OMODA E5 SUV (2023 - ) Electric review

The Omoda E5 starts at just over £33,000, undercutting other family electric cars such as the BYD Atto 3, Volkswagen ID.3 and the Renault Mégane E-Tech. You get a lot of standard equipment for your money. For those who can do most of their charging at home, the E5 shouldn’t cost too much to run. Company car drivers can also take advantage of lower Benefit In Kind by going electric. If you need to public charge regularly the E5 can’t receive as much power from a charger as other models such as the MG4, so you may find it slower to top up. Omoda is keen to keep insurance premiums down for motorists who have seen huge increases year on year, so is working closely with the highly experienced Thatcham Research on repair methods. We can only hope insurers respond accordingly.

Omoda is a new brand so it’s too early to tell how reliable the E5 will be. We’ve reflected this in the reliability score, but Omoda is clearly confident in its product as each car comes with a seven-year/100,00-mile warranty plus breakdown cover. As with most electric cars the battery pack has its own separate eight-year/100,000-mile warranty too. You can take additional reassurance from knowing Omoda’s owner, Chery, has sold over 12m cars globally and Omoda is aiming to have 100 dealers in its network by the end of 2024, so you should have plenty of support should anything go wrong.

The E5 comes with a suite of safety features as standard including adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, bind spot monitoring and emergency braking, plus it’s got 11 airbags to protect you should the worst happen. We found the Omoda E5 didn’t generally bing and bong at us too much which was a relief, but it did spend a lot of time telling us off for not paying attention, even when we had our eyes fixed on the road ahead. While there are a few physical buttons and steering wheel controls helping prevent the need for you to look away, a lot of the functions are accessed via the infotainment screen which is fiddly to use on the move. We also found the lane assist function of the adaptive cruise control was rather twitchy as it tried to steer us along the motorway, so we preferred to turn it off.

The Omoda E5 has been specifically tuned for UK roads and you can tell. It rides well and copes admirably with rough surfaces, cushioning you from the potholes and crumbling tarmac. Once you get up to motorway speed things are less serene though, as road and wind noise both disrupt the peace. The E5 is a similar length to the Nissan Qashqai but it is not as roomy inside. The front seats are comfy and supportive, however taller occupants might struggle for headroom, particularly on models with a sunroof. It’s a similar story in the back and adults might find it a squeeze, particularly if they need to shoehorn themselves into the middle seat. The boot is a usable shape, but again not as big as rivals like the Volkswagen ID.3, however, there is space under the bonnet for a small ‘frunk’.

Omoda is hoping to appeal to young buyers and as a result majors on tech. There are two levels of trim: Comfort and Noble. Entry-level ‘Comfort’ cars come with two curved 12.25-inch displays. We found the touchscreen to be responsive, but the layout wasn’t always intuitive and featured some rather interesting graphics including a starry mountainscape in the driver display. All cars also have a wireless phone charging pad with integrated cooling fan, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and a reversing camera. If you upgrade to the ‘Noble’ trim you will also get electrically adjustable driver and passenger seats, a sunroof, powered tailgate, and Sony sound system. While the interior looks relatively smart, some of the styling feels a bit dated. Touches such as the ambient lighting with flashing car graphic look like they belong in a 1990s disco and fashion-conscious buyers are likely to turn to the chic Volvo EX30 instead. Another feature we struggled with was the 360-degree camera fitted on ‘Noble’ models. This was great for parking and other manoeuvres, but it came on when indicating at low speed and filled the entire infotainment screen just when we needed to see the navigation instructions and was particularly annoying on roundabouts.

The Omoda E5 is much more responsive than the equivalent petrol Omoda 5, benefiting from the instant power delivery you get with an electric powertrain. While it’s no match for the slightly more expensive MG4 XPower, the E5’s 204 horsepower provides plenty of get-up-and-go to give you confidence at junctions or when overtaking. It took us a little practice with both the grabby brake pedal and the accelerator before we could drive the E5 smoothly, but there are three different strengths of regenerative braking to choose from. The steering is very light by default to help with manoeuvrability, and you can cycle through ‘Eco’, ‘Normal’ and ‘Sport’ mode with the press of a button on the centre console. Each mode has a noticeably different character and is accompanied by a colourful graphic like something out of a video game. There’s also an option to change the weighting of the steering with the different drive modes. Our test drive included a mix of rural roads and faster motorways and the Omoda E5 averaged a respectable 3.7 miles/kWh. This suggests it should be fairly efficient, although it will likely fall a little short of the official 257-mile WLTP range.