When Americans think about touring the British Isles these days, they don’t typically imagine themselves blazing the macadam trail in an MG. Once one of the kingdom’s most successful and compelling automotive exports, MG is best known to Americans today, if at all, as the maker of several popular sports-car models sold in this country a long time ago—between 1947 and 1980, to be precise.
Most people old enough to remember MGAs, MGBs, MG Midgets, and, in rarer cases, the cycle-fender T-Series that started it all—featured in Two for the Road, with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn—have relegated the storied marque to the musty garage of fading memory.
Yet there we were on our way to Scotland in the new MG4 E.V., a compact hatchback S.U.V., made in China. It’s all-electric, equipped with most of the modern conveniences, and, suddenly, one of the better-selling cars in Europe. Still, beyond the hallmark octagonal badges at the front and rear, it has nothing to do with MGs past.
Nevertheless, the MG4 has other attributes to recommend it: a capable chassis with a reasonable turn of silent E.V. speed, most modern telematics functions (touch screen, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto capability, and wireless phone charging), and it’s cheap.
Our Trophy Extended Range model cost $47,707 but typically transacts for roughly $13,000 less (with more pared down models on offer in the low $20,000 range—roughly 20 percent less than competitors).
A fine car with a seven-year battery warranty, the MG4 illustrates why both the United States and Canada and the European Union have recently felt compelled to levy tariffs (100 percent and 45 percent, respectively) on electric cars built in China.
The fact that the MG is built by the state-owned SAIC Motor Corp., Ltd., undergirds fears that unfair government largesse enables its sale at prices other nations’ car-makers can’t profitably approach. And those auto companies will be the first to acknowledge China’s acumen when it comes to building electric cars cheaply, thanks to massive, early investment that continues to outstrip their own.
When considering suitable destinations for an electric car, Scotland’s remote northeast coast—as beautiful as it gets but sparsely populated and impossibly unspoiled—may not top your list. It’s a place where you’re far more likely to meet sheep than find reliable charging stations or MG dealers who might help you in a time of need. But common sense has never been our strong suit. What better test of man, steed, and charging infrastructure than to head off by MG4 to visit our old friend the artist Fred Ingrams in the converted herring-drying shed where he lives and paints, hard by the North Sea in Dunbeath, population 160?
The first evening was marked by a detour to Edinburgh, where the exquisitely decorated Market Street Hotel, perched above the ancient metropolis in Old Town, beckoned. Unfortunately for our evening plans, the journey proved more time-consuming than expected, owing to heavy traffic around Leeds, occupying almost 10 hours versus the 7 predicted by GPS. Collecting our MG4 in Norwich, we’d set off in heavy rain, with busy lights, wipers, and the defroster each subtly sapping its charge.
Mercifully, we’d learn that many of the motorway rest areas along the route possessed ample high-speed charging facilities, without the need to download the providers’ annoying apps, as in the U.S. Topping up from 10 percent to 80 percent charge in 35 minutes using higher-speed chargers proved no burden at all.
MG quotes a battery range of 323 miles, though with highway speeds of over 70 m.p.h., we’d land on 240 miles as a more realistic distance between charging stops. What’s more, you don’t need a full charge every time. Sometimes, a 15-minute hookup will get you to the evening’s final stop, where you may charge overnight or while breakfasting with no time penalty.
Off the highway, where we’d spend the next several days, charging stations were found easily enough with search apps such as ChargePlaceScotland’s. Advance planning is required, but it’s hardly objectionable when weighed against the cost of buying gasoline in the heavily taxed British Isles.
Up early, we opted for a northeasterly route through the Highlands, 90 miles of elevated open space beginning in Blairgowrie, a market town south of the Cairngorms National Park.
Before long, our focus would shift, not uncharacteristically, to finding lunch. A gastro pub along the route at the Fife Arms, in Braemar, a grand old hotel in the rustic manner, obliged. Copious artworks lined the walls of its grand entrance hall, including a real live Picasso, Tête de Femme. The painting, which depicts Picasso’s lover of the time, Marie-Thérèse Walter, hangs on a tartan wall not far from deer heads with massive antlers, and is said to be the only one of Picasso’s works to showcase his own poetry, a brief mid-1930s obsession.
On the road to Speyside, home of more than 50 distilleries, we pause at the Royal Lochnagar Distillery, at the foot of the Cairngorms, only a mile from the Windsors’ Balmoral Castle.
Another day’s wonderfully scenic drive under our belts, we decamp the following evening at the Dornoch Station Hotel, a former railway hotel of 89 rooms just a few long drives away from the Royal Dornoch Golf Club, which, for many a duffer, is a place of almost religious significance.
Next up, a stop at the Dunrobin Castle, Highland home of the Sutherland clan, who earned the eternal enmity of the local population late in the 18th century by summarily casting tenant farmers off land they’d tended for centuries in a bid to earn greater returns grazing sheep. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Sutherlands had started to burnish their reputation through public works, such as turning the castle into a hospital during World War I, though many crofters had moved to the coast by then. Like a small few of the crofters, we aim the MG4 for Dunbeath, across the sea from Norway, bearing a gift bottle of Royal Lochnagar whisky for Ingrams.
Recovering from days of driving, we’d recount for him our findings: the MG4, despite slightly backward electronics, small L.E.D. screens, and inferior plastic interior trim, is a perfectly good, practical compact S.U.V., pleasant to pilot, with decent looks and build quality and a tempting price. The dozens of thrift-minded Scots and Brits we’d see driving them attest that the combination of a groovy logo from a once revered British brand with a good car sporting decent range and a low cost of entry has helped many to see past any objection to the latter-day MG’s country of origin.
Foreshadowing an assault on the U.S. market, SAIC is building an MG factory and design center in Mexico, itself already a leading market for the cars. (Car buffs will know that in its British-owned heyday, MG sold vastly more cars in America than anywhere else.) Thus, the 100 percent tariff enacted on Chinese electric cars by President Biden earlier this year—along with the promised but surely unpredictable tariff policies of the incoming Trump administration—will be watched closely, as it may prevent MGs from returning to the United States.
Until then, 100 years on, we can confirm that the MG4 E.V. is fully up to the rigors of its British motherland.
Jamie Kitman is a car columnist at AIR MAIL
