2020 MG HS vs 2021

What's the difference?

MG has built the HS to tick as many feature boxes as it possibly can at an incredibly compelling price.

It’s definitely rough around the edges when it comes to the drive experience, suggesting that the brand hasn’t taken the time to make all those parts work together nicely, but ultimately this won’t chase potential customers who already love its styling and features out of dealerships.

If nothing else, the HS represents a clear progression for MG from the ZS, but it remains to be seen if the brand can convert that progress to taking sales away from its major rivals.

The MG HS Excite has beautiful styling with a premium look. It’s loaded with advanced safety tech and is better value than rivals such as the Mazda CX-5 and Toyota RAV4 (which demand more money for similar equipment).

There are weaknesses. The driving experience isn’t as good as those rivals and the quality in-car feel of these competitors exceeds that of the MG.

The HS Excite is a good choice for an urban car. It’s not too big, but offers excellent practicality, and there’s great city safety tech, even if the AEB in my test car got a bit confused.

Only the jerky transmission and the fuel economy stops it from being a great urban car.

There is a plug-in hybrid version of the HS. Sure, it’s more expensive, but it’s one of the most affordable electric vehicles in Australia, and my colleague Tom White covers it in his range review.

The HS looks pretty good, don’t you think? And, I know what you’re thinking – It looks a bit like a CX-5 with the glitzy grille and curvy shape – and you’d be right. It’s nothing if not derivative.

That doesn’t take away from those looks, and when MG has a dealership filled with just three cars that are all consistently styled, it’s bound to draw people in.

The glitz is upped by the standard LED DRLs, progressive indicators, fog lights, and silver diffusers front and rear.

Possibly the best part for prospective base-model buyers is that you can barely tell the difference between the base and top on looks alone. The only giveaway is larger wheels, and full LED front lighting.

Inside was better than expected. While its smaller ZS sibling looked good, the material choices were less than impressive. In the HS though, the trim quality has been upped significantly, and so has the fit and finish.

Again, there’s a lot of parts here that are derivative of other automakers but the turbine vents, an Alfa-Romeo-esque steering wheel, soft-touch surfaces, and faux-leather trims lift the ambiance to a competitive level.

Not everything is great. I wasn’t sure about some of the buttons, and plastic inserts in the centre console and door trims was as chintzy as ever. It’s probably not going to bother anyone getting out of an older vehicle, but there are more consistent trims to be had from more mainstream players.

The MG HS's design isn’t exactly unique with some areas, such as the grille and headlights, bearing a close resemblance to the Mazda CX-5's styling.

Lookalike it may be, but the MG HS Excite’s design is stylish and modern. That goes for the interior, too, which has a premium look with high-tech touches such as the big 10.1-inch media touchscreen.

The feel of the cabin materials doesn’t match the high-end look, however, with flimsy plastic switches for fan speed and volume control, for example.

Tactile controls with good feel aren’t just nice, they’re important in urban cars where reaching quickly to turn the volume down or to adjust the fan makes life easier in stressful traffic.

The front seat design doesn’t seem quite right, either. The driver and front passenger seats are too high, even on their lowest setting, but more on this in the driving section.

The MG HS’s dimensions make it good for tight city streets and tiny car spaces. That said, measuring 4574mm end-to-end, 1876mm wide and 1685mm tall, it’s one for the larger medium-sized SUVs on the market.  

The HS is as you’d expect from most mid-sizers with no major red flags thrown up. Visibility is pretty good out the front and rear thanks to large wing mirrors and window apertures. Adjustability for the driver is decent, too. You’ll miss out on electric driver’s seat adjustment but you do score a telescopically adjustable steering column.

The seating position is high, and the comfort from the seats was middling. Neither good nor particularly bad.

The faux-leather trim on the seats, dash and doors is simple and will be easy to clean, but did seem a bit thin in places.

An annoyance is only being able to control the air conditioning through the screen. There are no physical buttons. It’s especially clumsy and slow to operate while you’re driving.

Storage-wise front passengers get a bottle holders and trenches in the doors, two big cupholders in the centre console with a trench for phones or keys, an adjustable length armrest console which is air-conditioned, and a small tray with two USB ports and a 12-volt power outlet.

Rear passengers score decent space. I’d say it’s about on par with Kia’s Sportage from my recent test of it. I’m 182cm tall and I had airspace for my head and legs behind my own driving position. The seats can be reclined slightly, and the trim is the same as it is in the front seats.

Amenity-wise rear seat passengers get dual adjustable air vents and two USB ports, so certainly not forgotten.

