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 if you’d said to be at the start of that year I’d seriously consider an Chinese electric hatchback, I’d have given you a very old fashioned look. But that was before I’d driven the MG4.
MG is now Chinese, far more so than, say, Bentley is German. MGs are largely designed in China, built in China and while nominally headquartered in Longbridge, sold overwhelmingly in China thanks to the clout of its owner the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC). The MG-badged cars built to date have done so on the same build ‘em cheap, stack ‘em high principle that helped established first the Japanese then the Korean brands in the marketplace over years gone by. But while it took them decades to establish a sufficiently firm foothold in Europe and develop product worthy of comparison to the best from the west, MG is looking to accelerate that process. Aided no doubt by tough times and the move upmarket of the likes of Kia and Hyundai, five years ago MG sold just over 4000 cars in the UK. Last year that number topped 30,000. It is Britain’s fastest growing automotive brand.
MG 4 is the latest from Britain’s fastest-growing automotive brand
MG
And that rate of acceleration is surely going to increase. Because now all those MGs sold to date can be seen almost as practice cars, machines designed to test the water and create a presence ready for the moment when the company can really show us what it can do. And it has.
In both size and power output, the MG4 is aimed squarely at the class benchmark, Volkswagen’s ID.3. But it’s better to look at than an ID.3 and by a distance better to drive. In financial terms the distinction is clearer still: at £31,495 the top of the range, fully loaded MG4 Trophy is nearly £5000 cheaper than the entry level ID.3. Compare base model to base model and the gap swells to over £10,000. Buy these cars on a PCP as most will, and the chasm grows further still, Parkers citing around £500 per month for the VW and £300 for the MG.
It’s not perfect: some elements of the ergonomics and infotainment system leave something to be desired, but you can say the same about the Volkswagen too. The ID.3 has a name and a cachet, but while that is an undoubted advantage, it is abstract and those who care not about such things will flock to the MG as well they should. I have no idea whether it is true or not, but you are left with the impression that VW charged what it thought it could get away with, while MG charges as little as it can commercially afford.
But actually, the MG4 has made me think at least as much about VW as MG. It’s a strange thing to say about the biggest brand belonging to the world’s largest car company, but to me and right now, Volkswagen is doing a very good impression of a company that has lost its way.
The Dieselgate scandal is now seven years old, but its effects combined with the need to develop an entirely new way of making cars with the push towards an all-EV future are felt to this day. In the traditional market the new, eighth generation Golf, has received a rather rough ride compared to its predecessor, now regarded among the finest cars of its kind ever designed. Even the GTI has not escaped the critics. But really it’s the EVs that worry me. I hear great things about the ID Buzz – the long awaited electric replacement for the beloved Type 2 Microbus – and I look forward very much to trying it, but the mainstream, volume cars I’ve tried, which include the ID.3, ID.4 and ID.5 have failed to convince. They are not a cut above as perhaps might have been expected. Broadly speaking the EV opposition from Kia and Hyundai is preferable.
And now MG. What should worry VW most is that the MG4 is built on what the company calls its brand new Modular Scalable Platform, which means its structure can be pulled, pushed, coaxed and teased in so many different directions it allows for a car one size down from the MG4 and another almost the size of an S-class Mercedes. So the MG4 is clearly the start.
For Volkswagen, seen by many as an embattled company since Dieselgate broke, the future looks harder than the company could ever have imagined ten years ago. VW was keen for the ID.3 – and by association its kin – to be seen as the third definitive car in its history after the Beetle and the Golf, but right now that seems a million miles away. It’s expensive and has an infotainment system that, at least for me, would provide grounds all by itself not to buy the car.
It reminds me of the wrong turn taken by Mercedes-Benz in the mid 1990s, signalled by the replacement of the gloriously over-engineered W124 generation of E-class saloon by the W210 which simply lacked the quality for which Mercedes-Benz had become rightly renown. The reputational damage that resulted was many years in the repairing.
For decades people have been happy to pay a little more for a Volkswagen in the usually justified belief that not only were they buying a better car but that, when the time came for it to be sold they’d get more of their money back. It is for precisely that reason that a late seventh generation Golf sits outside my house as I write this. But if the car is no better than the opposition and if, horror of horrors, it is comprehensively upstaged and undercut by a new Chinese alternative, the strain on that contract with the public will not take long to appear. And if it persists in producing cars that are as expensive as we have expected and accepted Volkswagens to be, but simply not as good, sooner or later it will break. The company needs to recognise its shortcomings and move both smartly and swiftly to address them.
