Ah, the quaint British summer of days gone by. Long rays of sunshine dappling the village green. Men in off-white clothing standing around, occasional bursts of furious movement accompanied by the echoing sound of leather hitting willow and cries of “OWZAT!” Cucumber sandwiches at teatime. Retire to the clubhouse at the end of the afternoon to debate the state of the wicket while downing several pints of warm bitter. Jump in a sports car parked outside and drive off, burbling exhaust bouncing off the hedgerows, slight crunch accompanying every gear change, silk flying scarf blowing in the breeze. Back to the airfield and find all the squadron chaps in the officer’s mess gathered round the wireless listening to grave reports that there’s a bit of a brouhaha developing in Europe. Looks like it’s time to take to the skies and give the Huns a jolly good spanking again.
Fuck all that rose-tinted noise. A few exceptions aside, I’ve never really gotten along with old British sports cars and what they stood for. They represented a Great Britain that for too long traded on former glories while failing to invest in its future, superficially modern enough on the surface but pig iron old-fashioned underneath. Was a car company ever more emblematic of the British disease than MG?
Careful Adrian, your class-warrior colors are showing. Yes they are, and bite me. I’ve got far more claim to being from the streets than – irony klaxon – Sir Lewis has. Mother Dearest got engaged three times, whizzing between a revolving door of fiancés in an Austin Healey Sprite, before reluctantly replacing it with a Ford Popular when she fell pregnant with me. Even as a fetus I was a pain in the ass.
A Brief History of Death and Rebirth
MG was born in either 1924 or 1925, when William Morris’ business manager Cecil Kimber started slapping lighter bodywork from Carbodies of Coventry onto Morris chassis. These sportier versions of Morris sedans sold well and eventually led to Morris Garages moving to its own factory in Abingdon in 1929. Pre-war economic depression led to the collapse in sales of these sedans, so MG introduced the template for the quintessential cycle-winged British sports car – the Type M Midget. How important was this car? It likely saved the company and invented the affordable sports car category.
By the time American servicemen were arriving on British shores in the early forties to seduce our women with Hershey bars and nylon tights prior to fighting the Germans, the Midget had evolved into the T type, which stayed in production until 1955. When the Americans returned home after squiring every eligible female in the home counties surrounding London, they loved their nimble little British sports cars so much the United States became MG’s most important export market. The first MG with enclosed bodywork, the swoopy MGA, arrived in 1955, before being replaced by the unibody MGB in 1962.
The MGB is the purest embodiment of the classic British roadster. Rugged, mechanically simple and with an electrical system designed by the devil. Using carry over engines and gearboxes from the MGA they weren’t exactly the most cutting edge thing on the road, especially compared to exquisitely engineered rivals coming from Italy. But they had a certain traditional charm with tidy enough handling and respectable performance. I’m not really a fan, but I have a soft spot for the achingly pretty Pininfarina designed MGB GT coupe, especially in V8 form (that was bizarrely never offered in the US. Good old British Leyland). By the time it was finally put out of its misery in 1980 the B had become a knock-kneed, over-bumpered shadow of its former delicate self, the last models wheezing off the line coinciding with the closure of the Abingdon factory.
That wasn’t quite it for MG. As the British car industry collapsed faster than a royal marriage the name began appearing on hot versions of the Metro, Maestro and Montego. They were quick but the mechanicals were ancient; the Metro Turbo had to make do with a four speed box because it still used the A series engine and transmission in sump combo that the original Mini had in 1959. Reactionary Colonel Blimp types decried these red seat-belted ditch-finding mongrels as not proper MGs, but by then the market turned away from dedicated sports cars and towards hot hatches. Until 1989, when the Miata came along.
Finally here was a British roadster that wouldn’t leave you stranded in a back road lay-by awaiting the recovery truck. Kickstarting a sports car mini-revival, in response the corpse of the MGB was dug up in 1992 and given a trowelling of makeup to become the RV8, the majority of which were bought by those lovers of British kitsch, the Japanese. Finally in 1996 the bar of soap shaped MGF appeared, a genuinely advanced but fragile mid-engined sports car. In the meantime the rebadging of hot Rover hatches as MGs had continued, but the whole sorry mess, stripped of its crown jewels Mini and Land Rover by BMW, imploded in bankruptcy in 2005.
Rising Like a Phoenix
Currently the brand is owned by Chinese megacorp Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, and they reintroduced a range of shitacular penury boxes back to the UK market in 2013, cynically trading on their ‘British’ identity. Ten years later they’re selling a range of extremely generic hybrid and EV hatches and crossovers. They’ve exploded in market share over the last couple of years by dint of being the only company that had any fucking cars to sell, and the Dollar Tree Lamborghini styled EV4 actually being quite good.
Are there enough fans of the brand left to warrant a new MG roadster? The Cyberster (yet again, did I miss a fucking meeting?) has leaked in filings with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and those reactionary middle England types are going to be having rage strokes all over again. A new MG two-seater, built by China and powered solely by electricity? Send a carrier (the UK has two now!) to the South China Sea IMMEDIATELY!
