MG Gloster review, road test

Can MG’s new flagship disrupt the body-on-frame seven-seat premium SUV space?

Published on Oct 23, 2020 06:00:00 AM

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How the ADAS works

The ADAS or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems in the Gloster have some features that we’re more familiar with, like driver fatigue detection, which suggests the driver take a break via a prompt on the MID after it senses the car has been on the move for a long time, or it detects erratic driving behaviour. The next feature is the auto parking assist, which is essentially a hands-free park-in or park-out function for parallel or perpendicular spaces, where the driver merely controls the vehicle speed and forward/reverse gears, and the car steers itself.

Orange light in the wing mirror flashes when an object is in your blind spot.

It also gets a blind-spot warning function, which flashes a light in the wing mirror to make you aware of a vehicle in your rear three-quarter view, and if you are indicating, you won’t hear the ticking sound if there is an object in your blind spot. Then there’s lane-departure warning, which alerts you with a graphic on the MID as well as an audible warning when it detects you are straying out of your lane without indicating. What’s nice is that this system even detects washed off or faint lane markers.

Lane departure warning alerts driver when the car is veering out of line.

There’s a self-explanatory frontal collision warning, which throws up a prompt on the MID accompanied by an audible warning, if it senses that the car could possibly have a head-on collision. And finally, adaptive cruise control, which maintains a set distance from the car in front of you and adjusts your speed to match, even down to a complete halt. This works brilliantly for the most part and will even slam the brakes if an errant driver suddenly cuts in front of you. But if the traffic in front is a bit slower than your set speed, the Gloster’s system, while maintaining a safe distance, will remain at a lower gear than usual, in an attempt to immediately reach the preset speed when the traffic clears. This on-guard behaviour takes away from a relaxed cruise control experience to an extent. The autonomous emergency braking function works extremely well while using adaptive cruise control, but we still wouldn’t advise that you rely on this system a hundred percent.

Adaptive cruise control works well; maintains a preset distance from cars.

Whilst the ADAS features work extremely well for the most part, the warning alarms and parking sensors are too loud and can get very annoying, and there’s no way to lower the volume. In fact, even something like the turn indicators sound excessively loud.