MG HS long-term test
I’ve never run a PHEV long termer with enough EV range – subsequently, I’ve got better fuel economy from conventional hybrids and diesel cars. This one has a massive battery though, promising 75 petrol-free miles on a good day. Could the MG HS PHEV change my mind?
Reports by Adam Binnie
Update 1: Welcome
Plug-in hybrids like the MG HS PHEV are getting a bit of a hard time at the moment. I should know, I’ve written plenty of long-term updates about how this combination of battery and petrol power has rarely managed to deliver the economy it promised (or for that matter, more than a diesel equivalent).
I’m not feverishly morally opposed to this type of powertrain – if you have a short commute and occasionally want to travel further afield, then a plug-in hybrid might be absolutely all you need.
But 20-ish miles of battery range has never covered my needs adequately enough to convince me that a conventional hybrid (like my outgoing Renault Austral long termer) or even smaller petrol engine isn’t a better option.
Consider my surprise then when I got into the HS after charging its battery and saw 75 miles of EV range available to me. Even with a bit of an efficiency drop-off due to cold weather and motorway miles, that should still be more than enough for my commute.
I’ve really enjoyed the EVs I’ve run for Parkers previously. They make superbly quiet, chilled-out family transport, with a smooth and wafty power delivery, and more than enough poke to get you up to speed on faster roads.
However, despite the charging network being much better than it’s ever been before, I have still felt that sense of trepidation getting into an electric car for our very regular trips to see family or friends in the south-west.
On paper then the MG HS might be the ideal solution to my – potentially quite niche – needs of a slightly longer than average commute, and much higher than average need to crunch 600 miles in a weekend.
In fairness, it isn’t the only long-range PHEV available, but it’s certainly one of the cheapest. In top-spec Trophy trim like we’ve got here it’s £33,995, it is nearly £3,000 less than the base-spec VW Tiguan PHEV. You can spend more than £40,000 on one of those, if you want.
In the previous generation you could argue that was because the MG HS wasn’t as good as a VW Tiguan, but in this 2025 model I’m really not so sure anymore. It’s got all the tech you’d expect, the interior is plush and solidly screwed together, and externally I think it looks like a much more expensive car than before.
We’ll dive more into how it drives in a later update but my early impressions are really good – it’s smooth and refined, spends a lot of its time in EV mode, and even when the petrol engine kicks in you’d be hard pressed to notice.
Most impressive though is how little of those 75 EV miles it gives away. Even on cold drives fast roads I’ve got an easy 50-55 miles without putting any effort in whatsoever. I suspect with a more eco-focussed right foot you’d find 60+ miles.
Tellingly, I think, in my first month of ownership I haven’t used any petrol at all. The battery range covers my commute, and for local journeys it’s big enough so that I don’t have to worry about plugging it in all the time at home.
I’ve got a challenge with myself to see how few times I have to fill this car in the three months I’m running it. I’m having to calculate the average MPG I’m getting manually at the moment, because the gauge only goes up to 99.9mpg!
Have I finally found a PHEV that suits my weird niche? Early signs are looking good.
Update 2: East to West
What can we learn from a load of motorway miles loaded up with four people and holiday kit?
I’ve decided I’m being far too easy on the MG HS, pottering around town and wafting to work once or twice a week, where it’s charged at both ends. As a result, the fuel economy on the screen has remained stuck at 99.9mpg for what feels like forever, and I haven’t actually put any petrol in it yet.
There’s a caveat there – my colleague James Dennison filled it with fuel for me after borrowing it for the weekend, and I have of course been charging the battery to fulfil those trips. But it’s basically been running as an EV rather than a PHEV so far.
That does rather prove the point I made in the first update, that the car’s 75-mile range is long enough to satisfy 90% of my driving needs, but to be really thorough I need to see how it copes on a much longer run.
I planned two trips to the beach, one week after another, to see how the MG HS copes with a day trip, and then a weekend away, taking me and my family from Hunstanton in Norfolk to just outside Perranporth in Cornwall.
Not directly, because we had work and school in the middle, but two long drives that would deplete the PHEV battery and force us to use a bit of fossil fuel for a change. I suppose if I was trying harder I could find points further east and west, but we like Hunstanton, and our friends live near Perranporth, so the plan was set.
