When I first took delivery of the car I thought, what am my going to write about, another new SUV from another new Chinese brand, there seem to be quite a lot of them these days.
This thing is I couldn’t have been more wrong. Many of you will Geely is the parent company of many brands, Lotus Cars Europe, smart Automobile, Polestar and Lynk & Co ,so they know a thing or two about making cars.
So here we have a good sized family SUV which is loaded with spec, for a price of a shade under £37k for the Max version it tested here.
During the week I had it i gave it a number of challenges, including a week long trip to Center Parcs, where its cavernous boot swallowed every thing we needed with no effort at all. Even a quick jaunt into London for the PoweredUp Event was no drama thanks to the excellent charging at Center Parcs.
Another point is the EX5 is beautiful put together the interior has a quality feel, with no squeaks or rattles. One criticism I was going to make was the lack of Android Auto and some quirks with the user interface but these were solved during my running club session. As I was getting out of the car it offered to update the software to version 12. I will be the first to admit in hindsight this was probably a bad idea since it could have rendered me locked out of the car for a significant time had it gone wrong. No need to worry though it all worked flawlessly and Android Auto is now available with other quality of life fixes.
Now on to the drive, this car sits on quality Tier 1 tyres. An issue I often find with cars in this segment is they can tend to sit on some awful tyres, these can make or break the handling of a car. Here though the EX5 had made an excellent choice. The suspension is well smoothing out bumps well and its impressively smooth on the motorway.
Efficiency the one you have been waiting for. During my time with the it averaged just under 4mpkwh in mixed driving over more than 600miles. Only falling 17miles short of WLTP what makes this more impressive is that this was in single digit temperatures, with a fair amount of motorway driving. When you think that the EX5 is fitted with a 60.2kWh LFP battery which traditionally are worse at cold temperatures than NMC. It never failed to exceed 200miles of range, so in summer I think it will be easy to beat the official figures.
This is a great first entry to the UK for the GEELY brand.