Lake Farm Hill Climb: Makigai MaiMai
Channel: Simon Brooke
Date: 30/04/2021

A review of the Makigai MaiMai, from Cyberpunk 2077


Welcome to episode four of the Lake Farm Hill Climb.

Early in the game you're only going to be able to afford the cheaper cars, and you'd reasonably expect that cheaper cars wouldn't be very good. In the last episode, we looked at the Mahir Supron, and it lived up to those expectations perfectly. So is there any vehicle which you can buy early in the game which is better?

Actually, there is, and this one will surprise you. It is, as we'd say here in Scotland, a magic wee car, and actually cheaper than the Supron:

The Makigai MaiMai.

It's a truly minimalist thing; a tin box - with quite a lot of glass - wrapped around two seats, a rear engine, and virtually nothing else. It's cheap, and it's honest about it: it looks cheap. There's no pretention here. The interior is similarly simple. It's beautifully modelled, but there's actually not a lot to it.

But now I'm going to do a thing I haven't done in previous reviews, just to show you one of the MaiMai's great features: I'm going to spin it round the carpark to show off its extraordinarily tight turning circle.

Note also the movement of the door. This is a city car, designed for tight spaces: the door doesn't swing out, but folds up. This is very thoughtful design.

It drives off without a lot of fuss. There's none of the wheelspin noise of the Supron, and the engine note is much less harsh. 

It also sticks to the road fairly well - the little jink across the road here is driver error, not a fault of the car; and overshooting the bottom turn is also driver error.

Once on the climb, driver hamfistedness is really the main problem. Because of the tight turning circle, the steering is very sensitive, and movements of the joystick which would mean fairly gentle turns in the other vehicles I've been driving now mean abrupt ones.

Coming out of the third hairpin, I've messed up so much that the car develops a harmonic pitching under acceleration, which is partly down to short wheelbase; and after recovering from that I come into the fourth hairpin too fast, resulting in a spinout. But the fifth hairpin is much more tidy, and this demonstrates that once you get used to it this car actually drives quite well. 

Although I'm still moving the joystick too far, the bend at the top is negotiated without difficulty - virtually no sliding. 

Acceleration isn't brisk compared to other cars we've looked at, but nevertheless we peak at just over one hundred miles an hour indicated on this first straight, and, when I cut across the gravel as I did in the Supron, there's no sliding at all. 

On the finishing straight it peaks at over one hundred and twenty, which is faster than I would want to go in something which offers little more protection than a go cart.

So that's the magic wee Makigai MaiMai: cheap, quirky, hardly stylish, but extremely manoeuvrable and handles reasonably well.

You would do well to buy this as soon as you can; it's a hell of a lot better than the Hella.