The Design
Alright Salty Bingham, calm down. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s not ugly either. A sort of ok-ish homogenous take on the generic roadster form. I think it borrows the long fender line and rear haunches from the MGA, which is wise because the A was always a more forward looking design than the slightly upright chrome and wire wheel wearing B. All the feature lines make sense and follow through to logical conclusions, and the light catcher above the rockers nicely allows the body to taper at the waist. The front isn’t over done with air vents, although I do think dividing the lower one lends it a bit of a buck toothed appearance. Aero is critical for EVs – notice the little vertical flaps on the underside just ahead of the front wheels to help manage the airflow in this important area.
It’s quite difficult to get a sloping nose with pedestrian impact regulations, you always end up with the convergence point of the surfaces higher than you ideally want. MG have resolved this tricky area well – by dipping the transition towards the middle slightly without making it look like the car has a goofy smile. It’s reasonably good, but the light graphics are a bit bland although it’s hard to tell definitively without seeing them lit.
The Trouble with Tail Lights
Round the back is where they’ve really let their creativity run wild. It looks like they couldn’t decide between two equally bad tail lamp graphics and decided to use both of them. The problem is the upper horizontal one with the vertical elements at the end is that it’s a rigid shape that doesn’t work with the curvaceousness of the rear fenders. Look at the ends and you can see the issue – that sharp 90-degree corner creates two creases that run into the rear three quarter. It’s like trying to squeeze a perfectly square robot shit out of a soft round human asshole. The arrows, I just can’t. [Editor’s Note: If the arrows illuminate as the turn indicators I think I can’t help but like that. Sorry, Adrian. Haven’t you always wanted a sports car with these? – JT] Ugh. What’s frustrating is I actually really like the way it looks like the horizontal part is one continuous piece piercing through the narrower section of the rear panel – but the arrowheads feel like they were going to copy MINIs Union Jack lights and then bottled it. Somewhere in between these two bad ideas there’s a good idea trying to get out, but with this they’ve chosen taillight violence over diplomacy.
The black panel above the diffuser has too much Z height – they saw the back of an Aston V8 Vantage and thought, hmm more of that but worse please. I know why they’ve done it – it’s an attempt to visually reduce the height of the car, but this is a case of something having the opposite effect to what was intended, instead drawing attention to what you were trying to hide. The black graphic running around the tops of the doors and into the roof panel is trying to fool your visual cortex in the same way – because if you look at the actual cowl height it’s high for a sports car. Because this is an EV with all the cells under the floor, which pushes up the H point (if you’ve missed earlier classes, this is the distance of the driver’s hip point above the ground plane).
Supersize MG
All the dimensions are large for a sports car. Make no mistake, this is a big old bus. At 178” long it’s some two feet longer, 7” wider and 5” taller than a Miata. And at nearly 4400 lbs, it’s 2000 lbs fatter. Alright yes, it’s full of batteries, although we don’t know how many, it’s obviously all of them. Real sports cars get the virtuous circle spiraling downwards not up; lower weight needs less power, lighter suspension components, lighter structure which leads to smaller brakes and so on. It is admirable for probably being the first sports car EV to market, but they could have made more of an effort to get the weight under control.
How you have to view this MG then is as a Chinese sports car in Union Jack dress, with all the indecisive design decision making and show-off technology that identity entails. It’s even got scissor doors for fucksake, they don’t look particularly long so for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Given all that, it’s probably going to be expensive as well, which really goes the made in China USP, and MG’s current position at the budget end of the market.
Let’s hope they didn’t subcontract out the electrical systems to Lucas.
Well done Adrian. Again.
The way you describe styling makes me stop and actually think.
Four. Thousand. Four. Hundred. Pounds. That’s as much as a goddamn Palisade or Telluride. Let that sink in. It weighs as much as an 8 passenger family hauler.
…for a two seat roadster. I don’t care what these manufacturers claim they can do these days, you can’t just hide weight. As I’ve said a few times the British roadster ethos that the Miata carries the torch for to this day is near and dear to me. A small, lightweight, manual roadster that you can ring out without risking your license is one of life’s great pleasures.
I understand that companies are going to try to recreate that with an EV and that the first couple cracks at it are likely to be a bit rough around the edges, but this is a non starter. My question is…why? We don’t have to just accept that cars are now pigs. It’s possible to make something similar to this that’s 1500 freedom units lighter or more. The BMW M2 doesn’t need to weigh 3,800 pounds. There’s nothing normal or environmental about these patently absurd EV trucks that approach 10,000 pounds. Cars aren’t required to grow with each new generation.