The boot is 463 litres (VDA) which is almost identical to the Kia Sportage (466L) and on-par but not remarkable for this segment. The boot floor is high, making for easy access for light items but hard access for heavy ones. The Excite gets an electric tailgate - it’s a bit slow but a nice feature to have.

Practicality is one of the MG HS Excite's strong points. There’s plenty of people space up front, and in the second row, where even I (at 191cm/6'3") can sit behind my driving position with ample headroom back there.

Cabin storage is good with a decent-sized centre console box up front, as well as large door pockets, a deep storage tray in front of the gear shifter, and two cupholders.

In the back there's a fold-down armrest housing another two cupholders, plus a built-in container for loose items.

There are directional air vents in the rear, plus two USB ports, while another two USB ports can be found up front.

Boot capacity is 463 litres (to the top of the seat backs), and that was plenty of room for my little family of three.

The MG HS tested here is the Excite grade, found high up in the line-up, and it’s the front-wheel drive version which, at $32,990, is $3000 less than the all-wheel drive Excite X ($35,990).

Is that expensive for an MG HS? Nope, not in a range which starts at $29K and tops out at $46K.

The Excite grade is the best value in the range, especially this more affordable FWD version.

Coming standard are all of the features from the two grades below it, such as the proximity key, 10.1-inch media screen, adaptive cruise control, leather-look seats, roof rails, leather steering wheel and rear parking sensors.

Then there’s all the Excite level equipment such as LED headlights, sat nav, dual-zone climate control, rain-sensing wipers, power tailgate and 18-inch alloys.

The sat nav, power tailgate, proximity key and rain-sensing wipers are all helpful urban features, but the lack of front parking sensors isn’t ideal.

For about the same price as the MG HS Excite there’s the Mazda CX-5 Maxx, Toyota RAV4 GX, and Hyundai Tucson Active.

In my opinion, the MG HS Excite isn’t priced low enough to tempt buyers away from such superb rivals, but it’s still better value considering the features you’re getting.

The HS ticks boxes here, too. It’s only available with one engine, and it looks good on paper.

It’s a 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder producing 119kW/250Nm. It drives the front-wheels only (there’s no all-wheel drive model for now) via a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic.

Sounds as cutting edge as any European rival, but there are some issues which we’ll explore in the driving section.

The Excite features the less powerful of two engines available in the MG HS – a 1.5-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol making 119kW/250Nm.

Sure, it doesn’t have the grunt of the 2.0-litre but if you’re just looking for something to get you around the place you aren’t going to be super concerned about high-performance.

Our test car was also the FWD version, which is fine because AWD isn’t necessary in the city.

The seven-speed automatic transmission is a dual-clutch type, prone to jerky shifts in some cars, and the MG HS is one of them. MG needs to improve this transmission for a smoother city drive.

MG says the HS will consume 7.3 litres per 100 kilometres on the combined cycle. Our drive day was not a fair representation, and we drove multiple cars so we can’t give you a real-world figure just yet.

With the small capacity engine and abundance of ratios, we hope it can at least undercut thrashy old 2.0-litre non-turbo rivals.

The HS has a 55-litre fuel tank and requires mid-grade 95RON premium unleaded petrol.

In my fuel test of the MG HS I covered 303.2km, a good chunk of which was a freeway trip back from Canberra to Sydney, followed by a day or two of inner city driving.

The Excite used 24.1 litres, which translates to 7.9L/100km. Not far off the 7.3L/100km MG says you should get after a combination of open and urban roads.

If you never leave the city, your fuel usage will climb. MG says the 1.5-litre engine will use 9.2L/100km in pure urban driving.

That figure alone is too high for me to call our test car a great urban vehicle.

There is a plug-in hybrid version of the HS, which is much closer to the ideal variant for urban dwellers.

The HS unfortunately proves how easy it is to take the cumulative decades of driving refinement built-in to Japanese and Korean rivals for granted.

Things seem good initially with the visibility and nice steering wheel, but it quickly falls apart from there.

The first thing I noticed on my drive loop was the distinct lack of feedback I received from the car. The steering provided seemingly no feel from the front wheels at all and was inconsistently weighted at different speeds. Most low-speed city drivers won’t mind its lightness, but could notice its lack of confidence at speed.

The 1.5-litre engine doesn’t lack power, but it’s extracting it that becomes a problem. Unlike rival small capacity turbo engines from the likes of Honda, peak torque doesn’t arrive until 4400rpm, and you do notice the delay as you wait for power to arrive a full second after pressing the go pedal.

The transmission is also inconsistent. It’s a dual-clutch, so at times can be quick and gives that nice stepped feel as you work your way through the gears, but it’s easy to catch out.

