MG Cyberster Review: Electric Isn’t Its Problem

The MG of today is very different to the Morris Garages your grandparents probably owned something from many, many years ago. Once a builder of quintessentially British sports cars, the now Chinese-owned firm is a churner of electric cars and good-value if otherwise forgettable crossovers.

So for it to go back to its roots of producing low-weight, low-cost and genuinely desirable sports machines is something unthinkable in this day and age. And it hasn’t – instead going for a Porsche-rivalling, all-wheel drive electric roadster, because of course.

This is the MG Cyberster, a car which – unless you still somehow use Internet Explorer – you’ve no doubt seen in some form or another. Years of teasers, concepts and a lot of talk of the Chinese brand making a sports car for the EV age have culminated in this.

If you parked it next to an MGB and stripped both of any branding, you wouldn’t be able to tell these cars wore the same badge.

For some context of its size, the Cyberster is very similar in size to a Porsche 911 – rather than, say, being a Mazda MX-5 rival as you may have expected from a two-door MG. It’s also way, way heavier than either of those, measuring two tonnes exactly.

You can place most of that down to the gigantic wad of batteries placed under the floor, with a usable capacity of 74.4kWh. That feeds power to two electric motors, one on each axle, producing a combined 503bhp and 535lb ft of torque. Again, not very MG.

Which brings me to something else that isn’t very MG. Scissor doors. In case you haven’t already heard, the Cyberster comes with them and they’re not just like any other scissor doors – they’re fully electrically operated.

You can either activate them on the key, which is one way to turn heads while you’re in a Tesco carpark, or with a button press on the top of the door. It’s a fun gimmick, but then they become extremely frustrating when they sometimes simply decide not to work. Or get stuck halfway through opening and then closing again after falsely detecting an obstacle. Or just anything in between.

They come with more drawbacks you may not think about while you’re looking at them, but I’ll come to those in a little bit. At least when you are, it adds to the overall look of a fantastic car. It truly is an impressive-looking thing in the flesh, although I’d happily delete the arrow-shaped rear lights.

It’s equally as bold inside, with an attempt at making a wrap-around cockpit similar to that of a fighter plane. On a visual inspection, it looks the part and may even pose a respectable rival to the likes of Porsche and BMW. When you start touching it though, things begin to fall apart – metaphorically and quite literally.

The very first thing I did inside the Cyberster was try to open the cubby hole cover on the door and, I’m not making this up, it immediately fell off. Not a great start.

Materials used like the fake suede and leather do feel nicer than anything MG is putting in its other cars right now but it still feels a little bit cheap, especially for a car that starts at about £55k.

Then the biggest pitfalls of the wraparound design expose themselves. There are four screens – one placed low down on the centre console for climate and car settings, one for the instrument cluster front and centre then two on either side of those. The left controls navigation and phone pairing, and the right offers general car info.

Let’s hope your passenger doesn’t want to change the dual-zone climate control as thanks to a bafflingly-placed beam, they can’t see the lower screen and reaching around it is a faff.

Then you go to look at Google Maps to your left only to realise the steering wheel is blocking half the screen. It’s such a thoughtless layout that seems to have been designed with the intention of looking good in marketing images and then released with not a single person interacting with it.

So far, this has turned into a rant but I am delighted to say the powertrain isn’t the problem with the Cyberster. It’s actually quite good.

On paper, it’ll crack 0-62mph in 3.2 seconds and there’s no doubt about that figure. It’s hilariously quick in reality, and that’s matched by a pretty fun experience through the corners. Granted, it is still a heavy electric car but the steering is surprisingly involved and there’s a lot of grip to play around with. It’d probably be even better without the heavy hardware needed for the scissor doors to operate.

More problems do emerge when you’re trying to cruise along, though. There’s quite a bit of noise coming from the soft-top roof which is more noticeable given the lack of any engine sound which you can forgive.

Less forgivable is the wind noise coming from the raised surround on the door for the button to open them, which is placed just behind your ear. It’s incredibly irritating from the moment you notice it.

Then there are the overly-intrusive ADAS systems. Lane-keeping assist appears to intervene the moment you’re not 100 per cent arrow-straight in your lane, the adaptive cruise is temperamental and the ‘driver fatigue warning’ goes absolutely nuts the split second you look any direction other than dead ahead – extremely frustrating when you often have to peer around the steering wheel to look at Maps. You then try to turn it off, and it goes bonkers at you.

At least the tech can be fixed with OTA software updates, so hopefully that’s something MG can rectify down the line. It’s a shame that interior layout isn’t something you can simply sort out, though.

It would’ve been easy to rant about electricity being the problem for the MG Cyberster before driving it, particularly as its 276-mile quote for the GT is nothing to shout home about, but that may prove to be its strongest asset.

Right now, if you want an EV convertible for anything less than £150,000 – let alone close to £50,000 – this is your only choice. When the rivals from the establishment begin to flow in, the Cyberster will have to trade on its value-for-money prospect to tempt buyers away from Porsches, BMWs and Audis. As things stand, I don’t think that’s enough to forgive it.