I’m going to poo poo this endlessly even though we’ll never even get it here in the states…and I’m excited to see what Porsche and Mazda cook up since they understand the benefits of keeping these types of cars lithe and limber. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting NA Miata weight because of the limitations batteries come with. But we can do better than Palisade weight, dear god…
We now have batteries available off-the-shelf that are at 270 wh/kg specific capacity. We can now get 300 peak horsepower out of an 80 lb motor. We can now get 300 peak horsepower out of a 15 lb controller. In a lightweight, sufficiently-streamlined car, the total EV drive system required for 200 miles real-world range can end up weighing similarly to or less than a small 1-2L displacement 4-cylinder ICE system(including transmission), and much less than a V6 or V8 ICE system.
But “sufficiently-streamlined” will be on the order of a VW XL1 in terms of CdA. This will allow a small enough battery to keep the car’s weight roughly that of a modern MX5 ND while getting 200 miles highway range. You’d be looking at a 30-35 kWh battery pack or so in a direct drive rear-driven configuration.
The caveat is that it will only have good range driven normally, on the highway. Take it to the track or the back roads and flog it around, its range will drop horrendously. Its run time at full throttle will be measurable in minutes if you give it 300 horses. City range won’t be as good as highway range, BUT on the long trips where such range is needed, these trips tend to be mostly on the highway anyway.
Very doable. And it would be a lovely thing to have and could be shockingly inexpensive to own and operate.
Bit of a point of order, here – it’s physically impossible to have a roadster with low Cd, at least when the roof is down. You can certainly do some tricks to minimize the issues, but they’re still going to have relatively poor CdA unless they’re literally only 36 inches wide. And, it should be noted, narrow tandem vehicles have been sold many times over the course of the past seventy years, and all have flopped because no one wants them.
Also, you’re ignoring the biggest issue, here – the average person does not know nor care about the weight of their vehicle unless it drives like a ’70s landyacht.
Here’s my thing: it’s been done before. Tommykaira, everyone’s favorite JDM Subaru and Nissan tuner of the ’90s, once made a sports car, the ZZ. In 2014, Kyoto University teamed up with them to electrify that sports car chassis and made a 1900 lb, 300 hp EV roadster that absolutely rips.
https://youtu.be/epPh-7V8ac8
Sure, it only had 75 miles of range, but as a JDM track toy that was plenty, and with modern battery tech no doubt you could squeeze twice range that into the same chassis. Moreover, who is doing touring in their 2-seater sports cars? Even 75 miles of range would be more than enough for me to have a nice run through the local mountain twisties, come back down with regen, and be home for lunch and a charge.
I doubt it would get 75 miles in racing conditions unless it had at least a 60 kWh pack. Racing it will require greatly more energy per mile than normal driving. Further, the ZZ is nothing close to a streamliner, albeit it is probably more slippery than most cars when it has the top on. On the racetrack, aero won’t make the massive difference in range that it would in normal driving, because on the track, you’ll lose most of your energy accelerating up to speed which will be proportional to the vehicle mass, then subsequently throwing it away each time you have to brake(regen might recover 30-40% of lost kinetic energy from each braking session if it does all the braking, but much less if you have to involve the bake pads in a hard stop). Unlike ICE cars, electric motors do not see increasing thermal efficiency with increasing load, and thus EVs are heavily penalized regarding range under racing conditions.
Right, that’s true. I wonder what the real-world mileage would have been as it was only an 18 (!) kWh bank. I also think it would be brilliant to have a track-spec EV like that with replaceable battery cartridges; even if it’s only an 18 kWh bank, if you could have two or three and just swap them out in your garage to keep the fun going!
Geeez, I drive a massive 17-foot 1960s land yacht that anyone would accuse of being unnecessarily big and heavy, but it actually weighs LESS than this “small nimble sports car.” Even for an EV that’s bad. Did they use lead acid batteries or something?
What a stupid name. “Let’s jam “cyber” into the name because that apparently means “cool EV” like a “cyber truck”! “
“Careful Adrian, your class-warrior colors are showing. Yes they are, and bite me.”
Fucking brilliant, mate.
I like it would not buy it. However having larger dimensions allows larger men to fit and drive confortably.
That is part of the problem: massive obesity epidemic. The food is so thoroughly poisoned and devoid of nutrition today, and loaded with addictive ingredients during processing, that to be of normal weight and healthy in the 1st world today is sadly abnormal. Thanks, Norman Borlaug!
Height is a thing too, you know…
A friend of mine is 6′-3″. He fits in my Triumph GT6 just fine, and it’s smaller than any new car available for sale in the U.S. Designing a vehicle to accommodate the height of someone with barbarian ancestry is a lot less hostile to the mission of designing for efficiency than designing a vehicle to accommodate someone who is morbidly obese. The latter necessitates increasing frontal area. One reason many Americans gravitate toward big trucks and SUVs is because their 300 lbs of protoplasm can’t comfortably fit into and get into/out of anything smaller!
Yeah, I’m 6’2”, plus another two inches for stupid goth boots and hair, and I just fit in an NC Miata just fine. Ok it was snug, but surprisingly my TT was worse.