The ride has a bit of an edge to it around town but it’s super serene on a cruise, and I mentioned before that the petrol engine is very smooth and quiet, so the overall refinement in the cabin isn’t wrecked by it kicking in. What I have noticed is that when the engine does fire up, it seems to take a long time to drop back off again into EV mode.
There are two custom buttons on the steering wheel that you can set to do various functions – I’ve got one controlling the brake regen strength, and the other to switch between EV and PHEV modes. This is a nice touch but also highlights the fact that rival cars have a permanent button on the dash for these sorts of things, so it’s a bit of a work around.
That said, they’re not things you usually press with any sort of regularity, and I appreciate the uncluttered dashboard more than the convenience of having a drive mode selector, for example.
One thing curiously absent is a boot release button – this is actually controlled by the touchscreen, as are the foglights, which is even more unusual. Although I haven’t actually needed to use the foglights once, and I’ve been driving around in mid-winter.
Something that bugs me no matter the length of the drive is the sensitivity of the driver assistance tech. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take any help I can get in the pursuit of keeping my family safe, but I’m struggling a bit with the driver attention monitor.
There’s a camera in the a-pillar that monitors your attention and bongs at you if it thinks you’re not concentrating enough. The problem with this sort of thing is that it’s a fine balance between useful and hyperactive, and if you cross that line, people will just turn it off rather than using it.
I wouldn’t mind if it was bonging while I had my head out the window or if I’d turned around 180 degrees in my seat, but it goes off all the time, and quite often when I’m doing something related to the task of driving. Such as looking at the sat nav screen, or once when I was checking my blind spot over my shoulder.
What would be great is if it was possible to adjust the sensitivity so it hovers somewhere useful. I’ve had VW group cars in the past that bong at you when they see you yawning – fair enough – but not when I’ve momentarily taken my eyes off the road to adjust the air con.
All of the long miles undertaken over our two weekend trips highlighted a few other, admittedly very minor, gripes that are emerging with the MG HS. The first centres around the decent but not class-leading 507-litre boot.
I will say it is impressive that you get the same capacity in the pure petrol and PHEV variants, but I keep losing the button to open it from the outside. It’s off centre and I can’t remember whether it’s left or right, and when you get it wrong you end up with a handful of road grime.
It did swallow everything my family of four needed for our weekend in Cornwall though, and there’s more space under the boot floor to store the charging cables to stop them flapping around.
While we’re talking bootlids, there doesn’t seem to be an intermittent setting for the rear wiper. It’s either on full-gas or off, which seems a bit odd. You do get physical front and rear demist buttons on the dashboard, and these proved useful on the drive down, because the windscreen kept fogging up.
What else? There’s a bit of trim that makes the exact noise of my phone falling out of my pocket when I sit down in the driver’s seat. I think it must be the bottom of the seat belt, so I’ve had to train my brain to not instinctively reach down to retrieve my device.
There’s loads of space in the back even for tall adults, and an armrest that folds down to reveal a couple of cupholders. The Isofix mounts are prominent enough that you can locate them without losing your fingernails too. The fifth seat is a bit of a perch, and the floor is raised, so that’s best kept for occasional use.
The driver’s seat is one of the comfiest I have experienced – I know these things are subjective, and maybe it just fits around me perfectly, but it feels like a big squashy armchair. I was a bit worried this would mean it gave me backache on a long drive but even after a five hour slog to Cornwall, it was still comfortable.
I can’t say the same for the passenger seat, weirdly – either it doesn’t have the same adjustments as the driver’s chair or just isn’t as well worn-in, so I found it harder to find the right position in it.
The central screen is home to all sorts of functions, and one that impressed me almost immediately was the surround view camera. This also has a transparent car overlay with wheels marked out on it to help you avoid kerbs while parking.
In terms of the menus and functions on the screen, these are very clear and logically laid out in a simple tile structure. There’s not a lot of flair or excitement but it gets the job done very well, and the dark mode setting makes it very easy on the eye.
There are plenty of soft materials used around the cabin, although the lower dash and glovebox lid are a bit scratchy. I suspect you haven’t missed that tan leather – a £500 option – which certainly brightens the cabin up. It might not be to your taste though, it’s certainly more caramel than brown.
