What the Moskvich 5 is like to drive
Most of what is written about how the Moskvich 5 drives was produced by people working from a specification sheet. We hand this car over most weeks and drive it ourselves between hires, on ordinary roads in an ordinary city. Here is what it is actually like from the driver's seat.
Pulling away and low speeds
This is where the car is at its best and the reason people get on with it. Lift off the brake and the creep is gentle and predictable. The turbo petrol produces useful pull from low revs, so nosing out of a side street onto a busy road does not require you to provoke it or plan ahead.
The CVT deserves credit here. In slow traffic a conventional automatic hunts between first and second, with a small lurch each time it changes its mind. There is nothing for a CVT to hunt between, so a crawl down the A6 at half five is smooth in a way you stop noticing after a week — which is the highest compliment a gearbox can earn.
Around town
Visibility is good. The seating position is high enough to see past the van in front, the glass area is generous and the pillars do not create the blind spots that some styling-led crossovers suffer. Judging the front corners takes about ten minutes to learn.
At 1.85 metres wide the car is narrow by current crossover standards, which matters in a city of terraced streets and tight multi-storeys. Nothing about placing it is stressful.
Ride quality
Soft rather than sharp. The suspension absorbs the broken surfaces and drain covers that make up most British urban roads without thumping into the cabin. Larger, sharper intrusions — a bad pothole, a square-edged speed cushion — come through more clearly, which is normal for a car with this much sidewall and this kind of tuning.
The trade-off is body movement. Push it through a series of bends and the car leans and settles rather than staying flat. It never feels unsafe; it simply has no interest in being hurried.
The slip road: the one awkward moment
Ask for everything at once from 40mph and you get textbook CVT behaviour. The revs climb rapidly to where the engine makes peak power and stay there while road speed catches up. Your ear expects the note to rise and fall with acceleration and it does not.
The car is not slow. The sound simply does not match what the speedometer is doing, and that mismatch is what people are describing when they complain about CVTs.
There is a fix and it takes two days to learn: squeeze rather than stamp, and build speed a fraction earlier. Do that and the gearbox stays quiet and the whole car feels more refined.
Motorway manners
Better than expected. Holding 65 or 70 the CVT settles the engine at low revs and simply leaves it there — no shuffling between ratios on a gradient, which some torque-converter automatics do. Wind and road noise are ordinary for the class. You can hold a conversation without raising your voice.
Crosswind stability is fine; at 1.70 metres tall the car is not a sail. Long-distance comfort comes down to the seats, which have been good for the several-hour runs we have done in it.
Steering and brakes
The steering is light, accurate and almost completely mute. For parking and town work that is exactly right. For anything that involves enjoying a road, it tells you nothing about what the front tyres are doing. This is a deliberate tuning decision rather than a flaw, and how you feel about it depends entirely on what you want from a car.
Brakes are progressive and easy to modulate smoothly, which matters more in stop-start traffic than outright stopping power.
In the wet
Worth its own paragraph, because Manchester supplies plenty of opportunities to find out. Traction is unremarkable in the good sense: front-wheel drive with sensible tyre widths does not struggle to put around 150bhp down, even pulling out of a junction on a wet gradient. The stability control intervenes rarely and undramatically when it does.
The CVT is quietly an asset here too. Because there are no shift steps, there is no sudden change in torque delivery mid-corner to unsettle the car on a greasy roundabout. It is one of those advantages nobody lists in a brochure and every driver benefits from between October and March.
The summary
As a machine for moving people around a city, it is genuinely good: smooth, easy, comfortable and undemanding. As something to enjoy driving, it is inert. Both statements are true and neither is a criticism of the engineering.
Twenty minutes will not tell you which side of that you land on. Several days will, which is what our Moskvich 5 hire in Salford is for.