My father used to own a 1st generation TT Coupe, 225 Quattro, red. I liked the way that car looked, but it was quite heavy, and the rear end design was very bad for drag even though the front was clean. Still more than a half ton lighter than the Cyberster though.
Yep. I lusted after a Honda S-2000 – until I tried to sit in one. It made me sad. 6″3″, majority of my height in the legs. Could not fit.
Man, you sure seem salty about Americans nailing British women 80 years ago. Good news for you tho, tables have turned. I can’t tell you how many idiots with accents there are in American companies that people think are brilliant and amazing because accent. Come visit the states, go to any metro area, and you’ll be able to land one every time with a british accent these days. Unfair and BS, but it is what it is.
I did get stationed in the UK and brought an English girl home to Texas with me. We have 4 kids. I’m part of that problem
It was all meant in jest, believe me I’ve been to America enough times to know how well a British accent goes over with the girls there – although better in flyover states I found. NY and the west coast are too used to hearing it, but in NC where my ex-wife was from, I was beating them off with a shitty stick (although this was 25 years ago when I was young and beautiful). I was seeing a girl in San Jose for about 6 years (yeah that got expensive) and she loved my accent.
The allure of the BTGG (big turbo goth gentleman) is not to be denied.
I worked in Indiana for three months and got precisely zero comments about my English accent. I expected at least someone to notice.
I met a woman who hated everything about Indiana, but wouldn’t go anywhere else because had gone to Kentucky once and didn’t like it.
One of the things I love about the US is that you can just get in a car and drive somewhere that’s completely different. NYC is a completely different kind of awful than Hicksville Ohio (drove six hours to get there once because I didn’t believe the name on the map was real) or LA, or Vegas.
Anyway: no where in the states ever has anyone ever commented on my accent, so I’m assuming I’m a lot less attractive than Adrian.
4400lbs?? Hard fucking pass.
It’s at least twice is big and heavy as what it should/could be.
You can do a lot with only 25 kWh, a pack that with today’s battery technology, weighs less than a 4-cylinder ICE and should cost under $3k to produce/replace in volume production. It won’t get you very far in today’s average lardass of a CUV while trying to push a barn door’s CdA through the air, but in an Aptera, it will get you close to 300 miles range.
This Cyberster exemplifies why new vehicles don’t appeal to me in the least, especially so-called “sports cars”. It’s too damned fat. Personally, I think it will be a massive flop.
Triumph is no more and I think BMW owns the name. Mini is owned by BMW outright, and at least has a little in common with its roots, even if its products have bloated up in mass and complexity over the years. MG is basically dead and has nothing in common with its roots. Austin Healey doesn’t exist anymore. Lotus is on life support. A world without little British cars is a very depressing place. With today’s technology, we could have little British cars that are even more fun than the old ones, corner like racing cars, are fast in a straight line like V12 exotics, every bit as cheap to purchase as they once were(when measured in hours of labor to afford them), and with none of the constant maintenance/rust issues, but that’s just too good and the existing legacy manufacturers won’t let us/don’t want us to have that because it will cannibalize the sales of bloated, high-margined products. The Mazda Miata proves getting at least halfway to this vision is possible, and it isn’t even British. Enthusiasts are being deprived.
Maybe that’s the weight of the top spec ultra long range model with tons of batteries? I just can’t see how something that looks like that weighs more than my 95 Audi S6 Avant (3800lbs). Makes no sense.
The scariest thing about Lucas is that if you fly on a plane, there’s a reasonable chance there’s something made by Lucas on it.
When I go on a plane, I always take my own bomb with me. I mean, what are the chances of there being TWO bombs on a plane?
Making digital clocks out of antiquated processors or even old cell phones is a fun hobby.
Somebody’s not getting TSA Precheck now. 😉
Beautifully written up. Thanks again! (thumbs up emoji)
It’s a bit of a mystery to me, that companies like Electric Classic Cars (look them up on YouTube, I’m too lazy to link right now) can convert old classic cars to electric with decent range, regenerative braking and all that, which weighs the same as the old ICE version.
I can’t image all the modern safety equipment can weigh that much, so a new electric sports roadster has to be double the weight of an old one?
But it seems that MG, being the cheap asses they are, have not really started from scratch here, but just made this one on some crossover/passenger car platform they already had. And given the MG history, that is really quite in the old MG spirit 😎
It’s not about safety equipment, it’s about frame strength (and therefore, at least to some extent, how thick the metal is) and vehicle dimensions
I see frame strength as a part of safety (“equipment”)
WRT the sloping nose and pedestrian impact legislation: in theory an EV should allow more of this over front engined ICE as there are less immovable hard points under the bonnet for the pedestrian’s soft skull to smash into, so higher wings over the suspension turrets but dipping down between them makes sense.
This should be a benefit of EVs generally, but is lost in the predominantly SUV driven market, and the general laziness of making EVs on or similarly to ICE platforms.
