Geely EX5 Review 2025 | Bargain-priced family SUV

What is the Geely EX5?

Have you ever seen those car breakdown cover adverts where the ad agency, painfully conscious of being sued for suggesting one or other car manufacturer might be less reliable than the others, doctors a picture of a car to try and make it look more anonymous?

If you know what we’re on about here, you’ll feel like you’ve seen the Geely EX5 somewhere before. It’s not that it’s an unattractive car – it’s just that it’s almost made an art form out of looking generic.

Mind you, Geely isn’t here to sell cars based on looks. The company owns Volvo, Polestar, Lotus and half of Smart, so even though you probably haven’t heard of it yet, this big Chinese conglomerate has had plenty of practice building cars to suit European tastes.

The EX5 is the first model to go on sale wearing its own badge here in the UK, however. It’s a larger-than-average family SUV, about the same size as a Volkswagen ID.4 or a Hyundai Ioniq 5.

But the big weapon in Geely’s arsenal is that it undercuts most of its established rivals on price. In fact, the entry-level model will cost you less than a Peugeot e-2008 – a car ostensibly two sizes smaller.

In other words, the EX5 is a car the size of a Skoda Enyaq, for the price of a Skoda Elroq. Geely, then, hopes to sell the EX5 on value, to family buyers whose heads will be turned by its price and equipment level – even if they aren’t by the way it looks.

How practical is it?

Passenger space is one of the EX5’s biggest strong points. Given it’s so much larger than most of the cars it goes up against price-wise, it should come as no surprise that you get a lot more room inside for your money.

In the back, there are acres of legroom and headroom, even for the tallest passengers. The flat floor means those sitting in the middle aren’t disadvantaged, either. Up front, there isn’t quite such a sense of space as a result of the high centre console, but you never feel cramped and there’s plenty of headroom and elbow room.

There are also some clever touches, with lots of useful cubbies for storing odds and ends. An especially impressive example is a large drawer beneath the rear seats that’s perfect for stashing parenting paraphernalia such as nappies, wipes, or kids’ toys. The front seats fold all the way back, too, allowing you to turn them into a bed if you want to have a nap while you’re charging.

What’s more, the EX5 is rather a nice place to be. The leather is all faux, of course, but Geely’s ensured there’s lots of it – not just on the seats, but slathered across the dashboard and doors, so everything you touch has a soft, luxurious feel. There are some interesting wood-esque inserts, and together with the light-coloured finishes these ensure that the whole of the EX5’s cockpit feels light and airy.

One area where the EX5 drops marks, though, is boot space. With 461 litres of luggage room, it isn’t quite so capacious back here as rivals of the same size. Having said that, the EX5 offers more boot space than the smaller SUVs with which it competes on price. You also get a false boot floor which can be set to a higher position, to divide the space in two. This is in addition to a separate, hidden compartment beneath.

What's it like to drive?

There’s plenty of power on offer in the EX5; every version comes with the same motor, which dispenses 215bhp – far more than you might expect for a car of this price. As a result, every version can sashay to 62mph in just seven seconds – which is pretty quick for a value-led family SUV.

There’s only one battery to choose from; a 60kWh (usable) unit that feels slightly undersized. Consequently, you get a 267-mile official range, which will mean around 230 miles on a good day in the real world – or perhaps around 200 miles in the winter.

That may not sound like much, but to be fair it’s about on a par with the entry-level Skoda Elroq, which costs about the same money. Trouble is, with the Elroq, there’s the option of a bigger battery should you wish to travel further on a charge; that’s not something that can be said for the EX5.

Charging speeds are pretty good, with a maximum of 160kW on a DC charger; a 30-80 per cent charge will therefore take around 20 minutes. That's compeptitive with most rival cars.

Out on the road, though, is where you’ll find the key difference. Geely says it gave the EX5 to the handling gurus at Lotus to fine-tune the chassis for UK roads. The results aren’t entirely successful, because there’s a degree of stiffness that causes the EX5 to shift uncomfortably from side to side on uneven roads. It can feel as though the car is rocking and pitching as you travel down the road, sometimes dramatically. Occasionally, this effect can be so bad as to cause one or other of the corners of the car to thud jarringly as the suspension struggles to cope. The problem is less pronounced away from undulating country roads, but even then there’s a jitteriness that means the EX5 never really feels fully settled.

