MG 4 Urban road test: A Golf-sized EV for Polo money
The MG 4 Urban’s no-nonsense, functional agenda is abundantly clear as you climb inside. Chunky, conventional exterior door handles: check. Roomy second row: present. Practical storage spaces are in generous supply too.
The seats, though a little firm in the cushions and not exactly imaginatively trimmed, certainly pass muster. The front ones lack any adjustment for the cushion angle or lumbar support and have non-adjustable integrated-style headrests, but they remain supportive and comfortable enough.
They locate you in front of a fascia that’s about as greyscale as the seat upholstery – and yet it isn’t without useful physical switchgear. There is refreshingly little pretence of a premium-brand ambience – even in the case of our Premium-trim test car, which adds an electrically adjustable driver’s seat, a heated artificial-leather steering wheel and some discreet ambient lighting features to the interior mix.
The dashboard has a thin strip of soft-touch padded suede at a convenient stroking height. There’s also some welcome padding for the armrests and door cards and some chrome decor for air vents, which matches the smart, solid-feeling chrome audio and heater controls. That apart, the car’s mouldings look like what they are: durable plastics that don’t reflect the light too harshly, don’t mark up or show the dirt, don’t wobble or creak when you prod them and, while somewhat plain, neatly avoid any telling semblance of cheapness.
Drive is selected using a column shifter stalk to the right of the steering column, with instrumentation conveyed quite neatly on a 7in digital instrument screen viewed through the orbit of the steering wheel (which is easily set so as to avoid obstructing it).
In the second row, passenger room is generous enough even for taller, longer-legged travellers. We measured 810mm of typical leg room (which beats a VW ID 3, levels with the much larger Honda Civic and trounces both a Ford Puma Gen-E and a Renault 4), and a respectable 920mm of rear head room. When sitting back there, you’re aware of a slightly raised cabin floor displacing your thighs upwards a little but to nothing like the same extent as you would be in many EV competitors.
Boot space, meanwhile, is very generous indeed. A variable-height floor is provided, so you can create a loading level flush with the folded seatbacks. Or, by removing it entirely, removing the parcel shelf likewise and exposing a deep loading well in the boot floor, you can open up more than a metre of loading height – ideal for carrying golf clubs, potted plants and the like.
MG quotes up to 577 litres of cargo space, floor to roof but with the second-row seatbacks still in place. That’s about 10% more than Ford’s memorably titled Gigabox boot for the Puma Gen-E provides – and, you suspect, not by chance.
Multimedia – 3.5 stars
The MG 4 Urban’s iSmart, 12.8in touchscreen infotainment screen is fairly well featured and easy to use, without being so large as to dominate the dashboard. You can control the heater and audio system through it if you choose to but MG provides fixed physical controls just below the screen to give you the option not to. This approach makes the most frequent interactions (volume adjustment, blower and temperature setting) easy without taking your eyes off the road for more than a glance. (There are also audio system remote controls on the right-hand steering wheel spoke.)
The main touchscreen can be a bit unresponsive but has a useful lower nav bar and a drop-down menu of configurable shortcuts. One of these toggles engages the MG Pilot Custom ADAS program, which is a welcome feature to which we’ll come in a moment (Assisted Driving).
The system mirrors your smartphone reliably but doesn’t always display an icon to easily jump in and out of mirroring mode, which is a bit of a faff for those who tend to default to their phone’s software. (You have to go via the home screen or assign one of the star-marked custom keys to the job.)
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