In theory yes, in practice not always. There’s still a lot to package in an EV, it’s not just motors and cells. You’ve got control systems, on board chargers, thermal management systems, regulators and so on.
Also if there is an ICE version (or this is going to be) that version is going to dictate a lot of the packaging.
4400lbs is 4kg short of 2tonnes, that’s obscene for a 2 seat roadster,, electric or not.
EVs don’t need to weigh a fucktonne, as Toecutter stated with his GT6 conversion. The (full EV, not REx) BMW i3 weighs 1270kg/2800lbs so the industry knows how to make lightweight EVs, but they all collectively, including BMW themselves seem to have decided ‘Fuck that, we’ll just continue to make cars how we always have, just with an EV power train, if consumers want more range we’ll just add more batteries’.
This is so dumb, part of the appeal of EVs is meant to be the efficiency. Instead we get supersized, super heavy EV SUVs. The virtuous circle of lightweight leading to smaller components leading to even lighter weight has truly been spun anti-clockwise. They should be being marketed on miles/kWh as much as overall range.
If you go back an read my my i3 piece, https://www.theautopian.com/the-bmw-i3-was-a-design-success-even-if-it-was-a-failure there are good reasons why that approach was abandoned. Namely, it wasn’t profitable.
You can’t use an older car as a comparison because they’re so flimsily constructed, and a conversion is never going to be as comprehensive as an OEM offering.
The Honda e weights 3400lbs as an example, so that’s probably more realistic. EVs definitely have a weight problem though.
The i3 used exotic materials and was built specifically as a city car, which is a tiny niche market. It’s aerodynamics, compared to other new cars available, were rather middling, and thus its efficiency figures were as well. It was short range and expensive, with lots of premium materials and laden with cost-adding features.
What we really need to get weight down isn’t exotic materials(even if that helps). We need a new approach to vehicle design that focuses extensively on overall load reduction in order to get a long range out of a small, light-weight battery pack, while keeping the product inexpensive to purchase and simple to operate/maintain. The i3 kinda, sorta got halfway there regarding load reduction, but it was way too expensive and complicated of a vehicle to have mass appeal. This is the route Aptera is taking, and it is not half-assing it on the load reduction and is making every effort to keep the product affordable. It has 3 wheels to get around current “safety” regulations, but if the company had the money to meet those regulations, it would certainly be a more normal car with 4 wheels and maybe even 4 seats. If Aptera can gain a foothold into the market by delivering the products, I think the light/efficient/inexpensive/low-profit-margined vehicles will eventually win consumers over. Consumers haven’t ever had that as a choice in the U.S.(the Honda Insight was the closest we got, and it did this about 1/2 as well as the Aptera, and wasn’t an EV, and was a two seater with a limited market that ended up not being able to compete performance wise with its competition. The Insight should have used a K-series engine and been rear wheel drive to compete with much more expensive cars, while still being a halo car for fuel efficiency, but I digress). This approach also scares the mainstream automakers, because not only is it a radical approach that conflicts with their historically conservative methods, but it also will cause a sort of moral hazard: if the offerings this approach allows ever take over, the market for their high-margined cash cow trucks and SUVs could greatly diminish. There is a significant segment of the motoring public that is tired of being nickeled and dimed to death, whose protestations have been generally ignored. And unlike myself, most of this demographic have neither the capability nor the workspace to build their own. Nearly 20 years ago, this same sort of moral hazard existed with EV technology. Beyond a few demonstration projects with no intent to offer anything to the buying public, the OEMs completely ignored it when the technology became viable in the 1990s, only for Tesla to arise as a viable competitor a decade later, by offering something radical and different to a segment of the population that had been demanding it for more than a decade, only to be ignored.
The arms race to keep making everything fatter, heavier, more expensive, more feature-laden, is not viable in the long-term. Old, simple, good-running economy cars from 20+ years ago are rapidly diminishing in number and greatly increasing in value. Increasing numbers of people don’t have the financial resources to purchase and maintain these expensive new vehicles, and debt burdens can only grow so large before it’s simply not viable to juggle a car payment around with other bills anymore while living paycheck to paycheck. The bottom 75% of the U.S. population, members of this demographic which don’t even have $1,000 in savings, are priced out of a $40,000 EV entirely. The non-renewable resources required to keep both ICE and electric vehicles running are dwindling and will eventually become much too expensive to use in the quantities that they are currently used, and the materials composing currently non-recyclable batteries will eventually become much too valuable to serve as landfill fodder. That is a problem that will eventually bear consequences.
When that day comes where the dealership lots are once again full of unsold trucks and SUVs(regardless of whether they are ICE or electric) as happened 15 years ago, will the legacy OEMs get more endless government bailouts funded by taxes collected from working people? I sure as hell hope not. The legacy manufacturers dug this hole, and they should be buried in it.
Wow! Well said!
23 year old simple 220K Corolla 5 speed here. Just had a 90K engine installed that I got to hear run beforehand. Will I get a half mil out of it?
