FIRST DRIVE: MG Cyberster - 335bhp, £50k, RWD and Scissor Doors!

imagine the scene a two- seat open top mg parked up in the square of a British Market town probably some gent picking up a new bowl a hat before retiring for a fish supper and a nice cup of tea just smash all those cliches together except this isn't your usual classic mg and this is a very unusual Village so what's going on here then well this is mg's new cyster a pure electric two- seat sports car now this car is going to arrive well before the pstar 6 or Porsche's electric boxer never mind the Tesla Roadster and it's going to be a lot cheaper than all of those cars so well done mg and this well this is tempst toown and it's very [Music] weird yep tempst town is actually named after the river temps but it's in the songyang district about 20 M from the C of Shanghai in China which is odd because it looks vaguely like a British Market Town Georgian Terraces but vely is probably the wrong word that is copied wholesale from Christ Church in Bristol Shakespeare obviously Tudor a big bronze statue of Winston Churchill hello mate Cobble streets Victorian Terraces red phone boxes wine bars it's like a panto version of stevenage though the cyberster actually isn't that weird okay so it's probably a little bit strange but tempst toown wasn't the ideal place to test a car so I headed out of Disney London but Shanghai was freezing and smoggy so it went the hood and after about 3 hours of Motorway in urban sprawl we ended up in some more interesting geography roads that wound up mountains through epic bamboo forests one of the beautiful bits of China so the mg cyberster I know it sounds like an 8-year-old named it but once you got used to the fact that you're driving around in a car that sounds like a baddy from a cartoon you'll find that this is quite a serious machine mainly because it's not based on massive electrical compromise underneath it is either a 64 KW hour or a 77 which should be good for around about 250 to 300 M of range depending on the spec there'll be two and four-wheel drive and the base model should start about £50,000 in the UK which for this kind of thing is really good and as for the way it looks I kind of quite like it it's actually a little bit bigger than I thought and at the front I can see shades of I don't know lots of different things I have seen Alpine there's a little bit of Porsche little bit of Jag everybody I speak to seems to think it's something a little bit different it's quite long I didn't expect it to be this long and actually these are 19in wheels so it makes them look fairly decently sized but not massive so you get an idea of how big it is it's sort of ftype sized or just a little bit bigger than a BMW Z4 and then down the side it's got a really quite pretty profile I mean I know it's red I know it's two- seat convertible but if you look down the side of it I like the way that the front Rises up and then they've colored in this bit at the side black so it gives it a little bit more of a slim shape it kind of Slims the car down on the way past and then as you come over the back of the car it's got a neat little duct tail just look at the profile it's actually quite neat and then at the rear well I have to say I think that these sort of massive arrows on the rear just underneath the big full width light bar are a little bit on the nose for me they are a bit cartoony but the rest of it is really neat it looks really good couple of little roll bars it's a car that kind of feels like one of those computer game cars that used to get where they were trying not to be sued for copyright but saying that I think it's really good looking it's a lot better looking in the metal than I thought compared to the pictures I've seen it's more proportioned and it just looks really nice I just think it's really pretty and the roof is really neat and really quick and it looks like this one touch maximum [Music] convenience there is one little bit of theater that I like though and that's the doors cuz obviously they are scissor doors and they're electric by the way if you are wondering about what happens if you stand too close and get punched in the face by the door they will never hit you so if I put my face here I'm betting on the fact this won't hit me in the face and it actually works still we're not just here to look at it it's time for some driving it's actually quite easy to get into but before I Drive I better have a quick chat about the inside now you shut the door by pressing this button here all very smooth very easy and actually there's quite a lot of space the thing is I was expecting something a little bit different and this is interesting because if I was going to reinvent the classic mg Roadster for a digital age I might have gone with some nice analog dials and a few buttons this the cyberster not a bit of it you've basically got a massive wraparound set of screens in front of view which are actually three different displays now this side is entirely in Chinese so I'm not really sure what it does but I have seen it displaying things which I think are like mileage your distance to empty and your tire pressures then on this side you've got um stuff to do with multimedia so your radio U stuff to do with the phone and in the middle is all the stuff to do with the car so it all makes sense it's incredibly clear the software in this car is actually like a gaming computer so it renders everything perfectly all the little graphics and stuff it looks like a cartoon it is really really good steering wheel is nicely positioned looks pretty good I mean there are two paddles on the back this side controls the modes so you can switch into sport normal Comfort Eco all the usual stuff this side does the regenerative braking so if you pull that you get a little bit more regenerative braking um then the usual buttons on here there's a little button Mark Super Sport which is kind of an over boost button so if you're doing an overtake you can hit that the dial lights up red and makes a washing noise like a computer game and then it gives you a little bit more power As you move round the car the thing you notice is that it actually feels really well put together you know you have your suspicions about things but then when you get in this this has been pretty well done I mean the stitching all lines up everything there's no panel gaps this is really good in the middle here you have all the drive controls so drives at the bottom neutral reverse and park and you can actually feel them by touch you don't have to look at them to know which gear you're in which is actually really nice and then next to the gear selector is an extra screen and that's basically just for the air conditioning the Comfort settings the roof controls here one touch it's a fast roof we've already seen that and then there's a little slot for your mobile phone here couple of cup holders and in here is a little bit storage but it's also got your USBS so there's a lightning uh and a SD card and some other bits and Bobs also little things I've noticed the seats look really cool you know the seats are really comfy and they actually look really nice so when you look into the car you actually think that looks like a nice thing and there's an optional yolk um with a variable rack which I think might be a bit weird because a a normal steering wheel is really what you want if you're going to drive quickly a yoke is a bit strange there is a little bit of storage behind