How to give Chinese tech a British accent

[SINGAPORE] Carl Gotham has one of the trickiest jobs in the motoring world. As the advanced design director at SAIC Design’s London studio, Gotham has to steer MG into the electric age while keeping one eye firmly on the rear-view mirror, where the venerable brand’s petrol-soaked heritage lurks.

While MG’s roots are unmistakably British, the brand is now wholly owned by SAIC (Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation), China’s biggest state-owned carmaker. Does that mean a modern MG is simply a Chinese electric vehicle in British tailoring? Gotham doesn’t see it that way. “We are obviously a Chinese-owned brand, and that itself does offer advantages. We’re seeing a shift in technology, and China are the leaders in that, so it’s quite a special combination to have this heritage and all to tap into, but also with this very forward-facing sort of side of the business,” he told The Business Times.

SAIC’s core design team sits in Shanghai, but the company maintains satellite studios that shape the cars in subtle but meaningful ways, and to keep a global perspective on things. It opened a design office in Tokyo recently to complement the London team that Gotham heads, for instance. “Our role is sort of as an outpost, to form some perspective on the world and what’s happening next, and see where trends are going,” he said. “Today’s MG is definitely much more of an international brand, so bringing that kind of international perspective is important for what we do.”

That broad thinking helped birth the Cyberster, the two-seat electric roadster that started as a flight of fancy in 2018 and went on to become a halo car for the brand. “The Cyberster obviously is quite emotive and it’s quite a refined sports car,” he said. “It’s not a deliberately overtly electric looking design, and that’s kind of filtering down through the range.”

The new MGS5, the compact sport utility vehicle MG launched in Singapore on Apr 9 to take on the wildly popular BYD Atto 3, borrows from the classically voluptuous Cyberster in some ways. Compared to the smaller MG4, which looks playful and sharp, the MGS5 is more toned down. “It’s just a bit more mature, a little bit more serious,” Gotham said. “It still drives very well because it’s built on the same platform. It’s something that’s distinct enough without being too polarising.”

If it looks understated, that’s entirely by design, so to speak. “It’s quite easy to do something outlandish and a little bit crazy, but it might peak and drop off very quickly,” Gotham said. “By being a little bit more restrained and a bit more controlled, we make sure the product can last a bit longer and have a broader appeal.”

As for the future, MG is launching five new models within the next couple of years, and each one will be designed to feel distinct but part of a coherent family, Gotham said.

To help get there, SAIC brought in a big gun. Jozef Kaban, the Slovakian designer who worked on the iconic Bugatti Veyron when he was just 25, and later led design for Rolls-Royce, BMW, Skoda, Audi and Volkswagen, joined the Chinese giant as global design vice-president in April 2024.

The London design team is buzzing, Gotham said. “We’ve got some good cars now, a great foundation for us to now take that next step, to really up the dial on where we really think the full potential of the brand is,” he said.

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But heritage still weighs heavily on Gotham. “It’s staring at me now. It’s giving me some heat and some pressure,” he said, glancing at MG’s familiar octagonal crest. “It’s a huge responsibility, obviously, because MG’s got such a massive fan base. In the UK, every classic car show you go to, there’s MG, so it’s still very much a brand that is still active and alive in its old format and there’s a big community.”

Still, one gets the sense that Gotham relishes getting to write new chapters in the British brand’s story. “Clearly the world’s different from 60 years ago, but there are some things about the brand that are still relevant today, like the fact that MG wasn’t an elitist brand. The rich and famous drove the cars,” he said. “But so did my mother-in-law when she was in her early 20s.”