16 year old Corolla 5 speed sitting out there too, that in hindsight I really don’t need.
I dipped my toes into the new car market during the pandemic, and supply shortages with their price increases scared me away. I was hoping to jump into one of Toyota’s 100K mile battery-warranted hybrids.
EVs are non-starters for me, living in multi-unit housing.
As for the common folk clamoring for affordable EVs, you only have to look at the explosion in sales of E-bikes lately. Folks just wanna get from point A to point B. Heated steering wheels, Android auto-play, power seats/windows/sunroofs, lane assist, and all the other profit-making bells and whistles mean nothing when it’s time to get to work. Just gimme good, dependable Get Me There for a good price or I’ma drive the wheels off that 2000 model.
The placement of the model name on the rear is just extremely uncomfortable
Yep it’s bad. It should be placed where it’s level. Badging 101.
FORTY FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS?!?
Are they trying for downforce through sheer weight?
The famous road hugging weight!
Well it’s certainly no Changli.
This car is far too heavy to be called a “sports car”. She’s 600 lbs fatter than a tank of a Mercedes-Benz 300 SDL I used to own, which rode like a bank vault on wheels.
An efficient design goes a long way toward reducing the size/mass of the battery pack required for a given amount of range. I don’t imagine the CdA value of this thing is very good given how much weight in batteries it had to add in.
Meanwhile, my Triumph GT6 EV conversion weighs less as an EV than it did originally with the inline-6, currently tipping the scales at about 1,850 lbs including batteries. I haven’t gotten to test the range yet, but once the aeromods are finalized, in theory, it should exceed 200 miles at 70 mph on a full charge, and without the aero mods, about 130 miles range. There are batteries available that could easily double that range, but I went with LiFePO4 chemistry because I want something disinclined to randomly catch fire.
Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation should have went for a more narrow, smaller-dimensioned car with half the battery, and focused extensively on aero drag reduction. It shouldn’t be too difficult to get a 2,700-ish lb EV sports car with a 250 mile range with today’s technology while passing all regulations, or even a few hundred pounds lighter if you delete features/creature comforts. It would probably end up less expensive to build as a result while being an overall better performing vehicle all around.
Seeing a lot of comments about the neutron-star mass of this thing, I have to wonder how much of it is thanks to sharing components with the more utilitarian people haulers.
Not an excuse, more of an observation.
A few years ago I saw generic Hyundai / KIA look-alike crossovers rolling around in Australia with the MG badge on them and assumed it was some Chinese knock-off brand.
I was half right.
I had no idea that a Chinese company bought them out after a bankrupcy! And now they sell the dollar-tree version of many cars.
How interesting! Thank you for the interesting and informative article on the history of MG.
“Even as a fetus I was a pain in the ass.” Sounds like a one woman off Broadway show following a dreamer on her journey of discovery. I also loved the car stuff.
I was born on the wagon of a travelling show…..
You were born a carnie? I love carnies, especially clowns.
I’ve always wanted to make a visit to Blackpool. Seems like my kind of place. TVR even made their operations there, building the perfect cars for clowning around in.
Clowns are the worst kind of Carny.
What’s the matter kid? Don’tcha’ like clowns?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N9Fzv7bYCM
Blackpool is a shit hole, as are most British seaside towns. Brighton is brilliant though, it’s like a mini London, kinda like a British SF.
Blackpool looks much nicer than where I live. Here’s some pics of the area roughly 1 mile from where I reside:
https://i.imgur.com/27RDHrX.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/0uyALPF.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/fAlGQzB.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/0YEHqky.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/mbSZrWO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/YjAplX5.jpg
I make an income in the very low 6-figures. This is what “living within my means” allows when I make it an explicit goal to stay out of debt so that my options remain open, and thus am free to save more money than most. Most of my coworkers in my age range who started families, live in a modest house in the suburbs(~1500 sq ft) and drive modest new cars(Nissan Versas, Honda Civics, Chevy Sparks, Ford Mavericks, ect.) are living paycheck to paycheck and will be in debt until their 70s to “afford” it, with a significant portion of their incomes payed out as interest to banks. Soon, they won’t be able to “afford” new cars either, even stretching the payment plan out 10 years, if current trends in new vehicle prices hold true. Most people are even less well off. All of the “prosperity” here is debt.
Things are going to get crazy here in the USA. Especially when the economy collapses in full and the petrodollar faces its inevitable death.
Me? I plan to go off grid and distance myself from the shitshow as much as I can.
One of the great things about the US was housing was always somewhat affordable (compared to the UK where we’ve had a shortage for generations). When people used to say to me ‘isn’t everything in the US cheap?’ I always said that was a myth, the only things that were cheaper than the UK were housing and gas (your grocery prices are insane, considering we import a lot of our food).
Sadly it looks like the flood of cheap money since the financial crash has reached the US housing market turning property into an investment, rather than a place to live.
