The secret of their success

Over the past five years, MG has enjoyed unprecedented UK sales growth in an ailing market. STEVE CROPLEY asks how they did it

- STEVE CROPLEY

Once upon a time, back in the annals of history, there may have been an explosion of UK automotive sales greater than that of MG’s recent, towering success in this country — a 620% leap from 13,000 to 81,000 cars in the four short years between 2019 and 2023. If so, no one can remember it, and experts reckon MG is safe to claim a most remarkable record.

However, even if there had been a rival high achiever, it’s vanishingly unlikely that the pretender would have achieved its feat - as MG did - while the supporting market around it collapsed in one disastrous year from 2.3 million cars to 1.6 million, as happened in Britain during the first Covid year. MG’s prodigious rise against the most powerful of trends will always loom large in the annals of automotive success.

This is just one of the reasons why Autocar decided to choose MG as its Manufacturer of the Year for 2025, the others being the fact that a large measure of the company’s success is due to the work of a British-led design team, centred in a compact studio atop MG Motor UK’s imposing headquarters not far from Madame Tussauds in Marylebone, London. It is run by design director Carl Gotham, whose team count the super-successful 4 EV and the more recent Cyberster sports car among a number of successes, many of which they can’t tell us about.