ANCAP: Three stars for 2025 MG5, albeit for $3k extra

UPDATE, 16/06/2025: MG Australia has cut limited its updated MG5 line-up to just a singular, highly-specified variant in the wake of the model's ANCAP safety retest.

Now priced from $32,990 drive-away, the 2025 MG5 Essence is $3000 more expensive than the previous version and arrives without its cut-price Vibe stablemate, meaning the small Chinese sedan has officially left the sub-$30,000 price bracket.

All of the extra cost can be attributed to the additional safety gear touched upon below, but unlike in other markets, the updated model looks exactly the same as its predecessor.

ORIGINAL, 05/06/2025: Australian safety body ANCAP has retested the MG5, with the small sedan receiving a new three-star rating.

Originally, ANCAP had dished out an embarrassing zero-star rating when it last tested the MG5 back in 2023, making it just one of three vehicles along with the Mahindra Scorpio and Mitsubishi Express to fail to achieve a single star for protection.

In its latest testing, the MG5 was awarded 62 per cent for adult occupant protection, 68 per cent for child protection, 65 per cent for vulnerable road user protection and 59 per cent for its driver-assist tech.

Those numbers are a significant improvement on the 37 per cent, 58 per cent, 42 per cent and 13 per cent scores awarded in 2023.

ANCAP said the new rating applies to the upgraded MG5 sedan that entered production back in November 2024 and lands in Australian dealers from this month.

Dramatically improving its performance in ANCAP crash tests is the addition of front and rear seatbelt pretensioners. The move prompted ANCAP to conduct new frontal offset and full-width crash tests to evaluate how they offered better protection to occupants in a crash.

Further whiplash testing, pedestrian impact tests, and collision avoidance tests were also carried out again.

Improvements in driver head, chest and lower leg protection and front-seat passenger chest protection were all noted.

In the full-width frontal test, full points were awarded for driver neck and chest protection, a big boost over the ‘Marginal’ rating from before.

Rear passenger chest protection also improved from ‘Poor’ to ‘Marginal’, with both the pretensioners and load limiters both raising the score.

Limiting the overall score to three stars, a ‘Weak’ rating was given for neck and chest protection of a 10-year-old child in the frontal offset test.

The MG5’s standard autonomous emergency braking has also been upgraded to now detect pedestrians, cyclists and motorcycles, while lane-keep assist, emergency lane-keep assist and seatbelt reminders have all been added.

Missing driver-assist tech is blind-spot monitoring, reverse AEB or cross-traffic alert and driver fatigue detection.

Finally, ANCAP singled out the lack of a centre airbag, which would significantly improve the occupant protection in the first and second row in the event of a side impact.

From January until the end of April MG had reportedly sold just 1123 MG5 sedans, making it the brand’s slowest-selling model after the Cyberster electric roadster.

It’s not yet known if MG Australia will update pricing and specification for the safer 2025-model-year MG5 sedan.

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