Geely EX5 (2025 - ) Electric review

Capable of charging at a maximum speed of 160kW on a rapid charger, the battery can be recharged from 30-80 per cent in just 20 minutes. At home, that charging speed will be slower if you’re using a wallbox, with a 10-100 per cent charge taking just over six hours. You can use the Geely Remote Control App to schedule charging with a start and stop time if you have a special EV energy tariff only available at certain times. The app can also be used to precondition the battery helping you get the most out of it before you even leave the house! If you get in there quickly, Geely is running a UK launch deal that will see customers offered a choice of either a home wallbox or £1,000 public charging credit. The EX5 kicks off at an affordable starting price anyway, made more attractive yet by Geely with its own version of the 'EV grant', knocking up to £3,750 off the price, depending on the trim you choose.

The EX5’s service intervals are 24 months or 20,000 miles and the base warranty is eight years or 125,000 miles, while the battery gets its own eight-year/125,000-mile warranty. We can’t comment at this early stage on how reliable it will be over the long term, but across its wider family of brands Geely has a decent reputation for making reliable electric cars so why doubt the EX5 will be any different?

The EX5 has earned a five-star Euro NCAP safety rating through being packed with safety features all available as standard from SE trim up. These include adaptive Cruise Control, Automatic Emergency Braking, Lane Keeping and Emergency Lane Assist, Emergency Manoeuvre Assist, Blind Spot Detection, Rear Cross Traffic Alert, Door Open Warnings, Traffic Sign Information, and a 360-degree camera system, which we love seeing included as standard. The alerts are quite loud and insistent, but you can turn them all off in the infotainment system… although you have to hunt for them. On the one hand it’s a very safe vehicle to drive, but on the other it’s a very noisy one if you leave all the alerts on.

It certainly is comfortable, with a nice spacious cabin to plant its ‘I’m made for families’ flag! The driver and main passenger seats are soft in all the right places and feature a full suite of massage settings at the top trim level (yes, even a serpentine massage pattern), but changing the settings even a fraction will flash up a prompt on the screen to save the setting every time. The front seats are heated and ventilated at the top trim level and can fold fully flat for napping, chilling and even in-car camping, although we’ll just take a quick 40 winks rather than an overnight stay. Sure, you could settle at the SE trim, but the cool 256-colour ambient lighting system and panoramic sunroof come at the Max trim level and are worth the price jump. One place the EX5 excels is in cabin storage, with room for several big dogs or suitcases full of luggage when you fold down the rear seats, a quirky under-seat drawer beneath the rear seats (which had a few car journos on the launch event squealing with excitement), and 33 other storage cubbies dotted about in all the usual places. The boot is accessed through a nice big opening, with a useful powered door replacing the manual tailgate at the Max trim level. Overall, whether you’re in the front or back, the EX5 is a nice place to spend time and we can imagine longer journeys with a family of four would be easy to enjoy.

The interior is packed with features and it feels high quality, especially the leather-effect upholstery and plastic surfaces, even if some of it is a little too easy to mark up with finger prints. The dominating 15.4-inch touch-screen is where you’ll do a lot of your vehicle control and it comes with the usual apps, sat-nav, Apple CarPlay connectivity and more. It’s a bit of a faff to use, with lots of features and settings buried away (see ‘Safety’), but it’s big, bright and hard to miss. We were surprised not to have Android Auto available, but we’re told it's coming in an over-the-air update soon. We like that almost everything is available from the entry SE trim level, which means everyone gets a heated steering wheel, leather-effect coverings, wireless charging and a reversing camera. At the top Max trim level you get the panoramic sunroof, ambient lighting, powered boot hatch, a head-up display for the driver, and a decent 1,000 Watt FlyMe stereo system that allowed us to pump out some ‘wicked’ tunes at a respectable volume. All models also get vehicle-to-load (V2L) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) power allowing users to plug in and use a range of devices and even charge up another electric vehicle if needed. We can’t stress enough how well-equipped the EX5 is, even from entry level, but some of the additions at the top Max trim level will be hard to ignore… so it’s a good thing even the top-spec vehicle is competitively priced.

The EX5’s front-mounted electric motor delivers 218 horsepower for 0-62 mph in just 6.9 seconds at the SE and Pro trims, and 7.1 seconds in the Max trim. The EX5’s 60.22 kWh battery provides a maximum range of up to 267 miles (WLTP), which will go up or down depending on how efficiently you drive. We found the range readout to be reliable on our test drive, losing around 30 miles from the max range on a two-hour loop. The chunky 320Nm of torque goes straight to the front wheels and you can choose between Eco, Normal and Sport driving modes. Switching between modes is more noticeable between Normal and Sport, with Sport mode firming up the steering and making the accelerator far more sensitive. It’s one of those cars that sits happily at higher speeds for as long as you need it to but loses some of its poise at lower speeds. We noticed when pulling up to junctions in Normal mode that braking to a stop would cause a loss of power almost immediately and require a heavy press of the pedal to get away again. However, negotiating twisty roads in Sport mode was good fun with a nice feeling of power as we burst away. If only it kept that feeling of power at cruising speed, then it would be a smashing drive. As it stands, you never feel out of control in an EX5, but some will want a bit more excitement that it will struggle to deliver. Not a deal breaker, just worth bearing in mind.