The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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2:34pm on Saturday, 15th February, 2025:
Anecdote
We're looking to buy a new car. Our current car is a Ford Focus from 2014, which will be due a cam belt replacement soon that will set us back around £1,700 and take two days. Also, there's a leaf or something in the air conditioning that's making an annoying whining noise.
We didn't want to go full electric because the UK infrastructure isn't there yet. It is if you live in London, but not if you live in not-London. I don't want to run out of juice driving to Bristol or Yorkshire, and I don't want to have to queue for 20 minutes at a service station to spend another 20 minutes recharging. We therefore looked at getting a plug-in hybrid, as these use electric for short journeys but switch to petrol when the electric has run out. Most such cars are expensive, even more so because anything costing over £40,000 attracts an extra tax — even for full-on electric vehicles (yet the government wonders why car manufacturers aren't meeting their electric-vehicle sales targets).
Checking out the reviews, the clear winner in plug-in hybrids is the MG HS. Not only is it much, much less expensive to buy (maybe 2/3 the price of some of its rivals), but it's also super-efficient as the battery can hold enough for 75 miles without using petrol. However, in common with other plug-in hybrids, it's big: 10 inches longer, 2 inches wider and 8 inches higher than our Focus.
We therefore decided to look at some non-plug-in hybrids as well as plug-in hybrids. These run off petrol, but they have a momentum recovery system that charges a battery when you brake or freewheel. They're therefore more efficient than regular petrol cars, but they're not as environmentally-friendly as a plug-in hybrid or an electric vehicle. They cost a lot less, however, and are smaller, too.
After rejecting some candidates for not being hybrid enough, not having a big enough boot or not having much legroom in the back, we came down to four manufacturers: Ford, Kia, Toyota and MG. Last weekend, we had a look at their offerings.
The Fords are dated. The main one they wanted to sell us was a Kuga, which is ugly and over-priced; it's about the same size as an MG HS. The Puma would have been OK but for there not being a fully-hybrid model, just a mild hybrid (which uses the electricity it collects from braking to charge a battery for non-drive purposes such as the heating system). The latest Focus was only available in petrol form. We rejected Ford. Sorry, President Trump: we won't be buying American this time.
The Kias we looked at were the Sportage and the Niro. The Sportage is available as a plug-in hybrid, but it's costly. It's not as big as the ZS, but it's still 6 inches longer than our Focus, 1½ inches wider and 6 inches higher. Higher isn't a problem, but we were thinking of down-sizing rather than getting a larger vehicle, so it was still a little alarming. The Niro was a nice regular hybrid, but the boot was only slightly larger than the one on the Focus. Also, it cost £3,000 more than the MG ZS, which is a bigger and more high-specification car. We rejected the Sportage, but the Niro remained a possibility until we visited the Toyota showroom.
Toyota do a Yaris Cross hybrid that's very nice, out-gunning the Kia Niro in every area. It's 7 inches shorter and 2 inches narrower than our Focus, meaning my wife might actually drive it. There's also a Toyota C-HR plug-in hybrid almost the same size as our Focus (apart from being 3 inches higher), but the price is perilously close to the £40,000 barrier beyond which vehicle tax skyrockets. If we wanted, say, 360° cameras, we'd need to buy an extra package that would push us into this high-tax band. The Yaris Cross made it to our shortlist, though, so we booked a test drive for it.
Finally, we looked at the MG ZS, which is now available as a regular hybrid (it was previously either petrol or electric only). This ticked all our boxes, and is a lot less expensive while being fully-featured. It's an inch shorter and half an inch narrower than our Focus. This also made it to our shortlist, so we booked a test drive for that, too. The HS plug-in hybrid wasn't available for a test drive as they're changing all their cars over for the new 75 registration numbers that come online in March, but I could test-drive the petrol version so I booked that, too, just to get a sense of what it would be like to drive a larger vehicle.
Today was the day of the test drives.
All these cars are automatic. I had never driven an automatic in my life before then. It was a lot easier than I was expecting, coming from a manual-gear background; I suspect that going manual from automatic might be more of a challenge.
First up was the MG ZS. This was great! It delivered a smooth ride and decent acceleration, despite its only having three forward gears. It handled well, and I even managed to reverse-park it.
Next up was the MG HS. I loved the higher driving position, but its extra width took some getting used to and its extra length made parking harder, even with its four-camera feature. This was the petrol version, but I won't be trying the plug-in hybrid for a somewhat unusual reason: I got motion sickness. I've only had motion sickness as a driver once before, when my dad took me to an aerodrome where people too young or too disqualified to have a driving licence could drive legally. As I was only maybe 12 years old at the time, our car must have felt to me then as big as the HS did when I drove it today. The salesman hadn't come across anyone feeling queasy driving the HS before, and it hadn't occurred to me that I might until I did. It was enough to put me off wanting to try it in plug-in hybrid form, though. So, HS out, but ZS a very strong finalist.
Finally, it was the turn of the Toyota Yaris Cross. It wasn't a lot different to the MG ZS, but I wasn't a fan of the steering: it seemed to be quite slack to start with then get progressively more powerful the more it was turned. This wasn't a feature the chap selling it recognised, but I certainly did. Hmm, I say "selling it", but he didn't make a great effort to do so — it was almost as if his attitude was "this is a Toyota, that's all you need to know, it sells itself, if you want something else then you know nothing about motor vehicles". He didn't accompany us on the test drive, unlike the bloke at MG, and as a result wasn't able to answer any questions that cropped up along the way.
We'll have to do some more research before making the final decision, but at the moment I'm leaning towards the MG ZS. The Yaris Cross Excel is £31,190 at the Colchester Toyota dealership (less in some other places). The MG ZS is £26,060. Toyota has a strong reputation for reliability, and MG in its current incarnation hasn't had time to build one up yet. Is more reliability worth £5,000, though? It's not all about the price, of course, but all else being comparable it could be the deciding factor. We don't really know for sure that everything else is comparable, however, hence the need for more research.
By the way, car manufacturers: take a leaf out of game developers' books and make the digital dashboard display configurable like the HUD in an MMO client. That way, the speedometer won't be hidden behind my hand when I'm driving in a straight line unless I want it to be hidden behind my hand when I'm driving in a straight line. Just a friendly suggestion.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).