MG Cyberster GT test drive

Make and model: MG Cyberster GT
Description: Two-seat roadster, electric
Price range: £59,990 (plus options)

MG says: “Blending MG’s iconic heritage with the vigour of modern electric innovation.”

We say: The MG Cyberster is supercar-fast, but all that performance comes at the expense of driving enjoyment.

• MG Cyberster (2024 onwards) – Expert Rating
• More MG new car reviews, Expert Ratings, news and features

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Introduction

MG’s renaissance over the last decade has seen the famous old British brand transformed into a builder of budget-priced family cars. It’s a far cry from the glory days (assuming you’re wearing rose-tinted glasses) of the MGA, MGB and MGC sports cars.

Not any more. The Cyberster makes a big statement for MG, being a sports car unlike anything the brand has ever built – and unlike anything else in the new car market. It’s an all-electric, two-seat roadster that propels MG into an entirely new demographic.

MG’s London studio had been working on sports car concepts for several years, and the concept that would eventually become the Cyberster was displayed at the Shanghai motor show in 2021. It received such an overwhelmingly positive response that MG immediately approved it for production.

On one hand, this is a £60K MG, which is well beyond anything else in the brand’s line-up. On the other hand, it’s a £60K sports car with straight-line performance that embarrasses gold-label supercars at three times the price.

So, how should be look at this car? Is it a very expensive MG, or a bargain supercar? We went along to the UK launch in Scotland to find out.

What is it?

The MG Cyberster is currently one of a kind in the new car market – a two-seat roadster powered by electricity. Other brands (notably Polestar) have plans to launch their own electric roadsters in the next couple of years, but right now there’s nothing else like the Cyberster.

It’s available in two specifications: Trophy for £55K and GT for £60K, the only visible difference being 19-inch wheels on the Trophy and 20-inch wheels on the GT. Under the bonnet, the GT gets an extra electric motor at the front, making it a 500hp all-wheel-drive vehicle car. The Trophy, meanwhile, has a single motor producing 340hp and is rear-wheel-drive only.

A coupé concept was unveiled at last weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, and would make a logical extension to the Cyberster family. There’s no word on whether it will go into production, but it would appear a fairly safe bet.

Who is this car aimed at?

If you’re looking for a sports car that provides maximum bang for bucks, you’ll struggle to find anything that gives a bigger bang than the MG Cyberster GT. It has a similar price tag to a Porsche Boxster, but absolutely trounces the Porsche in terms of performance and standard equipment.

It’s generally pretty easy to make an electric car go fast in a straight line, and we see lots of EV performance cars with stunning acceleration figures. But it’s still staggering to find out that the Cyberster GT is just as fast from 0-62mph as the legendary McLaren F1…

On top of that, the MG scores highly when it comes to street theatre with its electrically operated scissor doors. For ultimate show-off points, you can open and close the doors with the car key.

Who won’t like it?

Inevitably, there will be potential customers who will refuse to countenance an electric sports car, no matter the price. And there will also be potential customers who won’t even bother to look at a £60K MG electric sports car.

Straight-line performance isn’t everything, even for a performance car. Driving enjoyment, through the way a car steers and handles, is absolutely vital to a sports car. There will be sports car buyers who will prefer the superb driving enjoyment of a Porsche Boxster to the break-neck pace of the Cyberster.

First impressions

The MG Cyberster has a modern style that still manages to look fairly conventional – there are no crazy angles or wilfully controversial elements that you’d see on any new BMW, for instance. The arrow-style tail lights are a bit over the top – you’re not quite sure whether they’re indicators showing your intended direction or Mini-style Union Jack motifs (it seems to be the latter).

The party piece is undoubtedly the electrically operated scissor doors, for Lamborghini-style street theatre at a fraction of the price. Unusual doors seem to fascinate just about everyone that sees them, whether it’s on an MG or a Rolls-Royce, so it makes you wonder why more manufacturers don’t make more of an effort to offer something different.