It grabs the wrong gear often, and at other times will shudder when shifting down, sometimes for seemingly no reason at all. It’s also slow to kick down gears when you press the accelerator.

A lot of this can be put down to calibration. It’s as though MG has all the parts to give the HS a modern drivetrain, but hasn’t taken the time to get them to play nicely together.

The ride is a mixed bag. It’s incredibly soft, which makes for a comfort tune over larger bumps and a very quiet cabin, even on coarser-chip roads, but it proved to somehow be unsettled and jiggly over smaller bumps.

The softness is its downfall over undulations though, with the rebound launching the car into the air. This means on roads with lots of elevation changes, you’re constantly bouncing around.

Handling suffers as a result of a combination of these factors, the vague steering, soft suspension and mid-size SUV bulk making this hardly a fun vehicle to pilot on back roads.

I will say that the HS made a decent companion on the freeway part of our drive though, with the active cruise control and spongey ride making it easy to live with for long distances.

Can we talk about the driver’s seat first? The design of the front seats means the driver and co-pilot sit overly high, even on the lowest setting.

That really bugged me to begin with as an ideal position has the driver sitting lower so they can look over the steering wheel and up the road ahead, rather than down onto it.

Compounding the frustration is the fact that this height means the rearview mirror obstructs vision through the windscreen.

After a few days driving the MG HS Excite I became used to the elevated driving position, and I’m sure you will, too. But I believe the design is a bad one and not something an owner should have to work around.

Okay, enough about the seats. This isn’t seatsguide.com.au. Let’s talk about the engine and how the 1.5-litre four cylinder doesn’t have the pep and acceleration of the 2.0-litre AWD model, but is perfectly fine for the city.

Besides, that larger engine's a bit manic just driving around town. There’s more than enough oomph from the 1.5-litre in the city, and even my motorway trip to Canberra (in gale force winds) was as uneventful as any Hume Highway trip should be.

What’s not noticeable on the freeway, but pronounced in the city, is the seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission's lack of refinement. Jerkiness, sometimes on hills and when taking off from stand still.

Now, the ride. The news isn’t good here. either, I’m afraid. Our test car was comfortable enough on a smooth road, but throw speed humps, potholes and all the normal Aussie urban road imperfections at it and this SUV struggles to maintain composure.

A tendency to lean in roundabouts compounds a below average driving experience.

Finally, look at the steering wheel in the images. There’s a red button on it, just like you’ll find on the steering wheel of a Ferrari.

Only this button says, ‘Super Sport’ and when I pushed it nothing appeared to happen. It’s a setting that’s supposed to activate a performance driving mode, but there was nothing ‘super’ or ‘sport’ about it.

The MG HS scored the maximum five-star ANCAP rating under 2019 testing rules.

The safety tech list looks impressive with good city-focused features such as an AEB system that can detect cyclists and pedestrians (up to 64km/h) and vehicles (up to 150km/h), along with lane keeping assistance, traffic jam assistance, blind spot detection and rear cross-traffic alert.

But I received a stark reminder that AEB systems aren’t perfect while travelling at about 30km/h approximately 40m behind two cyclists on a city street.

The MG HS Excite braked hard for no apparent reason. Forcefully enough to throw everybody in the car forward, straining the seat belts.

The cyclists hadn’t stopped or slowed down, and I couldn’t see any no other obstructions which would have caused the pretty violent stop.

Luckily, there were no injuries in our car, and it was fortunate there wasn’t a car close behind which may have impacted us.

We know of AEB ‘misfires’ like this across other brands, but it's still a concerning behaviour.

It tells me not all safety systems are created equal and ‘advanced’ tech still has a long way to go before it is truly advanced.

Along with six airbags, there are two ISOFIX points and three top tether anchor points for child seats across the back seat.

A space saver spare wheel is under the boot floor.

MG covers its cars with the tried and true Kia success strategy of offering the seven-year warranty that pencil pushers at mainstream brand’s won’t.

It has unlimited kilometre coverage for the seven years and includes roadside assist for the entire period.

Servicing is required once a year or every 10,000km whichever occurs first. MG hasn't yet announced capped price servicing, but promises it will be released imminently.

The HS Excite is covered by MG’s seven-year/unlimited kilometre warranty, which is two years more than most carmakers offer.

Servicing is recommended every 12 months or 10,000km. Here are the costs: 10,000km ($279.04); 20,000km ($382.44), 30,000km ($330.23); 40,000km ($437.54); 50,000km ($279.04); 60,000km ($800.66) and 70,000km ($279.04).

That's an annual average of $398.28 for the first seven years.