The beginner's guide to MG

MG was started as a side hustle from Viscount William Morris’s car garage, with manager Cecil Kimber modifying Morris Oxfords and selling them on with the Morris Garages badge on the front. The Viscount’s entire business (which also included Wolseley, Riley, Morris and various manufacturing outfits) was folded in with Austin to create the British Motor Corporation in 1952.

Another merger saw BMC become the British Leyland Motor Corporation in 1968, and the whole thing was partly nationalised in 1975 after it collapsed. British Leyland was renamed the Rover Group in 1986, then it was owned by British Aerospace for a while and eventually bought by BMW in 1994.

The Germans kept the good bits and sold off MG Rover to the Phoenix Consortium of ex-Rover executives for £10 in 2000. Bargain. Though of course it never made a profit and went under in 2005 after talks with Shanghai Automotive (SAIC) fell through. Another Chinese firm, Nanjing, bought up MG but was itself taken over by SAIC in 2007. None of its cars are made in the UK anymore, but MG is one of the fastest growing brands thanks to its low, low prices and recent EV offerings.

Cheap and cheerful is MG’s thing these days, so you’d expect to find a reasonably priced car across the range – you’ll find a lovely selection of petrol, electric and PHEV cars on sale at your local garage, starting with the MG3 city car and ranging through the MG5 estate, MG4, HS and ZS SUVs.

The MG3 is the cheapest, starting at £14,320 – and it doesn’t suffer from a lack of equipment, either. You get electric windows, air con, remote central locking and an 8in touchscreen infotainment system with Apple CarPlay.

The new performance version of the MG4 (called the MG4 XPower) starts at £36,495 and comes loaded with fun toys like 360° cameras, wireless phone charging, 10.25in touchscreen and a heated steering wheel. Here lies the root of MG’s appeal – the fact you could buy one of each of the entire range for the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce.

When you think of speed, MG likely isn’t the first carmaker that springs to mind. It’s probably not in the top 12, even. And for good reason, as it turns out – although it does have one racy model that recently came on the market. The 429bhp MG4 EV XPower manages the 0–62mph run in a heady 3.8 seconds. We’re not entirely sure you’d want to, but the capability is there nonetheless.

It’s also the fastest MG on sale in terms of top speed, maxing out at 124mph. But then electric cars don’t tend to be very fast at the top end because sitting on the accelerator like that drains the battery like you’ve taken the plug out of the bottom.

MG did compete in the touring cars for a few years there in the mid-2010s, enjoying modest success with drivers like Jason Plato and Andrew Jordan, taking the BTCC manufacturers’ title back in 2014.

They're not built in Longbridge any more is the short answer, MG is owned by Shanghai Automotive, a Chinese carmaker based in... well, you get it. For a little while MGs were shipped from China in knockdown kits for final assembly in Birmingham, but that stopped in 2016. These days MGs are put together at various facilities in China, India and Thailand, but the firm does have a design studio in central London.

SAIC announced in summer 2023 that it plans to build a new European factory, but it hasn't decided where to pop it yet. The UK is on the shortlist, but there's no guarantee that MGs will be made there.

MG sold around 452,634 (our best guess, the firm hasn't revealed official global numbers) cars in 2022. Numbers were up nearly 67 per cent in the UK, sneaking the firm's market share past the likes of Skoda, Land Rover and Mini.

The 1985 EXE-1 concept shown at that year’s Frankfurt motor show was a highlight for the firm in the doldrum years of the Eighties – it showed ambition, that MG could build a Lotus Esprit-style sports car and be a proper player. It didn’t get built of course, they weren’t stupid. Who’d buy an MG supercar?

An electric roadster would be just the ticket though, which is why we got excited about the 2023 Cyberster concept at the Shanghai Auto Show. The concept promised 500 miles of range and a decent turn of pace, but the finished car might not run quite so far by the time the production version is on sale in summer 2024.

MG’s hard fought legacy is probably its best moment – a brand built in the first half of the 20th century that its current Chinese owners can take straight to the bank. Morris was the UK’s largest carmaker in the Twenties, taking over half the market.

MG’s birth as the sporty sub-brand of Morris was shrewd and the company was a big player on the pre-WW2 motorsport scene. Its early factories were key sites of the UK’s automotive industry too – Minis are still made at Cowley with parts from the old Morris plant in Swindon and the Longbridge factory in Birmingham was the home of Rover for decades.

These foundations have provided the solid base for the company’s current success – it’s not easy for anyone to start a new car company in a market as mature and cynical as the UK’s, far better to be able to use a badge with a bit of history.

So much to choose from with a history as long and illustrious as MG’s. Could its worst moment be founder William Morris’s antisemitic views and support for Oswald Mosley’s fascist party precursor in the early Thirties, or perhaps the brand’s loss of identity under British Motor Corporation ownership in the Fifties?

A low point for MG fans was in 1980, when production of the Midget and MGB models was brought to a halt because the Abingdon factory was losing a bundle of cash on every car. The hot hatch era had started, and it seemed that MG’s future in the Eighties was going to be as a go faster badge on souped up Metros, Maestros and Montegos. It wasn’t until 1992 that the MG badge would appear again on a bespoke sports car – the RV8. The strategy would be used again in the early Noughties as Rover slid slowly to its permanent demise. Sad times.

The development of the Austin Metro into a fire snorting steroidal entrant to the Group B rallying scene was a curveball. The 6R4 rally car, up against the likes of the Audi Quattro, Lancia Delta Integrale and Renault 5 Turbo, featured a 3.0-litre V6 engine shoved under the bonnet (Rover’s 3.5 V8 with two cylinders chopped off, later replaced by a bespoke unit), permanent 4WD and the development resources of the Williams F1 team at the beginning of its pomp (British Leyland was a sponsor).

The 6R4 entered the 1986 World Rally Championship, producing 410bhp in competition guise and managing 0–60mph in a terrifying 3.2secs despite being the only car in its category without a turbocharger. A couple of 1985 practice runs saw its best result though – third place at Rally GB. Finnish driver Henri Toivonen’s 1986 crash in Corsica in the Lancia Delta S4 saw Group B cars banned and the Metro 6R4 was never to realise its potential.