Inside, the dashboard is very screen-heavy with four separate displays. It looks state-of-the-art but the functionality leaves quite a bit to be desired, as we’ll come to shortly.

What do you get for your money?

Once we’ve got the first impressions out of the way, it’s time to look a bit harder at exactly what you’re getting for your money with the MG Cyberster.

At the car’s launch, there are two trim levels – Trophy for £55K and GT for £60K. Trophy gets a single electric motor producing 340hp and driving the rear wheels. The GT has a twin-motor setup, one for the front wheels and one for the rear – making it all-wheel drive – with a total of 500hp.

The only visible way to tell the difference between a Trophy and a GT model is to look at the wheels. The Trophy has 19-inch alloy wheels, while the GT gets 20-inch wheels in a different pattern.

There are no options other than metallic paint and soft-top colour, with everything else being standard equipment. And the equipment levels are good, covering everything you’d expect to have and plenty of stuff you’d have to pay extra for on a Porsche Boxster – like electric memory seats, LED headlights, auto-folding wing mirrors, heated steering wheel, Bose stereo and so on. In fact, a quick comparison of specification sheets shows that you’d have to add more than £10,000 of options to a Boxster to get close to what the Cyberster offers as standard.

The only problem with loading up on all the standard kit is that it adds even more weight to an already heavy car, and the Cyberster GT weighs more than 2.2 tonnes. That’s not far off the starting weight for a Bentley Continental GT…

We like: No extra cost add-ons – it’s all standard
We don’t like: Equipment levels are more suited to a comfortable GT cruiser than a sports car

What’s the MG Cyberster like inside?

Sliding into the MG Cyberster cockpit gives two immediate impressions. Firstly, everything looks and feels to be of a high quality. Secondly, it’s a bit tighter than you’d like if you’re even approaching six feet tall.

The cabin layout is dominated by a total of four separate screens – three in front of the driver and one in the centre of the dashboard. It looks impressive, but then you start to actually use the screens and find that the functionality is disappointing.

In front of the driver is the main 12-inch screen with all the usual dashboard information – speed, battery charge, any warning messages (which are almost constant and annoying), and so on. Either side of the main screen are smaller seven-inch touchscreens. The left screen handles navigation, Apple CarPlay/Android Auto, stereo and so on. The right screen, for reasons best known to MG, allows you to look at the upcoming week’s weather, send an email or read performance summaries and information. None of which you would want to do while driving, so it’s essentially useless.

The side screens have a further problem in that, if you place your hands on the steering wheel at the conventional “ten to two” position, your hands block most or all of the displays. I had to take my left hand off the steering wheel every time I wanted to look at the satnav screen, which is ridiculous. It’s amazing that this managed to make it through the whole design process without anyone in the design office noticing that this would be a problem.

The screen in the lower middle of the dash adjusts the climate control and seats. It’s a bit fiddly to use and, in my car at least, didn’t always respond to touch inputs (I’ve had similar issues with other MG cars previously). To make it worse, every time you try to use the centre screen, the Cyberster will bong at you and issue warning messages that tell you to “focus on driving”. In fact, it does this almost every time you look away from straight ahead, whether it’s to check your mirrors or adjust any other settings via a button or one of the many touchscreens.

The seats are firm, although not uncomfortable, so you shouldn’t get any lower back aches on longer trips or feel the desperate need to jump out and stretch your legs. But if you prefer your seats to be soft and supple, these are not those sort of seats. Which is something of a pity, given that the spec sheet and performance of the Cyberster would be great for long distance, grand touring adventures.

The seating position is also compromised for taller drivers, who are likely to have to slump down a bit to look through the windscreen rather than staring directly at the header rail across the top of the screen. This is not unusual for a roadster, where a low windscreen is part of the whole design, but it’s made worse here because the seat itself is mounted higher than ideal because you have the batteries arranged underneath the floor.