Rising interest rates are going to cause a lot of pain, but they can’t come too soon.
The time to raise the interest rates was back in 2008. Instead, they were pushed to 0% and held there for nearly a decade without interruption. This was intentional. The corporations who run the U.S. government want everyone in debt, THEN they will jack up the interest rates, and when the inevitable wave of foreclosures and repos occurs, the “too big to fail” institutions will get bailed out at taxpayer expense, then take that taxpayer money and buy back all of the distressed assets for pennies on the dollar, and then rent/lease them back out to everyone at inflated rates. Rinse and repeat.
I’m certain that at least 1/4 of the population is soon going to lose everything they worked for. 1/2 of the population already has nothing to lose as it is, other than to end up homeless and destitute, as they don’t own anything they have. The banks do.
A house in my neighborhood goes for $100k, and I live in one of the cheapest areas in the USA. You’ve already seen the pictures. This place has commonly been cited as the murder capital of the USA and statistically speaking, is a more dangerous place to live than the favela of Rio De Janero(Note: I personally would rather live here than in a favela). Hearing gunshots is a nightly occurrence, I’ve witnessed multiple police chases in progress, and even one time got to smell the rich aroma of a dead body that had festered in a basement for more than a week a block down the street before it was discovered. The entire area stunk like shit from that last one! There are multiple superfund sites within a 3 mile radius from me, including an underground landfill fire of burning nuclear waste.
The alternative is to pay $2k/month in rent to live in a “good” neighborhood but a small/crappy apartment(more than $2k in nearly everywhere else in the USA) and substantially cut down the rate I can save money while having no place to store/work on my vehicles, or go into debt to the tune of $250k(or more) to live in a house in a “good” neighborhood. That’s what most people with my means do, but they still end up having very little to show for their hard work other than being in debt for decades and pretending their way to prosperity, and as soon as the next round of layoffs come, they lose everything.
I’ll be happy to have 20 acres in the boonies, a shack to live in, a workspace/storage space for my vehicles, a well dug for water, and some solar panels and wind generators to power it all. Almost have the money to pull the trigger on that and be debt free, but I haven’t had the time to go looking at plots of land. I also have to be careful where I buy, because more and more municipalities are instituting minimum square footage rules for dwelling spaces, because they want you living in an over-valued McMansion so that they can extract more property tax revenue from you. Fuck all that!
I dont know what you are talking about half the time. The other half it is like what is the big deal. But always a blast to read.
I anoint you the Lewis Black of Autopia.
I live in McAllen, tx which is just minutes from our southern border and I can confirm I’ve seen a few of these modern MG’s in the flesh. Or at least a CUV of indifferent styling wearing an MG badge. I saw the first about 8 months ago and a few more since so they have definitely broken into Mexico. They were underwhelming to look at, but since I’m not the sort who chases people down and begs to poke around in their cars I can’t speak to anything other than the exterior. Far more interesting are the Ram 700’s and Reanault Dusters roaming the streets.
I don’t hate it, but lord is Cyberster a stupid name.
I’ve sat through a few SAIC presentations, and believe me this is nowhere near the worst thing I’ve heard.
One of my faves was when Newcastle polytechnic went all posh when they upgraded all the polys back in the day, and they got a fair way through the committee stage with the sobriquet City University of Newcastle upon Tyne as the favourite.
The kids in my Jr High were all into Cybikos. It was a palm-pilot type of thing with huge promises that never really worked right.
Probably similar to this
Yeah Cyberstar is right there.
Cyberstalker?
It is Chinese, maybe that is even more to the point
“I summon Elemental Hero Cyberster in attack position!”
YOU FOOL. You’ve activated my trap car.
Former MGB & TR6 owner here. This doesn’t look half bad in pictures. I can understand the Colonel Blimp POV, but the originals had a time & place. Technology and the industry have moved on.
That being said, “Dollar Tree Lamborghini” made me LOL!
A TR6 is one of the few British sports cars I really love. In magenta on steelies please.
I’ve always felt a TR4 in black would make an excellent goth ride. It sort of resembles a Trabant, but is much nicer in appearance, much faster, better at cornering, safer, ect. It just has a dark aesthetic quality to it that I adore.
I chose a GT6 for its potential for aero. Stock GT6’s weren’t all that great on Cd, but their frontal area is low, the car is light, there’s a massive amount of weight in ICE components to remove, and there is no shortage of room to fit batteries. But the potential to reduce the Cd value is certainly there. The ADU1B LeMans Triumph Spitfire, that the GT6 is based on, is very slippery. It uses a different front end and removes the rain gutters, chrome trim pieces, and stylized vents to cut drag. According to Mark from Jigsaw Racing, it could reach 137 mph on only 111 brake horsepower, with a crudely-built, lossy, heat-generating transmission and differential sapping power(about 15% of it) from reaching the rear wheels.
Mine is going further than that. Mine has no grille, smooth underbody paneling with a rear diffuser, front and rear wheel spats, and a custom roof add-on to re-taper the roofline at the rear by turning it into a Kammback.
