The MG Story I Didn't Plan to Keep Telling

Six weeks ago I published a piece on this site called I've Driven Six EVs. Here's the One I'm Actually Buying. The car in question was the Zeekr 7X. The plan was a five-year novated lease. The deposit was practically warm in my pocket.

I am not, in fact, buying that car.

What I'm driving instead is a 2024 MG4 hatch with just under 40,000 km on the clock, barely two years old, picked up from a rental centre in Melbourne's north. It's costing us a fraction of what the Zeekr 7x would have. We're loving it.

Here's how the conversation with the dealer went, why a five-year commitment didn't survive contact with the world we're actually living in, and why — for the second time in three years — I've ended up in a small MG.

Why a five-year lease stopped feeling right

The Zeekr 7X is, on paper and in person, the car for us. Range, towing capacity, the kind of build that would let us sell the petrol Mitsubishi Outlander we've been using to tow our caravan. Without the budget for a BMW Neue Klasse iX3, the Zeekr 7x is — was — the best version of the car I want.

Novated leasing made it possible. The FBT exemption on eligible electric vehicles is genuinely generous, much more so than for non-EVs, and if you've been on the fence about an EV in Australia, this is the policy that makes the maths work for a lot of people.

The catch, for us specifically, was the structure of the commitment. The exemption attaches to the employer who signs the agreement — not to you, the driver. If your circumstances change in the five years that follow, that benefit doesn't necessarily travel with you. We weren't worried about the car; the car is the safe part. We were being asked to commit, in effect, to the rest of our circumstances staying broadly the same for half a decade. In mid-2026, looking at the world, that started to feel less like a calculated risk and more like wishful thinking.

There's a second thread to it. By the time the five-year leases that started in 2024 begin rolling off, there will be a lot of two- and three-year-old EVs hitting the second-hand market. The residual value calculations on these things are not gentle. A reasonable bet is that in three years' time you could pick up a lightly-driven BEV for $20k — with all the usual second-hand-battery caveats, but at a price that makes the maths look very different.

So the decision wasn't whether the Zeekr 7x was the right car. It was whether five years of confident projections still held. We decided they didn't.

A note before we go any further: this is our story, not advice. If you're looking at a novated lease right now and the numbers work for you, they work for you. Talk to people who do this professionally. We did, and we still landed where we landed.

Origin 360EV, and the listing that felt like the clouds parting

The way back from "we're not signing the lease" to "we're once again in an EV car we love" ran through Origin's 360EV program — a month-to-month EV subscription that my employer happens to offer. We've used it for every test drive in the last two years. No long commitment, the option to buy out after three to five years if you fall in love, and a 15% discount each year you stay. If you keep a car for the full term, it gets cheaper as it goes.

We'd been on a previous 360EV rental — most recently with an MG S5 EV, as it happens — and ended that one purely on cost and our then-current circumstances. It wasn't bad to drive, just more than we wanted to spend month-on-month. The Zeekr 7X is on the program too, but the price puts it outside what we'd want to commit to as an open-ended monthly outgoing.

Then I checked the pre-loved section. There was an MG4. Just under 40,000 km. Barely two years old. We'd looked at the MG4 a couple of years back when it first launched and walked away because the timing wasn't right.

It felt like the clouds parting.

Picking it up

The pickup centre is a small operation north of the city — half rental yard, half cleaning bay. The car came out, we did the walk-around, signed for it, and drove off.

What I expected: a perfectly competent small EV with the cost-cutting showing through.

What I got: a small hatch with a turning circle that makes inner-city parking actually pleasant, and a build quality that doesn't match the "cheap Chinese hatch" narrative some of the reviews lean on. It feels solid. The driver-warning chimes — which on the MG S5 EV were borderline aggressive — are dialled back here, and what remains is easy to configure. The seat position is low. The steering is light without being vague. The suspension handles Melbourne's roads better than I'd been led to expect.

Twenty minutes in, I was already revising my preconceptions.

Three weeks of daily driving

Around the city, the MG4 is exactly the car you want. Zippier than the spec sheet suggests, quiet, solid, and economical on the kind of stop-start driving that punishes a lot of bigger EVs. If you've got reliable charging — at home, at work, or both — and your driving is mostly inner-suburban, you'd struggle to find a smarter buy at the price.

The freeway is where the small-battery, small-car physics catch up with you. The MG4's economy on the open road is not its strong suit. But — and this is the part that surprised me — it's not materially worse than the bigger EVs we've spent time in. You'd hope a 75 kWh family car would pull better numbers, but in practice the gap closes a lot when you're holding 110 km/h.

Specifics, in case you're running the numbers for your own life: Melbourne to Daylesford eats around 40% of the battery. The return trip, with the gradual descent into Melbourne, eats around 30%. We've done a Daylesford-Melbourne-Daylesford-Melbourne in a single day, with only the Level 2 charger at Wombat Cottage in the middle for a few hours, and finished with margin to spare. For a car we picked up because the bigger commitment got too big, that's exactly the right kind of competence.

The MG story I didn't plan to keep telling

A couple of years ago, I had an MG S5 EV for six months — yes, that one. I called it the best value EV I'd driven and said I would have kept it longer if circumstances had let me. That's still in print on this site, in the Six EVs I've Actually Driven piece from March.

I did not expect to be writing the sequel.

There's something quietly satisfying about ending up back in an MG after working through the field. The S5 EV was a value pick. The MG4 is, dare I say it, more than that — a small hatch that drives like it costs more than it does, with none of the polish-deficit you fear when the price tag is this competitive. If the brand has a story arc, it's that the cars keep getting better and the marketing keeps not quite catching up.

For now, the MG4 is doing exactly what we need it to. We're not going to flatter ourselves it's a long-range tourer or a tow vehicle — that's still the petrol Outlander's job until we can do something about it. But for everything that doesn't involve a caravan, it's the right car at the right time.

The Zeekr 7X is still the car. We'll get there one day.

A few charging notes

Two things worth knowing if you're driving an MG4 around Melbourne and Victoria:

The Level 2 charger at Wombat Cottage in Daylesford has done the heavy lifting for our regional charging. A few hours plugged in over lunch is enough to turn the trip back into a non-event. (Yes — that's our Airbnb, and yes, the charger is part of the reason guests book.)

The Ampol on Barkly Square in Brunswick was a genuine surprise. I expected a slow, fiddly experience and got a clean, fast charge with no drama. If you're in the inner-north and need a quick top-up, it's worth the detour.

The honest version

I keep waiting for the regret about the Zeekr 7x to land, and it hasn't. We almost made a five-year commitment we weren't ready to make, walked it back, and ended up in a smaller car that costs less and does the job. The 7X is still the goal — the goal can wait.

If you read the piece six weeks ago and felt the conviction in it, I owe you the update. The conviction was real; the conditions changed. That's how this is going to keep working as we figure out what it actually means to own — or not own — an EV in 2026.

For now: the MG4 is great, the lease can wait, and the next EV story I write will be about something else entirely.

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