MG Windsor Long Term Review: No Worry For Fuel Prices?

Praised for its spacious interior, smooth power delivery, and city-friendly size, MG Windsor excels in usability. Its downsides include a firm ride and over-reliance on the touchscreen for controls.

The Windsor EV impressed during a two-month test, offering a real-world range of 280km from its 38kWh battery.

Source : Somnath Chatterjee

The Windsor is currently one of the most popular EVs and we also gave it our EV of the year award. However, how good is it to live with? We spent a couple of months with the car and came away impressed with its usability plus the range while it only had a few quirks. The Windsor that we tested was the standard version with a 38kWh battery while there is a Pro version which gets a larger one. Anyways, let's talk about our review.

What's The Range?

Let's get straight to the talking point and with a claimed 332km per charge, we got around 280km with a mix of highway plus city with all modes including eco+ which is the best mode for getting the max change. Eco+ is not very slow too and for low speed traffic, it makes sense. The real world range hence, is near the claimed range while we only had to charge it once a week at our office while the per km cost of running the car is a fraction of a petrol or diesel car. That is the big USP for an EV. 

How Is The Power?

Power delivery is smooth, quick enough and perfect for city use with a light steering along with great visibility. It is not very big and neither is it too small but perfect for city use. There are drive modes and regen braking on offer while I used the highest regen. The ride though is firm and that's a bother when it crashes over potholes but other than that, the light controls, smooth performance and the compact size enables it to be perfect for city use. We also like how the camera stays on at low speeds when driving while at night, the LED headlamps illuminate the road ahead quite well.

What About The Interior?

The interior is impressive and simply put, offers more space than other 5 seater rivals. The rear seat is huge on space and you can recline too while three passengers can easily fit along with a flat floor. Even the boot easily swallowed my entire family of 5's luggage. The seats are comfortable for long distance use and the other best bit is the huge number of storage options with plenty all around the cabin. There were some issues though and mainly with the touchscreen having too many functions. There are not many physical controls which means you need to get into the touchscreen to adjust the sunroof or even mirrors and even after a week or two, it was confusing. The screen works very well though and it never did hang in two months while the resolution is good too including for the 360 degree camera.

That said, we did notice how the screen is a bit too bright at times at night and we had to lower the brightness. We did find it interesting that you can scroll down as far as you want the sunroof to be lowered but all of it requires too much attention given to the screen and not to the road ahead. There are a few shortcut buttons on the steering which we did use for some of the functions.

 
Other things? The voice command worked well and I used it a lot while the audio system is decent too while the inbuilt app helps you pick from many songs on the go.

Would You Recommend It?

The Windsor is easy to recommend as a spacious EV which offers a lot of tech, compact size but inside it is much more spacious than rivals while range is good too for mostly city use. Yes, it has its own fair share of quirks like the gimmicks including too many touchscreen oriented tasks but beyond that, the Windsor is very good value for what it gives.