I currently have a single Prestolite MTC4001 series-wound DC motor coupled to the transmission, run by a Soliton 1 controller and a pack of CALB LiFePO4 batteries. It peels out in any gear, and in theory should be capable of running 14 second quarter miles as such. It has not been to a drag strip. This motor is 1970s era technology originally intended for a forklift, so far from ideal. But I was a broke high school student when I started this project.
In the longer term, there will be a transmission delete and a Tesla drive system in it driving a single-speed ratio to the rear wheels, with the batteries moved in the transmission/driveshaft area. The Rotoflex suspension is going to be replaced by RWD Toyota Celica parts.
In my mind’s eye, Adrian always strikes me as a Ford Capri sorta guy for his nostalgia, pinning after a Brooklands edition perhaps.
I’m not sure, but I think MG is selling in Mexico now? So there’s a slight chance we might see some brought over the border maybe, like the penultimate Ford Focus RS back in the day.
I would love a Capri 280 (which is what the last of the line 2.8 injections were called. The colour is Brooklands green). I did consider one, but they’re getting expensive for what they are.
So yes, a Capri 2.8i is one of my favourite cars. If I can pry one out of the Ford UK heritage fleet, you’ll hear all about it here.
A good read, thanks.
Interesting to see what happens to this, maybe the market is ready for the change. She is a heavy pig though.
I perhaps should have made more of this point, but yes the first EV sports car it is a very bold step, so kudos to them for taking it.
Didn’t Lotus/Tesla already make the first EV sportscar?
At least that wasn’t catastrophically heavy with a disastrously stupid name.
I’ve sat in early planning meetings about designing EV sportscars, and marketing types get really excited about what an extra motor in the front does for 0-60 time, while giving no shits at all for what that implies for mass and size. They don’t really seem to care what it means for the price either.
I’m hoping Mazda do it right with the MX5/Miata EV. With a coupe option please (more range from better aero, plus I don’t get on with convertibles).
I want an MX-5 EV streamliner, dammit. If that thing had a Cd value around 0.18 with the same frontal area as the ND, and assuming it weighed the same as the current ND ICE, it would only need about 130 Wh/mile to hold 70 mph on the highway. Which, using modern Tesla Model 3 batteries and the lighter variant of the Model S PLAID motors, it could easily weigh the same as or less than the current ICE Miata WHILE getting 250 miles range at a steady 70 mph and maybe 200 miles range EPA highway, and readily out-perform the ICE MX5 in the 1/4 mile and maybe even be able to play with Corvettes and Hellcats at both the strip and racetrack. Drop the top, and you would lose about 1/3 the range, or more, but when the top is up it should be designed for minimal drag. Such a thing may end up costing less than the ICE variant to build, to boot.
You could fit all of the batteries where a drive shaft and transmission would have been, have the motor drive the rear wheels with a single speed ratio in the back, and have a surprisingly large and practical trunk up front which could also serve as an access point with which to pull out the battery pack for servicing.
And the platform could be designed to accommodate a front-engined rear drive manual-transmissioned ICE variant as well with its trunk in the rear, which if sharing the same level of streamlining as the above hypothetical EV, would probably match or beat the current Prius in highway fuel economy AND could be geared to top out at over 180 mph with the current 181 horsepower, even if the 0-60 time wouldn’t change.
I always thought we in the USA use sports car and muscle car interchangeably, and we shouldn’t. Only 1 can go around corners spritely.
If you are ever feeling insecure about the sophistication of your MG (yes even a BL era model), then just park it next to a Reliant Robin. You’ll be fine…
Somewhere in the back of my mind I read the engine in a Reliant is actually pretty advanced.it’s all aluminium I think.
Yeah, although I’ve never looked into the Reliant motor in detail (life’s short, ya know?), I do recall Setright saying nice things about it in ‘Car’. Must have been early ‘90s. Apparently it’s origin was a portable industrial engine (fire pumps etc), like the Coventry Climax.
It looks somewhat like a doodle I would make as a boy. Very swoopy, lots of details that probably look good on their own but maybe don’t have friends, proportions look very clearly wrong and somehow looks very high riding.
In other words this is the closest I’ll ever get to driving one of my doodles so I’m a fan.
Looks good imo, always happy to see more happy cars and fewer pissed off ones
Agreed. And despite being an EV, which we expect is heavy, it looks light.
It doesn’t look 4400 lbs, but it is. We thought the Hyundai Ionic5 was gonna be hatchback size from the early pics, but it isn’t. Seems like we’re in an age where the camera subtracts a few hundred pounds instead of adding a few.
I’ve said it before, but yes the ioniq 5 is huge. But because it has big wheels and a normal hatch volume, it doesn’t look it in pictures.
Agreed. I love the ioniq 5 in pics, and was definitely picturing a golf sized vehicle. Still love the look, but it’s far too big for me