New MG with 911 Turbo power - is time right for electric sports cars?

Road Cars

MG is back in the roadster business, but the Cyberster is like nothing it's made before: weighing almost two tonnes and with vast power, it looks to be the blueprint for electric sports cars, writes Andrew Frankel

MG Cyberster overhead view

MG Cyberster is due to go on sale next year

MG

Andrew Frankel

From an industry if perhaps not product point of view, there have been few companies more interesting to watch over recent years than MG. The marque, all but dead after the collapse of MG Rover, was Britain’s fastest growing car brand in the UK in the first nine months of last year.

But such success has been built on a succession of worthy, affordable family cars, machines to be admired far more by head than heart. From the very outset of the company’s rebirth, one question has remained top of the agenda: when will it build a real MG again?

MG, and its Chinese owners SAIC, would like you to believe you’re looking at the answer right now. Although it stopped short of producing a physical car, at this week’s Shanghai Auto Show it showed images of a production-ready two seat electric roadster called the Cyberster and let it be known it will be on sale in the UK and Europe next summer.

MG Cyberster doors open picture

Cyberster is due to arrive in MG’s 100th year

MG

The timing is no coincidence: 2024 is MG’s centenary year and it looks to be in a mood to celebrate, with a bold entry into a region of the market left unpopulated since the brief life of the Tesla Roadster was brought to an end over a decade ago. Just don’t get carried away with the idea that the Cyberster is some kind of reborn MG, a sports car for people. From what little we have been told, has been leaked and can be divined, it is any but.

Related article

Why MG may have made 2022’s most impressive car
Road Cars

Why MG may have made 2022's most impressive car

Sometime before the end of the year someone is going to ask me to write a piece about the car that impressed me most over the previous 12 months. And…

By Andrew Frankel

Indeed think of all those MGs on which the name was built: the PBs, the K3s, the TCs, MGA, MGB and many others up to an including the MGF. All small, all light, all  feeling no need to go chasing ever greater power outputs because back then no one was mistaking fast for fun.

Now consider some of the very few known facts about the Cyberster: it will be available with both one and two electric motors, giving the owner the choice of rear or four-wheel drive. And the less powerful, single motor car will have 309bhp. The all-wheel drive car? Try 536bhp, which is not far short of 911 Turbo territory. Also, and while we’re talking Porsche, this is no pint-sized post-modern Mazda MX-5 rival: it’s bigger than a Boxster.

But the most breathtaking statistic is that the Cyberster weighs 1850kg – if you don’t opt for that extra motor. If you do? A whisper short of two tonnes. Put another way, here is a two-seater convertible MG that weighs a sack of spuds less than an S-class Mercedes-Benz. Time alone will tell how it will drive and how cleverly MG has tried to mitigate such an excess of apparent avoirdupois.

MG Cyberster roof lowering
MG Cyberster front view

Cyberster – all-new, yet strangely familiar to MG fans

MG

MG Cyberster headlight

There must of course be a reason it’s so heavy and that in itself could be very revealing of the kind of car MG intends it to be. A very fast one for sure – faster by a distance than the MG SV-R, (remember that?), the Octagon’s fastest road car to date. Looking the numbers I’d say it’s a mid 3sec to 60mph car. But actually, electric motors aren’t very heavy – indeed they’re lighter by far than internal combustion engines. So the mass is going to come from the batteries.

What is most interesting is that the received wisdom among those who talk about the electric roadster of the future is that it doesn’t need big, heavy batteries because these are cars more likely to be used for recreational purposes than as daily, do-anything, go-anywhere drivers. Moreover, big batteries are actively undesirable precisely because of the weight they add. MG is flying in the face of this thinking.

Related article

Why? Common sense I expect, the kind of common sense that recognises that people want a car that merely looks like a lightweight road warrior. What they actually require is a car with vast performance and sensible range, that allows them to feel the wind in their hair and not much more. Bear in mind too that those who love lightweight two seaters even more for how they drive than how they look (and that is a fairly small constituency), will be among the most EV-sceptic of all drivers. Finally it seems almost impossible to build even an affordable electric hatchback at present (as the over £30,000 price tag of the most basic electric Vauxhall Corsa bears stark witness), let alone an affordable roadster. Equip it with monster horsepower and four-wheel drive however, and the cost to you rises by only a fraction of what you can then charge the customer. Bluntly, that’s where the margins lie.

But what fascinates me most about this car is not what it is, but what it represents: after a ten-year post-Tesla Roadster hiatus, the industry clearly feels the world is now ready for EV sports cars, for there is not only this MG on the horizon, but Porsche’s confirmed EV Boxster and the EV replacement for the Alpine A110, which will be developed jointly with Lotus so there’s likely to be a Hethel version too. And while it’s hard to see Alpine and Lotus going down the high power, high mass route, right now it looks like the most viable likely way forward. Sadly.

Comments

Loading Comments