Coming to America

How the Sacred Octagon found success in the New World

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Whether MG could have survived during the postwar era without the benefit of American sales is open to debate but there is little doubt that the United States served as the Sacred Octagon’s most important export market for more than 30 years, introducing countless enthusiasts there to the thrill of driving nimble sports cars, at an affordable price, and returning millions in revenue until the MGB’s demise in 1980.

Although MGs only started to travel across the Atlantic in significant numbers after WWII, the first examples in the New World arrived much earlier, among them an M-type that Edsel Ford ordered in February 1930. The son of the man who had conceived the moving assembly line to reduce the price of the Model T to the point that made it attractive to the masses, Edsel drove the Midget regularly for three years, recording 27,509 miles on the odometer before donating it to the museum that his family had established to preserve various artefacts of automotive history.