Um, there’s now an MG pick-up

The MG badge has changed somewhat over the years. Anyone over the age of 40 will remember neat little two-seat sports cars that prioritised fun and value over actually working properly. Head down an age bracket and you’ll find a bunch of people who aspired to drive a boy racer-ed Rover hatchback once they’d torn up their L-plates.

Anyone discovering the brand more recently, though, will be left royally confused. In the last ten years MG has gone from making end-of-the-line special roadsters to an actual pick-up truck, via a small handful of nondescript crossovers.

Meet the MG Extender, a pick-up just unveiled in Thailand and almost certainly not for the UK market. It’s not a ground-up MG, as you might expect, but a rebadged Maxus T70. That means it gets a 161bhp 2.0-litre turbodiesel powering the rear wheels as standard, or all four as an option. Yep, it’s the first rear-wheel-drive MG in a decade. Maybe the purists can get on board after all.

Especially given you can have your Extender with a manual gearbox, too. Perhaps this is the most MG-ish MG in some time. It’s proper value, too, starting at around £15,000. We might have talked ourselves into quite liking this.

What do you reckon?