The big question after both long drives is surely about the economy though. The battery actually didn’t run out on either trip while I had the car in PHEV mode, which is a bit odd, as every plug-in long termer I’ve run previously would drain its battery on a long haul.
The MG seems to be a bit more frugal in how it deploys it, and I suspect as a result of this, you only get 40-odd MPG on the motorway. I actually prefer this in all honesty, I’ve had several PHEVs before that would arrive after a long drive with zero battery miles.
If there’s nowhere to charge it (because you’re staying on a campsite in Cornwall, for example) then you’ve got no battery power to do local trips with. The HS has a standard type two charger, not a rapid CCS charging port – this would be nice to have for one thing, but more pressingly, it’s getting quite hard to find a type two charger in the wild these days. Most motorway and service stations we passed only had CSS, so there wasn’t an option to charge up anyway.
For all other intents and purposes though the MG HS was epic during both our long trips – quiet, comfortable and spacious, with plenty of poke for overtaking on country roads and getting up to speed on the motorway.
Update 3: Farewell
The time has come to say goodbye to the MG HS PHEV, and it’s probably a good sign (for the car at least) that I’m finding it harder to let go than normal.
It could be because I’ve had a slightly shorter time with this one than previous long termers. More pertinently, I think it’s because I had just got used to it being around, and it had started to do that thing that all the best long termers do – after 3,000 miles, it had started to feel like my car.
I said before that its 75 miles of battery range and (for me) auxiliary petrol engine is a perfect combination – enough electrical range for most of my day-to-day driving and commute but the convenience of being able to pour 400-500 miles into the tank in 90 seconds on a long drive.
It fulfilled this purpose perfectly, and for the first six weeks or so I didn’t actually fill it up once (other than recharging it, of course) which meant the dashboard was stuck on 99.9mpg. In the second half of its time with us we did a lot of longer trips, and this brought the averages down to 58.9mpg and 7.5mls/kWh in mixed use.
I’m still really impressed with this and the average miles per gallon readout was starting to climb back up quicker and quicker after the flurry of motorway miles I did in early March, so I suspect with a longer time in the car, it would have finished up even higher.
It proved to be super comfy and refined on those long drives, with minimal wind noise and barely anything audible coming from the bonnet. It also had a surprisingly good stereo, full of bass and decent clarity in the higher ranges too.
I’d have loved to strap some bikes to the roof or towbar to see how that impacted things but timings didn’t really allow that this time around. The optional side-steps look like they would have made lifting bikes up easier, but I wasn’t overly convinced they’d take my weight!
Initially I was surprised by how bright the tan leather was, but it makes the cabin so much lighter than the darker option, and I had quite a few nice comments about it from friends and family I showed the car to. The driver’s seat did start to get a bit discoloured from my black jeans but a quick spritz with Auto Glym leather cleaner sorted this right out.
Some bad points then – some of the tech felt a little bit last-generation. It all worked perfectly, but while you get keyless entry, you have to press a button on the door handle to operate it. Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are present, but you have to use a wire. The headlights have automatic high beams, but they’re not matrix-style ones.
None of this is a deal-breaker, frankly, and I didn’t have a problem with any of these things five years ago when they were the norm, but it’s worth pointing out. Elsewhere some of the spec felt a bit confusing – I wasn’t expecting massaging seats, but a heated steering wheel feels like an odd omission, particularly in a partially electrified car where you want to avoid using the air con if you can avoid it.
I’ve complained about some of the driver assistance tech already, but I should also say the cruise control and lane assist functions worked flawlessly, and the clear surround view camera made parking what is quite a large vehicle super easy.
Clearly a lot of work has been done to migrate buttons from the dashboard to the screen for a cleaner look and on the whole I’m in support of this – initially you might be confused by the decision to move the foglight function, for example, but as I said before, I didn’t actually need to use them in the three months I ran the car.
Altogether the MG HS PHEV really impressed me. It has evolved into a much more complete package than the previous generation, which is fair to say didn’t stand up well to comparisons with more polished rivals like the VW Tiguan.
Previously the HS was a cheap car – now it’s a good value one, and that’s a very different distinction. I’d go even further and say that improvements to the exterior styling and interior quality make it feel significantly more expensive than it is.
So to answer my initial question – yes, I think I have at last found a PHEV that works for the weird driving requirements I have, and one that I’d recommend even if you don’t share them.
