One they made earlier

When MG was British and EVs were fantasy, there was the thunderous XPower SV coupe

We’ve written previously about the MG4 XPower’s Hunter Green colour option being a callback to the record-breaking MG EX181 of 1957: a glorious success for the British brand.

But the XPower name itself recalls a glorious . . . failure. Back in the early 2000s, when MG Rover desperately needed new mainstream family cars in its portfolio, it decided to go big on an exotic V8 muscle-coupe instead.

The XPower SV was a Frankenstein’s monster of a car. Based on a failed De Tomaso project, which became a failed Qvale (an independent Italian carmaker) project, it was unveiled as the MG X80 at the 2001 Frankfurt Motor Show — the same day as the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Talk about red flags.

The appeal for MG was that the car had already met US safety standards, so it could be sold there. At great expense, the MG Sport and Racing division turned the somewhat low-key X80 into the epic XPower SV; the carbon fibre body was designed by Peter Stevens, who also penned the McLaren F1.

The final car kept the 239kW Ford Mustang powertrain that had originally been envisioned for the car, later upgraded to 287kW for an SV-R version.

The end product launched in 2003 was horrendously expensive — much more than a rival Porsche 911, for example — with six different companies involved in actually building each vehicle. The XPower SV also famously used many borrowed incidental parts, including Fiat Punto headlights and tail lights from the Fiat Coupe.

It was a critically acclaimed hero model for MG, but did nothing to help the company’s perilous financial state; quite the opposite, in fact. Ultimately, only 82 cars were built before MG Rover went bust in 2005.

The SV-R was hailed as an MG supercar at the time, but the new MG4 XPower EV-hatch is a full second quicker to 100km/h. How times change.