Do you remember the MG? Worse yet, have you ever had one? Then cower in fear. The Chinese bought the MG brand and are about to open a plant to build the malfunctioning suction cups in Oklahoma.
The Nanjing Automobile Group, which acquired the MG Rover Group in bankruptcy last year, plans to be the first Chinese automaker to open a factory in the US The product will be called the MG TF Coupe and will be available in 2008.
Let’s hope they do a better job of bold branding than the British.
I never owned an MG, but I did own another British car, a venerable Jaguar, which I had serviced at a specialist MG service place.
This is my story, with one caveat. Now I understand that Ford bought the Jag brand, it works better.
My old Jaguar XJ 6 sedan was a beauty, the cutest car on the road. The only problem is that the mechanical aspects brought home the idea of a hornet’s nest. There were always at least five things going wrong at the same time.
To save money on maintenance, I used to take it to a place that ran MG instead of taking it to the Jaguar dealer. I asked the guy who ran the shop, a canny Irishman, why the cars always had problems.
“Well, you know limeys,” he replied with a sulky gleam in his eyes. “A bunch of socialists. So they’re on the assembly line and they see an engine with a loose bolt. So Frank looks at Harry and says, ‘Harry, could you look at that? A screw loose.”
And Harry says, “Well, yeah, I think you’re right. It’s a loose screw.”
But any one of them reaches down and squeezes it. No. The engine keeps moving along the assembly line.
Then there was the day I was parked outside the store, waiting for a space inside the busy spot, so I could stop my car for repairs, when suddenly I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Then there was a big hit to the side of the car near the curb. I turned around and a normal looking businessman in a suit had an angry look on his face and was actually kicking my car.
I rolled down the window and, in keeping with the British spirit of the car, calmly asked, “Excuse me, sir, but why are you kicking my car?”
“I used to have one of these damn things,” he yelled, “and every time I see one I think how much trouble I had with it and I get mad.” She then calmed down, as if her confession let off the hottest steam. “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but I couldn’t help it.”
“Okay,” I said, “I might decide to kick it myself.”
Then there were the two worst problems I had with him. The drain in the air conditioning dash was clogged. Apparently it was too small. Condensation would build up anyway, and pretty soon I could hear water sloshing on the dash. The real problem was that when I turned a corner, the water rushed to the side and spilled out the vent onto my lap or worse, onto the lap of whoever was unlucky enough to be on the passenger side. .
The other rather inconvenient problem was that when I was driving down the road at night and a car cut into my path, and I pressed the button on the floor to dim the headlights, they would turn off completely. That’s how it is. He would be speeding down the highway in total darkness, except for the scant illumination provided by distant approaching lights. So I would quickly start pressing the button and after three or four desperate shots the headlights would come on again.
When I brought the problem to the attention of my world-weary mechanic, he referred to the name of the wiring manufacturer and informed me, “You know what they call Lucas’s electrical system, right? Prince of Darkness.”
To add insult to injury, I went to the car show at the old Collesum in New York one year. When I saw the Jaguar on display, I went up to the dealer and asked, “Why can’t you make a Jaguar that works well?”
He smiled mischievously and gestured at the sleek, gleaming gray sedan, and simply said, “But look at it.”
Yes, if you liked the design, you were expected to put up with the flaws.
Finally, when the time came when I couldn’t take the accident anymore, mainly because the radiator wouldn’t stop leaking, I looked in the yellow pages for places that buy used cars. I saw an ad that said “2000 Cars Wanted.”
I called. The guy who answered was very responsive until he asked, “What kind of car do you have?”
“To Jaguar,” I confessed.
“Oh,” he said, his voice growing more recessive, “that’s the only car we don’t take.”
So I filled the shamefully rejected beast’s radiator with fresh water and took it to the nearest American car dealer, thinking I’d never buy another import. Fortunately, I got there before things started to steam up and managed to make a halfway decent deal.
I left in a new American car. While it didn’t turn out to be a flawless mechanical achievement either, it was at least a hundred times better than the Jaguar.
Obviously this article strayed from the MGs, but the car was cut from the same sloppy cloth as the Jaguar. Both brands help explain why, in these elegantly robotic times of exact Japanese assembly, English cars now own even less of the road than Detroit ones.
