Inside the Moskvich 5: interior and comfort
Interiors are where cars are actually experienced. You spend a week looking at the dashboard and about four seconds a day looking at the exterior. This is an assessment of the Moskvich 5's cabin based on living with one rather than on photographs of a press car.
Getting in
Easier than a hatchback and easier than a large SUV, which is the whole argument for a compact crossover. At roughly 1.70 metres tall the car puts the seat at a height where you step across rather than dropping down or climbing up. For anyone with a stiff back or a knee that objects to low seats, this is a genuine consideration and it is the reason a lot of our repeat customers give for choosing it.
The door apertures are square rather than stylishly tapered, so there is no ducking involved. Rear passengers get the same benefit.
The driving position
Good, with adjustment in the places that matter. The seat height range is generous, the wheel moves enough to suit most builds, and the pedals sit where your feet naturally fall rather than offset towards the centre. Over a three-hour drive the seats have not caused complaints from us or from anyone returning the car.
Visibility deserves a mention because it contributes more to comfort than people credit. The glass area is generous, the pillars are not dramatic, and you can see the front corners. That reduces the low-level tension of driving in an unfamiliar city.
Materials and finish
Sensible rather than luxurious, and honest about it. The upper dashboard surfaces are soft to the touch, the lower plastics are hard and hard-wearing, and the switchgear operates with consistent weight. Panel fit inside the cabin has stayed tight over a year of constant use, with no new creaks or rattles.
What you do not get is the tactile theatre of a premium badge: no damped rotary controls, no interesting textures. What you do get is a cabin that still looks tidy after a year of different drivers, which for most people is the more useful property.
Rear seats
Three across the back is fine for short journeys and comfortable for two over long ones, which is normal for a car of this width. Knee room behind an average-height driver is adequate rather than generous; headroom is good, helped by the upright roofline.
Child seats fit without a fight, and the ISOFIX points are reachable rather than buried in the seat crease — a small thing that matters enormously at seven in the morning.
Noise
Quiet enough at 60 to hold a conversation without raising your voice, which is the practical test. Road noise rises on coarse motorway surfaces in the way it does in most cars at this price. Wind noise around the mirrors is well controlled.
The engine is only audible when you demand a lot from it at once, and then it is the CVT holding revs rather than the engine being coarse.
Storage and the boot
Cabin storage is well judged: door bins take a large bottle, the centre console has somewhere to put a phone that is not the cupholder, and the glovebox is a usable size rather than a gesture.
On the boot we will describe rather than measure. We are not going to publish a litre figure we have not verified against manufacturer documentation, because the numbers circulating for this car disagree with each other. What we can say from a year of handovers: a large weekly shop plus two soft weekend bags fits without folding the rear seats, and the load lip is low enough that heavy things do not need lifting over an edge.
Infotainment
The weakest part of the cabin, and the one place the rebadge shows. The screen is responsive enough and the functions all work, but menu labels read oddly in places — a normal consequence of a car being rebadged from another market. It is an irritation rather than a fault, and it varies between software versions.
Climate and small controls
Physical buttons for temperature and fan, which after a year of using them we would not trade for a touchscreen menu. Heating warms the cabin quickly on a cold morning and the demister clears the screen without a fight, which in this part of the country is tested most days between November and March.
The verdict on the cabin
Comfortable, sensibly laid out, easy to get in and out of, and quiet enough for the driving most people do. It is not a place that impresses anyone, and it does not try to be. For a week in Manchester with a family in the back, that is very much the right set of priorities.
The only reliable way to test seat comfort is to sit in one for a few hours. Hiring the Moskvich 5 in Salford for a couple of days does that better than any description can.