the seats and there's kind of a little flappy thing here um it's got a flap on it because obviously the doors open upwards so otherwise everything would fall out of it um but you don't really need it cuz the boots actually quite big general terms I think some of the colorways are a little bit strange this kind of sort of reddish color makes it look a little bit cheaper than it actually is if this was in black leather it would look super classy generally though massively impressed I really like the insides now I have to drive okay so enough teasing it was actually time to drive and as it turns out China has some amazing Country Roads roads that are as spectacular as anything we've got in Europe except just that little bit different and the cyberster finally ended up in its element so the driving part of the mg cyberster which is what we've all been waiting for well my first impressions it's really rather good but it's more like a sporty GT car than an out andout sports car and that is no bad thing I mean that as a compliment so there's going to be two versions this one is a single motor rear wheel drive car with about 335 brake horsepower and this will get from 0 to 62 in about 5.2 seconds which is kind of nicely rapid then there will be a dual motor which straps a 2011 brake horsepower motor to the front to give 536 brake horsepower and that's a lot quicker so that'll do 0 to 62 in about 3.2 seconds which is a lot more naughty now both cars o hair pin Bend both cars will get to about 124 mph which is probably Irrelevant for most people and generally the one with 335 brake horsepower this one actually feels quite sprightly the steering is a little bit sort of numb so you don't really know what the front wheels are doing but it's got plenty of grip and actually quite good body control it's quite it rides quite well on the motorway which is where I've been driving it and that led me to believe that it might not have very much body control but actually it's pretty good it's not got the most feel in the world that's the problem I think it it could be a lot more feels some it's really pretty up in the hills I thought Shanghai was a bit of an urban kind of monstrosity but this is so beautiful we've just come about about 3 and 1/2 hours outside of Shanghai and up onto these mountain roads and it's really pretty and they're actually quite nicely surfaced they're good driving roads weirdly I think 300 horsepower in this car and rear wheel drive is probably enough just enough to start to get it to move around but not enough to scare yourself weirdly though I think it's like with all of these battery electric cars they will always have to to work with or around the weight now this is just a single motor with a 64 KW battery with about when I charged this up 100% said 250 Mi now the two motor car with 536 brake horsepower weighs nearly 2 tons so even though you've got a lot of power you're always having to play with the mass and it's something you can't get away from I think this one is more like just a bit more than an F type an F Type A chunky ftype with an internal combustion engine weighs something like, 1600 kilos rather than 19900 and some so there's a lot of fattiness in a car like this but this cyberster seems to it seems to cope with it really well and it's actually quite quick you know what an electric convertible play thing is actually a good idea a lot of these cars don't have massively characterful engines anyway I'm thinking Mazda MX5 so such usable power is excellent and the general quiet really isn't that big of a deal it's a different experience rather than a worse one now you can change the modes so if you play with this paddle here you can do Comfort Sport and also custom but when you changed it the graphics do loads of really cool things so when you're in sport the wheels catch fire on the graphic when you're in custom it's got like electricity going over the wheels and then there's this little button here that says super boost which just gives you a little bit of extra power for a short amount of time but it makes loads of funny noises you just hear it messing around all the time it's like it is a bit computer gy but you know what it drives really really well I'm actually having quite a good laugh and it's quiet I don't really miss an engine note and the weird thing is this is a Chinese domestic market car so a lot of this stuff if you wanted it a little bit sharper could actually be engineered in it for the UK so what the Chinese did was when the mg 4 came to the UK it was called the Mulan in China and was handling slightly differently so they got some British Engineers to tune it up for the UK market and they made it a really decent handling car they could do exactly the same with the cyberster if we have a slightly different feel or Texture that we want from the car they can engineer it in but the basics of this car what I'm driving right now isn't bad at all it's slightly soft there's slight slight amounts of body roll the steering could be slightly sharper and a bit more feels some but this is a very neutral kind of relaxing car to drive quickly I'll be honest here I'm more impressed with the cyberster than I thought it was going to be it's genuinely neat it doesn't feel as heavy as it is it's got plenty of grip Okay so when you hit the brakes it does dive a little bit there's a little bit of body roll look if I hit the brakes you are getting a little bit of front end dive I have been making the front tires lock up slightly on these Mountain Roads sometimes it could be harder it could be sharper but then when I was driving on the motorway I quite enjoyed the compliance I enjoyed the fact that it wasn't an out andout hardcore you know like Lotus exes or something this is really good this is really good but eventually we had to head back into Shanghai to give the cyberster back and after a bit more charging which is excellent by the way and produced an average of 90 KW a bit more freeway and a lot more time we ended up back in the urban sprawl in a car that can absolutely stand on its own a car that really doesn't need to hark back to mg Heritage or classic British two seater cliches to be what it is a currently unique fun and interesting electric car so the new mg cyster what's our verdict well I have to say that I don't think this is actually a sports car I think in any of the versions they may be fast but they're a little bit too heavy and a bit too soft for that but what it is is something completely unique right now and that is a two- seat pure electric drop top GT car I've really enjoyed driving this car about and given that the competition is likely a few months away and going to cost twice the price of this thing you have to give mg G kudos for that this has been a gentle calming not very exciting but generally quite nice version of what a convertible should be I think it's really rather good

Channel: Top Gear

Views: 948,979

Keywords: Top Gear, mg cyberster, cyberster, mg cyberster review, mg cyberster ev, mg cyberster 2024, mg cyberster interior, mg cyberster 2023, mg cyberster price, cyberster review, 2024 mg cyberster, mg cyberster roadster, cyberster mg, 2024 mg cyberster roadster, 2024 mg cyberster in-depth walkaround, mg cyberster specs, mg cyberster exterior, mg cyberster test drive, 2024 mg cyberster launch, 2024 mg cyberster review, mg cyberster performance, 2024 mg cyberster interior

Id: TbTXrhA5DJ0

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024