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The Omoda E5 – a new make and model to most drivers in the UK – aims to offer an electric family hatchback/crossover at a more affordable price than most rivals, but what’s it like to drive?
Omoda, established in 2022, is a brand of the Chinese company Chery, which is one of the country’s biggest automotive manufacturers. The Omoda E5 (along with the petrol model) is the first Omoda model to be introduced in the UK. Omoda joins a number of Chinese brands which are starting to sell cars in the UK; the challenge is that UK car buyers don’t know the company, so they don’t know what to expect from the vehicle. Let’s try and help…
The Omoda E5 is basically a family hatchback, but like lots of other rivals, it has a slightly higher ride height than a traditional hatchback, so it’s described as a crossover. The exterior is a typical crossover shape, with its styling comprised of a mix of angles and curves. The grey colour of our test car didn’t do it any favours in terms of enhancing its visual appearance.
The main features of the interior are familiar in many of the latest EVs, such as a central touchscreen, a driver’s instrument display, and lots of storage in the centre console between the two front seats – including a space under the centre console, where there are also two USB sockets, but these sit on the passenger side, so they’re impossible for the driver to see, and very hard to reach.
The cabin is generally fit for purpose, with the levels of quality being what you’d expect for an EV that’s aiming to be one of the more affordable options. One detail liked by front occupants are the vanity mirrors in the sun visors, which are surrounded by a rectangular light strip complete with a button that gives you two brightness settings.
Rear legroom is not quite as spacious as some other Chinese rivals, and the boot offers average space of 380 litres. Very unusually, under the boot floor is a full-size spare wheel. This means that there’s no space here to store the charging cable, but there’s a 19-litre front trunk, or frunk; sitting in here in our test car was a charging lead with a 3-pin plug, but strangely no Type 2 cable, making charging at public fast chargers challenging.
The Omoda E5 has a 61 kWh battery and a 186 PS electric motor delivering front-wheel drive. It has an unbraked towing weight of 450kg, but no braked towing weight.
The Omoda E5 is a new name for motorists in the UK so there’s bound to be some preconceptions about what it’s like to drive. So let’s address this now by saying that the headline is the E5 offers a comfortable and easy driving experience. This starts even before you drive the car; like many of the latest EVs, as you walk up to it, it unlocks automatically. There’s no start button, you just pull down the gear selector stalk on the right-hand side of the steering column to select Drive, and you’re off. Ride quality is good on all but the most pothole-laden roads – relatively high profile tyres help with this – and the E5 even feels like it has some agility in the handling department, no doubt helped by the 1,710 kg kerb weight, which is lighter than many other EVs.
It feels like the E5 has been engineered to be easy to drive, and one by-product of this is that the steering is light and doesn’t have much feel.
The E5’s power output of 186 PS doesn’t sound much, but the 0-62 mph acceleration time of 7.2 seconds is perfectly sufficient, and if you press the drive mode button on the centre console (one of the very few physical buttons in the car) to change from Eco (the default mode when you get in the car) through Normal to Sport, the EV has decent responses. So much so that enthusiastic acceleration will result in wheelspin from the front-wheel drive powertrain.
One thing that you won’t find is any way to change the degree of brake regeneration. There’s no setting for this on the gear selector, there are no steering wheel-mounted paddles, and there are no controls on the touchscreen.
While we’re on the subject of touchscreens, the E5’s infotainment system – a bit like the rest of the car – does the job, but isn’t up there with the latest systems in terms of design and technology – perhaps understandably for a car aiming to undercut rivals on price.
The secret to making touchscreens user-friendly – which some manufacturers seem to understand and some others don’t – is having clear, well thought-out permanent shortcut buttons. The Omoda E5 doesn’t have these, with the result that when using Apple CarPlay, you have absolutely zero car controls accessible on the screen. There are no shortcut buttons, and, critically, no climate controls. We’re in an era when many manufacturers seem to be expecting customers to speak to cars to tell them to increase or decrease the cabin temperature, but voice control systems, although improving all the time, are still not as reliable as a physical dial on the dashboard to twist for more heat. Trying to change the cabin temperature using the very small controls on the screen while driving is not easy.
However the main issue with the Omoda E5 – and this is a trait of many Chinese EVs – is that you’re likely to go mad as a result of all the beeps and boings when you’re driving. There’s a menu in the touchscreen for driver assistance systems, with many settings related to eg. lane departure warning systems etc that you need to switch off to stop the car beeping at you. And of course you have to switch off all of these items every time you get in the car.
The Omoda E5 has an official WLTP combined electric driving range of 257 miles. After a week on test the real-world range in winter was averaging 220 miles.
The Omoda E5 has energy efficiency of 3.5 miles/kWh, which is about average, but not class-leading. It has a maximum DC rapid charging rate of 80 kW, which is lower than the minimum of 100kW that you probably want; a 30% to 80% charge should take 28 minutes. Three phase AC charging is possible up to 9.9kW; a 0% to 100% charge should take 7-8 hours.
The E5 has vehicle to load (V2L) capability, up to 3.3kW.
The Omoda E5 is available in two trim levels, Comfort, as tested, priced at £33,055, and ‘Noble’, which is an extra £1,500. The Tourmaline Grey of our test car was an additional £500. Comfort trim doesn’t include heated seats or heated steering wheel – two items of equipment that are essential on EVs to minimise loss of range from cabin heating in cold weather. There’s also no heat pump with Comfort trim, although this is available with Noble trim.
The Omoda E5 faces an uphill task because most car buyers in the UK won’t have heard of it. So it needs to have as many weapons in its arsenal as possible. Chief of these is its price; £33,055 for a family crossover is less than many rivals.
Other good news is the driving experience. The E5 won’t appeal to people who want a driver’s car, but for the majority of motorists who want a car to get from A to B as cost-effectively as possible, it’s easy and comfortable to drive.
Design is a subjective thing, so people will have to make up their own mind about the look of the exterior and the interior, but one thing that most people are likely to agree on is that the user experience of the infotainment system could be much better, starting with permanent shortcut buttons and climate controls that are accessible when Apple CarPlay is in use. But the one thing that’s likely to drive you mad is the array of beeps and boings from the over-intrusive driver assistance systems, and although you can go into menus on the touchscreen to switch off the various systems related to lane departure warning etc, you’ll need to do this every time you get in the car.
So if you want an electric family crossover for a price that undercuts many European rivals then the Omoda E5 is worth considering, but you get what you pay for, and although it offers comfortable zero emission transport from A to B, it doesn’t offer the sophistication or character of many other brands. This statement has also been applied in the past to other Chinese brands such as MG (yes it’s now a Chinese rather than a British brand), but MG’s latest offering, the Cyberster, demonstrates rapid progress, and it’s likely that future products from brands such as Omoda will share this trajectory.
The Omoda E5 is awarded a Green Car Guide rating of 7 out of 10.
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