At last, MG feels respectable again. All these years, it has seemed quite wrong to me for MG to be making handy hatchbacks and dog-toting estates – however decent – without having an honest-to-God sports car in its repertoire.
The marque’s famous founder, Cecil Kimber, must have been rotating in his grave at 6000rpm since he checked out in 1945, killed in an unlikely railway accident. But the advent of the Cyberster roadster in production fixes all that – or will fix it when the car hits the market next summer.
Suddenly, MG will have the respectability of Porsche, a company that has to make sensible vehicles to finance its more frivolous ones.
Even MG’s commercial experts acknowledge that they’re not really doing the Cyberster for the money, but to fulfil their perceived responsibility to the old marque and (hopefully) to please those who love to drive.
Best of all they suggest, without quite saying it, that other sporty MGs are on the stocks. They’ll be very welcome.
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I really don't want to own a Chinese car no matter what the badge says.....
It's called marketing, relating your latest product to an iconic brand isn't going to sell it, it has to look good firstly, be well put together and be nicely appointed inside ,but the most important it has to drive, handle well, so, this is pre release BULLDUST.
It's a total myth that the Cayenne etc bankroll Porsche sports car. The sports car make good money in their own right.
More to the point, it was the success of the 986/996 that provided the financial footing to do the first Cayenne. Obviously the Cayenne was a hit and didn't need any further help. But as a matter of fact, the opposite of the usual refrain is actually true. The sports cars financed the SUVs and not the other way round.
In 2003-4 the sports car sales were declining rapidly. 2004 saw Porsche double it's sales volume by the addition of the Cayenne alone (against that backdrop of declining sports models).
The finances to launch Cayenne etc may have been sourced from prior sports sales but everything post Cayenne launch has ridden on the back of the volume provided by the Cayenne and Macan.
Margin is high on the sports cars but Porsche would have been in a mess without the 4x4s
Also nonsense.
Porsche base all their vehicles on VW underpinnings, the cars just about break even.
Porsche's investment banking arm is the division that bankrolls the entire operation.