Buying An MG3

With more and more MG3s now coming out of their warranty period and onto the market, Roger Parker looks at the model and buying one secondhand.

The first UK MG3s went on sale in September 2013, so that means many early models are already well beyond the original three year warranty, and this number is growing rapidly. At the time of writing, the running total of MG3 sales had passed the 10,000 mark, something to bear in mind when researching the validity of chat room discussions on the cars and their reliability, especially since wide-ranging owner satisfaction surveys with higher sample rates have come out with quite good results for the model. So with currently just short of 2000 cars already out of the manufacturer’s warranty, and this figure set to more than double before the end of 2018, there will be a much bigger pool of secondhand cars, making this an ideal time to take a look at what is on offer.

The first point to make is that generally the cars are reliable and, in our real world, acceptably economic to own and run. As with any car there have been a few issues, but mentioning problems has to be balanced by several independent studies showing MG in a good light in respect to customer care, model reliability and warranty acceptance. In this age of instant communication you will usually find someone shouting from his keyboard about the cars in a general rant that devalues any point they may have wished to make, so do take care to separate this out from rational comment by genuine owners.

Most of the relatively few issues that have been reported tend to be connected to earlier cars, but those problems should have been dealt with when it was under warranty. If a car is displaying the issues mentioned below, then the best advice is to walk away and look at others, or wait until the issues have been sorted.