MG S5 EV CKD: SAME CAR, PROPERLY SORTED

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I went into this expecting nothing more than a factory change and a new invoice, because that’s usually how these local-assembly stories go: same badge, same silhouette, same car with a different birth certificate and a marginally better price. I had that whole thought fully formed before I’d even started the engine, or whatever the electric equivalent of that ceremony is. By the first roundabout, I’d quietly had to retire it. This didn’t feel like the same car wearing a local address. It felt like the S5 EV that had finally been allowed to finish its homework, and the rest of the drive only made that impression stronger.

For the record, the car under me for this test was the range-topping Lux, the CKD line’s flagship trim, so everything below about power, cabin materials and equipment describes that variant specifically. The entry-level Com shares the same body and the same underlying platform improvements, but it comes without several of the upgrades that made the biggest impression on me, so where the two differ I’ve called it out.

What Actually Changed Under the Skin

The number that started changing my mind is 205 PS and 350 Nm, up from 170 PS and 250 Nm on the original CBU, and it’s not the kind of bump you get from a firmware nudge and an optimistic marketing team. You feel it the instant you bury the throttle, a proper shove through the seat rather than a polite suggestion, and it drags the 0-100 km/h time down from a fairly ordinary 8.6 seconds to a genuinely satisfying 7.0 flat. What makes it stranger still is that the range went up at the same time, from 425 to 446 km on the exact same 62 kWh battery, which is the automotive equivalent of losing weight while eating more. Somewhere in Melaka, someone went back into the motor and inverter tuning and simply asked for more of everything, and by whatever quiet engineering miracle these things happen, got it without giving anything back in return.

The cabin is where this stops being a spec sheet story and starts being something you notice with your hands rather than your eyes. The CBU made do with a leather-and-fabric compromise on the seats, and the CKD has swapped that for full leatherette that actually looks and feels like it belongs on a car in this price bracket. The front passenger seat has gone from manually adjustable to power-operated and ventilated, which sounds like a small thing until you’re the one riding shotgun on a hot afternoon and suddenly it isn’t. Even the tailgate opens itself with a wave of a foot now, which is the kind of convenience feature that feels faintly ridiculous until the day your hands are full of groceries and you’re grateful for it. None of this is what a badge-engineering exercise spends money on, and that’s really the point I keep coming back to: somebody wanted the local car to be genuinely better, not just cheaper to build.

And here’s the claim I’m putting my name to, because as far as I can tell nobody else in Malaysia has said it yet: this cabin feels more solid than the CBU’s did. There’s less give in the door cards when you push on them, less of that hollow, slightly apologetic flex you sometimes get from an interior that was built to hit a price rather than a feeling. Rap your knuckles on the dashboard and it doesn’t sound nervous about it. It’s not a number you’ll find on a brochure or a spec sheet anywhere, but it’s the kind of thing your hands register within the first ten minutes behind the wheel and don’t forget for the rest of the drive.

Comfortable, Spacious, and Genuinely Quick

Settle into the S5 EV and it doesn’t feel like it’s making excuses for its price tag. There’s real room in both rows, the kind where nobody’s knees are negotiating with the seat in front of them, and the cabin feels wide and unhurried rather than the usual C-segment scramble for elbow space. Malaysian humidity is a genuinely hostile environment for a car interior, the kind that turns a plain seat into a small daily punishment, and the ventilated seats earn their keep within the first five minutes of any drive that involves actual sunlight, which in this country is most of them.

On the move, that extra 100 Nm isn’t just a spec-sheet flex, it’s closer to a personality change. Squeeze the throttle and the car pulls with real conviction, the kind of response that turns overtaking into a formality instead of a negotiation with oncoming traffic. It’s quick enough to be genuinely entertaining on a good stretch of road, which is not a sentence I expected to be writing about this car going in, and refined enough that none of that speed comes at the expense of comfort. That’s the grand-tourer trick done properly: fast when you ask for it, serene when you don’t, and never seeming confused about which mode it should be in at any given moment.

