Living with the MG Marvel
Review by Jacob Lerklint
MG hit last year with its MG ZS EV at a ridiculously low private lease price. This year they are not satisfied with that, but they want to enter with their premium car MG Marvel R, although not at a premium price. Is Marvel R something to have? I have driven the MG Marvel R Performance and I am actually a bit unsure.
When you step into the Marvel R, it feels expensive. The car is well equipped and has everything you could think of, and then some. For example. There is ventilated seats, something you normally only find in the higher price ranges. If you look around, you wouldn't think this a "cheaper" car. Everything is vegan leather (no cow here) or fabric-like materials. There is also a large panoramic roof that lets in a lot of light. MG has done well with the air ventilation, which is located in the dashboard. The buttons on the steering wheel feel nice to press and is easy to use. The center of the steering wheel is perhaps the most cheap-looking part of the car, which is ironic because it's among the first things you see when you get into the car.
The seats feel okay, not great but I think Kia and Peugeot have nicer seats. These seats are different to the ones in the MG ZS EV, they are more bolstered because it is more Performance oriented. The sound system in the car is mediocre at best.. It is labeled Bose on the speakers but it feels flat. There is no fullness in the sound and if you turn it up it sounds pretty bad.
I was worried about the placement of the screen before I got in the car and my fears were confirmed. The placement is not great and it becomes difficult to handle the screen in the position it is in. You have to look down too much which takes your eyes off the road. The climate control is at the bottom, which means you have to look almost straight down to e.g. turn on the seat heater or change the temperature. It feels messy and ill-thought-out and when you keep your hands three quarters of the way on the steering wheel (as you should), you can't see anything from the screen because your arm is covering it.
But the worst part is how sluggish it is. The whole system feels slow and you have to really push for it to register something. It made it even worse when I tried to raise the temperature in the car, I failed several times which meant I spent a lot of time not looking at the road. The car has navigation, but if you want to look around on the map, you need to be patient. Overall, the Marvel R's system makes VW look like software geniuses. It is both misplaced and has a software that does not match the rest of the car.
Marvel R Performance is sporty, as the name suggests. In sport mode, the car is really fun to drive where there is plenty of power and the steering is snappy. It is noticeable that the car weighs 2 tons, however, it is set quite hard, which means that you feel most of the bumps in the road. It does help in curves though. Even if you go back to normal mode, the car is still hard and feels bouncy. However, it is quite quiet and lying on the motorway with the cruise control in is no strange thing. The driver display is nice, there is a lot of information to take in and you can set what you want to see and so on. There is a view that shows one's own car as well as other cars around, a bit like Tesla. There is a single pedal mode but it's pretty bad. The car brakes softly and you often need to use the brake pedal. In addition to that, the car does not stop completely, which I find very useless. For some reason, the car sometimes beeps. No message appears on the driver display and it came up several times, both when I was driving spirited and when I was driving normally. I don't know what the car meant by its beeping but it was annoying. If it beeps, a message should be displayed, it shouldn't beep for the sake of beeping.
I'll be honest, the MG Marvel R was a bit of a disappointment. On paper it looks like a fantastic car and with a price that is at least as fantastic.
But the slow infotainment screen is a dealbreaker for me. It's a shame, because they've built a good car that looks good, is fun to drive and feels premium. But the screen ruins everything. MG, and all other car manufacturers too for that matter, need to start investing more in software.
One can hope that the software gets updates during its lifetime that can solve large parts of the problem, but it could just as well be hardware and then it's done from the start. If the system is this bad before the car has started being delivered, I'm worried about how it will be in 5 years. Do yourself a favor and don't buy the Marvel R, lease it.
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