MG XPower SV – Cult Classic, Not Best Seller

History of MG and Rover is, to say the very least, complicated. And it’s made no less complicated when you wedge the frankly nuts MG Xpower SV into the chronology. It’s a car that, had MG been helmed by people with even a modicum of business nous, would never have made it beyond a sketch. But here we are, it’s real and it’s… well, it’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s just weird. 

The story starts in 2000 when BMW got bored of the MG Rover group having picked at it like a Boxing Day turkey. It had plucked the MINI from the carcass, it had sold Land Rover to Ford and that was enough sustenance. It sold the bones of the MG Rover group for a notional sum of £10. No, honestly, a tenner. 

The consortium that bought it, known as the Phoenix Four headed by ex-Rover Chief Exec, John Towers, were concerned not by such financial matters. The deal, enforced by law, was that BMW would be responsible for redundancy payments if the sold company, which was now known as MG Rover, folded within three years. As such, it provided a dowry payment to the value of £500-million. This payment consisted of cars, holdings, buildings and so on. Everything the new MG Rover needed to succeed. 

But what’s all this got to do with the XPower SV? Well, we’re getting to that. 

The new MG Rover company took the money from BMW and ran with it, spending like a kid in a sweetshop. Some of it was very clever. The new MG models – the ZR, ZS and ZT were a stroke of genius. They were damn good cars, but let’s be real, they were just brightly coloured Rovers at heart. But it bloody worked, and soon MG Rover was on the up, the ‘hot’ MG versions of grandad’s car were well engineered and excellent to drive, and we bought them in our droves. The ZR even became the best-selling hot hatch in the UK. MG Rover’s horizons were no longer looking bleak.

Then, things went a bit bonkers. The Phoenix Four stopped throwing £50 notes at each other for a moment and decided to buy Qvale. Which, in a roundabout way, was what De Tomaso had become. Its offering of the time, the re-imagined Mangusta, intrigued the MG Rover bosses. It was ugly as sin, but the chassis had already been homologated for the U.S, so it had the potential to be the basis of the company’s new halo car. 

MG Rover took the Mangusta and threw it away, which is fine because it had a face only a mother could love. Maybe. On its birthday. If it was lucky.

Initially, the new halo car was going to be the MG X80, of which a concept was revealed at the 2001 Frankfurt Motor Show. Sadly though, the car was deemed to be too conservative and safe, forcing bosses to re-evaluate the project. The X80 design was shelved. Even with the Mangusta base and Ford V8, the looks would have killed sales. So instead, MG Rover made the new car even weirder to look at. 

MG Rover threw money at the project, giving freelance designer, Peter Stevens, free reign to body the Qvale chassis. What he came up with was remarkable. The whole body shell of the SV tipped the scales at 65kg. Made from mostly carbon fibre, it was cutting edge and featherweight. This meant the 4.6 Ford V8 strapped the chassis underneath it had very little mass to shift – the whole car only came in at approx. 1,500kg.

It wasn’t a looker, though. A confused, squat, hunched machine, it looked like what would happen if you asked a GCSE design student to design a car. But it didn’t matter. It was screwed together exceptionally well, so well it won MG Rover an award. The interior wasn’t, though. It was crammed with (actually very comfortable) bucket seats you couldn’t easily adjust, a transmission tunnel that was only comfortable if you could put your left leg over your head and four-point harnesses that were a pain to get in and out of. But then, when you consider that the body was built in Italy, but the interior was done in Longbridge, is it that surprising? 

The resulting car was… interesting. It was fast, make no mistake. 320bhp in a 1,500kg will be. And MG’s chassis designers had tweaked the SV’s handling to perfection. The SV, or XPower SV as it was known (XPower being the ST line or AMG of MG), was surprisingly well-mannered on the road. The suspension worked well and kept the driver’s confidence levels up, the power was there, the noise was there, but it was all a bit… short.

This was a £75,000 supercar, to MG’s mind. But it didn’t feel like it. You sat too high, too upright. The ride wasn’t exactly squidgy, but it was too soft for what the SV was trying to be. It seemed MG Rover had been outlandishly brave – Mangusta, carbon fibre, construction in Modena – but only to a point. When it came to putting this thing on the road, it bottled it. The SV needed to be wild, it needed to be no compromise, it needed to be hard. But it wasn’t.

MG tried to sort all this out by offering a 385bhp SV-R version, but it was too little, too late. And it was also £82,000, which was 911 GT3 money. And really, which would you buy?

This takes us to 2003 or so, and by now the MG Rover company was in big trouble. The ZR, ZS and ZT had brought life to the company, but in reality they were old cars re-engineered. As for the Rover range – the 2003 25 was based on a 1995 design. The cars were old hat, so we stopped buying them. The Phoenix Four hadn’t played the long game. They were, as it would later transpire with their huge salaries and pensions, in it for a good time, not for a long time. MG Rover was once again doomed, and the money ploughed into the SV project didn’t help. And let’s not even start on the V8 MG ZT260 that MG paid Prodrive a lot of money to engineer and build. 

But even so, the SV should still be remembered. Yes, the management of MG Rover was terrible, but in being so, it gave the designers time to play and time to go mad. Can you imagine what MG Rover might have produced if there was just a bit of guidance and financial concern? Just a little bit of impetus to not go completely mad, to play the much needed long game? It could have been a very different story indeed.

While this particular model is pretty rare, the best place to keep a lookout for one is in our classic MG listings.