It increasingly seems that the electric car will definitely help Chinese brands in Europe. One of the newcomers is Aiways, which with the U5 for a relatively modest amount offers a wattle of an SUV.
It has been complained that cars are increasingly similar to each other due to the rise of the EV, but for the time being the opposite seems to be the case. Firstly, the EV is forcing existing manufacturers to resolutely throw the familiar basic recipe overboard. In addition, the electric car lowers the threshold for new car manufacturers. Why? Well, first of all, an EV is less complicated, so knowledge and experience are less important and the development process can be significantly simplified. Another factor in the Dutch market is that the EV is particularly favorable from a tax point of view due to the bpm exemption. That it suddenly becomes much easier to be competitive, a brand like MG has proven for quite some time with the almost dirt-cheap ZS EV.
The Chinese Aiways U5 at first seems less advantageous. The car is not even that much cheaper than its direct competitors, while things like power and battery capacity are quite comparable. No, the great strength of the Aiways is its size. At 4.68 meters, it is much bigger than those competitors. That translates into a lot of interior space, especially in the rear seat, where passengers have a generous amount of leg and headroom at their disposal. With 432 liters, the luggage compartment of the U5 is not huge, but it is larger than many other cars in this segment. The Aiways also has an extra storage space in the nose. That frunk doesn’t represent much, but the extra compartment is useful for a charging cable.
The design of the interior fits well with the exterior. Build quality seems okay and so are the soft plastics used on dashboard and door panels. Nevertheless, the U5 interior shows that Aiways is a newcomer. It is precisely the parts that you come into contact with a lot, such as the steering wheel and the rotary knob for the direction of travel, come across quite cheap. Various buttons and switches are also strongly reminiscent of those of other manufacturers and that also means that the whole does not look too coherent.
No navigation
The instruments consist of no less than three screens, which means that information about consumption, journey, speed and media can be displayed at the same time. Aiways also deserves credit for showing both the battery percentage and the remaining mileage. The central touchscreen is 12.3 inches in size, but not really nice. The menu structure is good enough, but the reaction speed could be better and the whole, as yet in English, contains a lot of unclear translations. Moreover, it lacks its own navigation system. Smartphones can be connected, but not via Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Instead, Aiways uses an app that displays the entire phone screen. Then you can navigate, but only when the phone screen is switched on. Moreover, you can immediately operate the entire telephone in this way. That seems convenient, but app or watch YouTube videos on the go is of course not the best idea from a safety point of view. For Apple users, the solution is on the way, because in time Apple CarPlay will appear. In addition, Dutch translations would follow and the most expensive U5 will get a separate control panel for the climate control. A downright mistake is that seat heating is only available in the most expensive version, while that efficient way of heating is very nice in electric cars.
Traditional
Aiways is a start-up founded in 2017 that has focused on electric cars from the start. The U5 is therefore not based on an existing (petrol) model, but is nevertheless quite traditional in design. For example, a front electric motor drives the front wheels. The power comes from a 63 kWh battery pack. From model year 2021, the U5 with 204 hp and 310 Nm is slightly more powerful than the 2020 version that we drove, because it has to do with 125 kW or 170 hp. The car seems to be squeezed slightly from the starting blocks to limit the wheel spin, but then takes off quickly. The car is clearly geared towards comfort. It leans considerably and absorbs irregularities with ease, although not always silently. Even if it has to slow down, it turns out that this is not the most refined EV on the market. When the foot of the gas goes, the U5 initially starts to slow down nicely. If the driver then decides that a slightly less severe deceleration is desired, the braking is finally thrown overboard with a tangible shock. Strange, because in every other EV the degree of recovery can be adjusted neatly ‘on the go’ with that pedal. In addition, the spongy feel of the brake pedal is very difficult to adjust and that makes it almost impossible to move through traffic without any jolts.
Naturally, the U5 also has assistance systems on board. Lane assistance is linked to cruise control. That’s nice, but it doesn’t work very advanced. The adaptive cruise control is even downright annoying, keeps an unnatural distance and brakes unnecessarily hard. Although the question is how happy we should be with that, the adaptive cruise control is standard on all versions of the Aiways U5. For the time being there are three: the Premium, the Comfort and the Showroom. The latter is a temporary implementation. The Aiways never has a three-phase charger, which means that a night on the charger does not always result in a full battery.