention we paid to the road as we frantically tried to shut it up by turning it off.

With all these systems in slightly fiddly menus within the touchscreen there’s actually more risk you might hit something while trying to get rid of them. Best to do this before you set off, then - but we wish MG would fit a shortcut button, like some manufacturers have started doing.

*the basic three-year warranty is extended by a year with each approved service

MG has enough faith in its cars to offer a seven-year, 80,000-mile warranty with all of them. However, the brand performs poorly in the Driver Power owner satisfaction survey, with more than a third of MG owners reporting a problem with their vehicle.

It’s too early to make a definitive call on MG HS reliability, though. The engines used in this model are all-new - which can be a good or bad thing, either remedying the problems of older engines or introducing a whole host of new ones. Time will tell.

We spent three months living with the MG HS as a daily driver, giving us ample time to test it in the real world - seeing if it’s as practical as it looks, finding out just how efficient it is compared to the official figures and whether there are any annoying features that will drive you crazy. Here’s what we found out.

What we liked

Practicality was a highlight. The HS is a big car for small-car money - compared to anything else you can get for this price, the huge boot and back seats were really impressive. With the arrival of video producer James Drujon’s first child, it was quickly pressed into service carrying child seats, pushchairs and all sorts of other kit and clobber, and it did a sterling job.

Despite being the entry-level petrol engine, we were also impressed with the MG’s fuel economy. A car this size doing 40mpg is actually really impressive, especially since it’s more than the 37mpg MG claims.

We also like how smart it looks, both inside and out. It definitely doesn’t come across as a budget car.

What we didn’t like

The MG’s tech is irritating. The infotainment system is slow to start up, the onscreen buttons are fiddly to use and the screen isn’t the most responsive to the touch. MG’s latest cars are a big improvement in this regard, and we look forward to the HS getting a similar screen to the new MG4 or S5 EV.

The wayward suspension was annoying too. It’s comfortable at low speeds, but on a country road it just feels sloppy, taking a couple of seconds to settle down after you hit a bump. The automatic gearbox on our car was also a bit unresponsive.

And like so many modern cars (especially Chinese ones) the safety technology was just infuriating. The bings and bongs are particularly loud and annoying, and there’s no quick shortcut to turn them off - so at the start of every drive you need to spend a few minutes trawling through the menus. This is a pain to do.

Our final thoughts

For the price, the MG HS is amazingly good. But our three-month test didn’t let us experience what so many MG owners tell us in the annual Driver Power survey - that breakdowns and faults are frequent, take too long to be repaired and that service from the dealers is unpleasant. As a product it’s great, but as an ownership experience the evidence says you should be careful.