MG explained that the batteries are very slim compared to most EVs, and the battery pack under the floor is no taller than a Coke can. That’s certainly an impressive technical achievement, but out on the road I couldn’t help wishing that my seat was mounted about a Coke can lower… In a sports car, a low seating position is crucial for maximising driving feel, and this is a bit of a miss for the Cyberster. Again, in a comfortable GT cruiser, this would be less of an issue than in an open-topped sports car. However, everyone is shaped slightly differently so you may feel absolutely fine.

I’d also have preferred to be able to push my seat back a little further, and pull the steering wheel out a little further. Only a few centimetres, but it would help to feel more relaxed and less bunched-up. There’s a small amount of storage space behind the two seats rather than a solid wall, so it should be possible to make the seat slides a fraction longer.

Obviously there are no rear seats in this two-seat roadster. The storage space behind the seats is welcome and will no doubt be useful for Cyberster owners. The boat is pretty small, especially if you’re carrying the charging cables with you. Officially, it’s about 250 litres, which is better than some other roadsters. Despite the long nose, there’s no under-bonnet storage space. Pack light if you and a passenger are planning to go away for more than a night.

We like: Very quiet and smooth at low-to-medium speeds
We don’t like: Not enough room or seating adjustment for taller drivers

What’s the MG Cyberster GT like to drive?

It’s fast. Really fast. Brutally fast. On a motorway or A-road, it will accelerate from 50mph to 70mph faster than your brain can process. And being an electric car, the response is absolutely instant. With any kind of petrol car – even a supercar – acceleration builds as the revs rise, because a petrol engine simply cannot deliver all of its performance at idle. Broadly speaking, more revs equals more performance.

Electric cars don’t work that way. You get everything all at once as soon as you hit the accelerator. Hit it hard, and your insides will go gooey as the Cyberster GT rockets forward. As the MG team was keen to point out, the 0-62mph time is equal to the legendary McLaren F1. It’s likely that the 0-30 time is even quicker, because even the McLaren’s mighty V12 engine has to get some revs into it to deliver maximum performance.

The other characteristic of an electric car is that the top speed doesn’t match to a similar petrol car. Again, this is due to the nature of electric motors. So the Cyberster GT tops out at 125mph while the McLaren will go on to almost double that. Obviously, given that out national speed limit is 70mph and most European countries are approximately 80-ish mph, this is not that important, but it shows how concentrated an EV’s performance is compared to a petrol car.

The brakes are supplied by famed Italian manufacturer Brembo and they’re strong, although don’t have quite the reassuring feel you’d like given how ferociously the Cyberster accelerates. Although they didn’t have great feel, I found the braking performance to be perfectly good during my drive time. A couple of other journalists, however, suggested that they found the brakes starting to fade after a few heavy stops (they must have been pushing a lot harder than I was!).

The Cyberster may be a heavy car, but most of the weight is kept very low down – as mentioned, the batteries are built into the floor of the car – which means that the car stays very flat during cornering, with almost no roll. That’s good news for both ride and handling, as it means the suspension doesn’t have to be extra stiff to counteract the roll. If you’ve ever driven an SUV into a corner a bit too quickly and experienced it leaning over on its wheels, you’ll know how alarming that feels. No concerns about that here.

The ride is good given the car’s weight. In fact, it feels lighter than the specification sheet shows. It’s still a sports car rather than a limousine, so you’ll certainly feel potholes and speed humps, but it’s better than many similar cars.

So, objectively speaking, the MG Cyberster GT does everything you’d want it to do. There’s only one real problem – it’s not actually that much fun to drive. The car is defined and dominated by its incredibly impressive electric motors. But once you’ve had enough of short bursts of missile-like acceleration (and they’re very short bursts if you want to avoid losing your licence), the rest of the driving experience is a but numb.

I spent most of the driving route through the Scottish highlands thinking I’d be having much more fun in a Mazda MX-5, which has 60% less power but a much more tactile and sporty feel as you wind through corner after corner at legal speeds.