On the plus side, the stiff suspension means that the EX5 doesn’t lean over too badly in bends, and that means it retains a decent level of grip. Trouble is, you never really feel that keen on exploiting this, because the over-assisted steering saps any sort of enjoyment from the process.

To be fair, family SUVs are not intended to be drivers’ cars and most buyers will be happy enough with the way the EX5 goes where you point it. For all that, though, family SUVs do need to be stable and secure – and the way the EX5 behaves over rougher roads might cause small voices in the back to pipe up and complain of queasiness.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

It’s the SE model that kicks off the range, yet despite this version’s very reasonable price, it comes with a wealth of technology on board: heated and electrically adjustable front seats, a heated steering wheel, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, adaptive cruise control and a 360-degree top-view parking camera all come as standard. As does a heat pump, for better energy efficiency when using the heating and air conditioning.

At the top of the range sits the Max, which comes with a panoramic roof, ventilated and massaging front seats with a memory function, a powered boot lid, a 16-speaker audio system, metallic paint and – brace yourself for this – little lights for the vanity mirrors. Joking aside, that is a veritable cornucopia of kit for a car that costs as little as this.

Between these two versions sits the rather odd Pro model. This gets a specification identical to that of the SE, with the exception of the alloy wheels, which are upgraded from 18- to 19-inch items. That’s it. That’s the only difference. Peculiar, no?

You can’t fault the EX5 for value, then. But where the tech story falls down is with the infotainment system. This comes in the form of a whopping 15.4-inch touchscreen, and at first glance, it’s rather attractive, with pleasing on-screen graphics and crisp quality.

The problems come when you start to use it, and you find that it doesn’t always respond to your first touch. It can also be generally slow to react, which means you sometimes find yourself waiting to see whether the reason the system hasn’t done what you’ve asked is because it’s being slow, or it hasn’t registered the prod of your finger.

Combine this with the fact that some of the car’s critical functions are buried several layers deep in the menus, and it isn’t hard to imagine how quickly the system can become distracting. And boy, doesn’t the EX5 like to tell you about it when you’re distracted – indeed, the nannying bongs of its driver monitoring system can often be a background accompaniment to any attempt to achieve even simple settings changes.

Geely would be keen to point out that the way round this is to use the voice-activation system, but this doesn’t always recognise your commands. So there really is no easy way to access some of the car’s functions.

Geely EX5 running costs

This is where the EX5 starts to get truly competitive. Let’s face it: you’re paying not much more than £30,000 here for a car of a size and specification that could easily cost you £40,000, and then some, elsewhere.

So there’s absolutely no doubting the EX5’s value for money. It should be relatively affordable to run, too; the entry-level version gets 3.9 miles per kilowatt hour (mi/kWh) in official tests, which isn’t quite up there with the best, but it’s not far off.

The low price of the EX5 pays dividends as far as road tax is concerned; not even the most expensive version will breach the £40,000 threshold and, therefore, incur the higher rate of VED from years two to six. The same can’t be said for its pricier rivals, most of which get costly to tax if you spec them up too much.

Servicing, meanwhile, is only required every two years or 20,000 miles, as is the case with most electric cars; do factor in that Geely currently has just 25 showrooms in the UK, although it aims to up that to 100 within a year or so’s time.

Geely EX5 reliability

It’s absolutely impossible for us to predict with any certainty how reliable Geely’s products will be. The only vague guide we have is the performance of Volvo, which has been under Geely’s control since 2010. A 21st-place finish (out of the 30 brands) in this year’s What Car? Reliability Survey doesn’t bode brilliantly – although it’s worth remembering that Volvo came 12th the year before. And also, that Volvo’s cars’ performance does not necessarily equate to that of Geely’s own products.

What we can tell you is that the EX5 comes with Geely’s six-year, 100,000-mile warranty, which is a good sign that the company has confidence that its products will last the course. Of note, Geely is currently offering buyers an additional two years’ worth of warranty (with the mileage cap lifted to 125,000 miles) for an undisclosed promotional period to coincide with its launch in the UK.