WE’RE big fans of the ‘reborn’ MG here at Drive Towers, with the MG4 EV being one of our favourite cars of recent times – electric or otherwise - in both its well-appointed yet still eminently affordable bog-standard trim as well as its ‘high performance’ guise, the MG4 XPower.
Indeed, having been declared UK Car of The Year 2023, the MG4 is good enough to make you want to stand up for the Chinese-owned brand whenever critics sneer about it forever living in the shadows of its iconic, British-made origins.
Enthused by how well MG did at making a small family car, I was dying to get behind the wheel of the new MG Cyberster, a sleek, two-seater roadster perfectly poised to reconnect MG to its petrol-powered sporting heritage while simultaneously securing an electric-powered future for the brand as it celebrates its 100th anniversary.
When I finally got hold of a Cyberster at the SMMT Test Day event back in September, I was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. Having just enjoyed taking another reborn British classic for a spin - the new electric Mini Cooper John Cooper Works edition (more on that in a future edition of Drive) - my appetite for sporty EV-based fun was well and truly whetted.
Available in single motor-powered Trophy (from £54,995) and dual motor-powered GT (from £59,995) form, the Cyberster looks just as sharp in the metal as it does in pics – especially from the front.
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However, once I’d opened the vertically-rising ‘Lambo’ style door and slid into the wrap-around confines of its faux-leather and Alcantara-trimmed cockpit, the Cyberster GT proved to be a hugely frustrating driving experience.
The car itself is comfortable and performs well, delivering a proper kick in the guts when you thumb that alluring red Super Sport Mode button on the steering wheel and put your right foot down to take full advantage of its sub-four second 0-60mph acceleration time, courtesy of the GT trim’s dual electric motors generating 375kW / 496hp.
The Cyberster also handles well for a two-tonne car, with decent enough road feel through the assisted steering. It’s a pleasure to drive in slow traffic around town, thanks to the one-pedal driving functionality, though the suspension can feel a tad bouncy when powering out of the corners on rougher-surfaced roads – which is pretty much every A-road in Britain and the north at the moment.
It’s no MGB GT, then: indeed, I immediately got the sense the Cyberster didn’t really want to be thrown around. It’s much more at home cruising in a straight line for long distances: it will devour up to 316 miles between charges of the 77kWh battery, according to MG (so more likely 250-ish in the real world).
Away from the twisties, you could enjoy just dropping the top, which goes up and down in under 10-seconds and can be raised or stowed at speeds under 30mph, and watching the world flash by as you motor along in electrified quiet.
Well, you could, if it wasn’t for all the damn beeping.
Yes, sadly our test car was equipped with a faulty/hugely over-zealous Driver Fatigue Monitor that was hell-bent on getting me to pull over for a rest mere minutes after I’d got into the damn thing. A little orange ‘coffee cup’ icon on the dash was throbbing away in tandem with an incessantly chiming alert sound.
Even turning the feature off via the settings located deep within the Driver Settings menu didn’t seem to work – buggy software, faulty sensors, or perhaps I just looked particularly knackered to its unmerciful electric eye(s)?
The Cyberster also kept flashing messages on the dash insisting that I ‘please focus on driving’, which was tricky given how hard the central touchscreen is to navigate, not to mention the need to constantly take your eyes off the road in order to be able to actually read the right and left-hand driver’s display monitors properly – they are partially obscured by the steering wheel, as are the windscreen wiper speed controls.
Honestly, spending over half the test drive trying to thwart such inaccurate electronic nannying really soured my MG Cyberster experience. It’s not all bad, but given how much more fun and well-designed the BMW Z4 roadster I drove later that day proved to be (it’s also nearly a whole £15k cheaper), I’m afraid the Cyberster GT offers virtually no competition to the Bavarians’ finesse.
For now, then, the MG4 XPower remains the pinnacle of MG’s ‘performance-orientated’ offerings – and it will only cost you £37k.