Ride quality plays along nicely with all of this. Malaysia is not kind to suspension systems, between expansion joints and B-roads that seem to have been designed by committee, and the S5 EV absorbs most of that punishment without passing the bill on to your spine. There’s a newfound sense of structural tightness that seems to have arrived along with the local assembly line itself, and the result is a cabin that stays hushed and composed at speed rather than one that’s merely quick in a straight line and loud about it.

The Numbers at a Glance

By the Numbers: Why Melaka, and Why Now

Right, coffee break over, let’s talk business for a moment, because the reason this car exists in its current form is a more interesting story than the usual “local assembly, lower price” shrug most reviews give it. Malaysia’s CBU EV import and excise duty exemptions were due to expire in December 2025, so MG’s move to localise assembly at EPMB’s Pegoh plant in Melaka was a calculated hedge rather than a courtesy gesture, and you can watch that logic play out in the pricing timeline. The first sign of what was coming arrived in October 2025 with a full RM8,000 cut across the CBU range, announced in the same breath as the CKD plan itself. The real payoff landed once the CKD cars actually reached showrooms: the Com starts at RM103,900, a genuine RM4,000 cheaper than the last CBU Com price, while the Lux picks up a noticeably stronger motor and a nicer cabin for roughly the same money the CBU used to ask for less car.

Run the actual value math and the case only sharpens further. On a price-per-kilometre-of-range basis, the CKD Lux works out to roughly RM264 per km of WLTP range, against approximately RM301 per km for Proton’s e.MAS 7 and RM299 per km for BYD’s facelifted Atto 3 at their respective entry trims. On a price-per-horsepower basis, the Lux comes in around RM573 per PS, which undercuts the Atto 3’s RM617 per hp and lands close to the e.MAS 7’s RM483 per hp despite the MG’s meaningfully longer range. The GWM Ora Good Cat looks cheaper on a pure range-per-ringgit basis, but that comparison needs an asterisk attached to it, since its 460 to 480 km figures are NEDC-rated, a noticeably more generous test cycle than the WLTP numbers used for the S5 EV, e.MAS 7 and Atto 3, so it isn’t a clean like-for-like reading. The Ora’s 60 kW DC charging, less than half the S5 EV’s 150 kW, is the cleaner and more directly comparable shortfall between the two.

*NEDC-rated range figures read more generously than WLTP; treat this row as directional only, not a like-for-like comparison with the WLTP-rated rivals above it.

There’s a bigger production story sitting underneath those numbers, and it’s a more ambitious one than a single facelifted SUV would suggest. The Melaka line is currently running at 120 to 180 units a month, somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 units annualised for 2026, and MG Malaysia posted 39 percent year-on-year sales growth in the first quarter of 2026, up 57 percent quarter-on-quarter, a jump the company itself credits partly to the CKD launch. The dealer network is scaling to keep pace with all of that: new 3S centres have opened in Kuantan and Rawang, and there are now up to 11 body-and-paint centres operating nationwide. Melaka-built S5 EVs are already being exported to left-hand-drive markets in South America, and MG has signalled plans to expand CKD assembly to several more models from here. Taken together, none of this reads like a one-off localisation exercise to dodge an expiring tax break. It reads like the opening chapter of MG treating Malaysia as a genuine production and export base, not just a market to sell into.

Verdict

Here’s where I’ve landed after spending real time with this car: I expected a rebadge and got a genuinely better one instead. More power, more range, a cabin that finally feels like it believes in itself, and pricing that either held steady or actually improved depending on which trim you’re looking at. It was already comfortable and spacious in its original CBU form, and now it’s quicker, quieter, and put together with noticeably more conviction underhand than the car it replaced. This isn’t just the S5 EV built a little closer to home. It’s the version you actually want, and right now it’s one of the most convincing electric SUV values on Malaysian roads, full stop.

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