âOne hundred per cent this is an NG. It ties in with the production cars coming, it's not just a throwaway thing."
So says Carl Gotham, European advanced design director for Chinese megacorp SAIC, current custodian of âBritishâ MG. And heâs talking about the EXE181, an electric, perspex canopied, single-seat streamliner with more swoop than a flock of agitated starlings. Itâs a mad thing, a knee high throwback to the golden age of concept cars when manufacturers would arm their motor show stands with bizarre 4,000bhp fever dreams powered by dark matter and constructed from nothing but alloy of unobtanium. But there really is history here, even if SAIC is mining a seam of MG gold that has very little to do with the companyâs contemporary product. Mind you, Gotham is such an effortlessly charming and honest human â based at SAICâs London design office in Marylebone â it does actually make sense.
Of a sort. But the modern design gambit really isnât the current corporate ownership of MG, but some of the undiscovered country that is MGâs storied history. Back before electric MG4s and value driven transport, platform sharing and the complex web of industrial ownership, MG was a feisty, adventurous little business that very much aligned to the âbecause we canâ school of advancement. You can just imagine several fellas in brown Morris Garages shop coats standing around and making things for the hell of it.
That stuff goes way back to the 1920s and 1930s. From âOld Number Oneâ based on a Morris Cowley chassis that competed in the 1925 Landâs End Trial â a kind of on/off-road regulation rally â driven by MG founder Cecil Kimber himself, to supercharged K3 Magnettes of the 1930s raced by Tazio Nuvolari and later at Le Mans by Eccles and Martin. MGâs racing madness stretched from the Mille Miglia to the Monte Carlo rally, all the way to postwar TCs, and various other T-based alphabet cars.
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