Those who drove both the GT and Trophy models back-to-back on the launch reported that the steering on the Trophy felt better as the car is about 100kg lighter and it’s rear-wheel drive, so the front wheels don’t have to drive the car as well as steer it. I suspect the slightly less frenetic acceleration of the Trophy model may also make it easier to drive along winding B-roads. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to put that one to the test soon and report back.

We like: Missile-like acceleration is incredible – just warn your passenger in advance
We don’t like: The rest of the driving experience is not actually that much fun

How safe is the MG Cyberster?

The MG Cyberster has not been yet tested by Euro NCAP, so we can’t give a definitive answer to that question. It’s also possible that it will never be tested, given its likely modest sales numbers. Most sports cars don’t get put through Euro NCAP testing, so this is not unusual.

The Cyberster comes equipped with all the latest accident avoidance technology that we now expect to see on new cars – blind-spot assist, lane-keeping assist, adaptive cruise control, and so on. It also has the usual complement of airbags to protect you if an accident can’t be avoided.

Recent MG models have performed very well in Euro NCAP testing, so the company does have a good track record – which also dispels the myth in some quarters that Chinese cars are less safe than European cars – but that’s all theoretical for now. We’ll update this section if Euro NCAP

MG Cyberster economy, battery range and charging

The MG Cyberster has a 77kWh battery, which gives an official range (according to government lab tests) of 276 miles for the GT version and 316 miles for the Trophy model. Call it 240 miles and 280 miles, respectively, in real-world driving conditions and you’re probably close to the mark. While that’s not as far as you’ll go in a number of family electric SUVs these days, it’s likely to be plenty for this sort of car.

If you’re charging from a public charger, the maximum charging rate is 144kW. That’s not as fast as some new EVs, but is fast enough for most public chargers, which tend to have a maximum charging rate from 50kW to 150kW.

Best-case scenario at a 150kW charger is a 20%-80% charge time (the default measurement for public charging) of 38 minutes. If you’re charging at home from a 7kW wallbox, which is what most home chargers produce, you’re looking at a 10%-100% charge time (the default measurement for home charging) of about 10.5 hours. Both of these times are about what you’d expect from any new EV.

The Cyberster features a relatively new technology called Vehicle to Load, which means you can use the car’s battery to power regular household devices like a fridge or electric pump. That’s great for camping, although you might struggle to find a fridge that will fit in the boot. More realistically, it means you can run something like a vacuum cleaner from the battery when you’re cleaning your car, without having to try and run an extension cord from your house to the driveway.

Verdict

The Cyberster is currently in a class of one. It’s not just a new car for MG, it’s a new kind of car for the whole industry. Elon Musk has been talking about a new electric Tesla Roadster for longer than it has taken MG to design, develop and build its new electric sports car.

Yes, you can buy a low-volume, insane-level performance EV supercar for many hundreds of thousands of pounds from the likes of Lotus or Rimac, but this is the first electric sports car with a vaguely sensible price tag.

In terms of specification and figures, the Cyberster GT is a very good car. Yes, it’s a £60K MG, but you get an impressive level of standard kit and stunning performance. It’s worth the money, although we’d be tempted to forego the extra performance and take the Trophy model for £5K less cash.

The difficulty in judging the Cyberster GT is that it feels like would be better pitched as a GT than as a sports car. With a but more legroom and storage space, it would be a lovely car for long-distance driving. The slightly numb driving experience would be more enjoyable to live with on a more relaxed A-road drive, rather than attacking winding B-roads.

If MG decides to put the coupé concept into production, and it manages to eke out a bit more legroom and storage space – both of which should be achievable without the retractable roof – it might be a real winner as an electric grand tourer. But as a sports car, the MG Cyberster GT feels more like a near-miss.

• MG Cyberster (2024 onwards) – Expert Rating
• More MG new car reviews, Expert Ratings, news and features

Similar cars

If you’re looking at the MG Cyberster, you might also be interested in these alternatives:

Alpine A110 | BMW Z4 | Hyundai Ioniq 5 N | Jaguar F-Type | Mazda MX-5 | Porsche 718 Boxster | Toyota GR Supra

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