Motoring Goals with MG UK’s David Allison

Hi, I'm Alex, he's Jim, and this is the Charging Status EV Podcast.

How are you doing, Jim?

I'm good.

How are you?

Not too bad.

We've got an illustrious guest with us today.

We've got Mr David Allyson from MG.

David, you are correct me if I'm wrong, which I'm sure I am, head of product and planning.

Is that correct?

I'm correct, yes.

There we go.

One out of one.

What does that entail?

It is a very wide-ranging title to be perfectly honest, and I think that the best way I can

describe it is I am responsible for everything up to the point of when our cars effectively

reach the showrooms, so the specifications, the pricing, ultimately deciding what are the

right cars for us to bring into the market, I suppose is probably where we would start.

I also have responsibility for vehicle ordering, supply, onward delivery and distribution in

the UK, and I also do all the tactical campaigns in my spare time as well.

But you've got bags of that, I know.

A little dickie bird tells me you're also a fan of grass-roots football.

That is true.

I am a season ticket holder at the National League North Champions, Bradley Town FC, so

we're now starting our campaign in the National League.

Two games in, one win, one defeat, so if I look forward to tomorrow's home game against

Rochdale.

Fantastic.

Sounds good.

I'm an Everton fan, so you're probably used to a higher standard of football than I am

as an Everton fan, but it must be nice to see the game without the kind of negative

trappings of cash and actually just people enjoying football.

I think whatever level of football you follow, there's always an element of how much of an

impact finances actually make, and it's no different than on the league, but it's certainly

for me a much more enjoyable way of enjoying football, even going down to the way that

the players interact with the supporters and how the opposition supporters interact

with each other, which is different than we expected in the more professional element

of the game.

Good stuff.

So I think, like you're talking about the cars that have come to UK, I've just had

the S5 in for a new in the last sort of week, 10 days, and one of the things that

struck me about that is it seems fairly well suited to UK roads, and we've got

physical controls again, which is something that all of us, boring car review is

bleat on about all the time, is that we've gone too screen based with everything, and

it feels like people have been listening, and it's part of your role to kind of essentially

kind of lobby MG over in China to make some adjustments for UK or those kind of

adjustments done here, or is it just a happy accident that we've got cars that

feel like they're fairly well suited to our road?

It's very much the former.

I think the first point I would make is that MG is now solved.

It's probably over 115 countries around the world.

I mean, the brand is far bigger and far more successful than it's ever

been in its 101 year history now, but the UK is the biggest global

export market for MG.

It's the second biggest market overall behind China, but China market is 24 million

cars, so it's fairly large.

And because it is the spiritual home of the brand, we do have quite a lot of

influence in what goes on.

That's helped by the fact that we have the design studio here in the UK, which is

upstairs.

It's the floor above from where I'm sitting in our head office in London.

And then we still have an engineering facility at Longridge, and those guys

do an incredible amount of work honing the vehicles to ensure that they

are more suited, if you like, to the UK and European roads, which are very,

very different than what we see in China.

But the point you make about physical controls is very much a direct feedback

following previous cars that we've introduced.

So with the MTS5, we felt that we perhaps have gone up a little bit

too screen heavy on some of the previous cars that we launched.

We obviously read lots and lots of reviews, not just our own cars, but other

competitors' cars as well.

And we felt that it would be appropriate to look at, I suppose,

going back a step in some ways.

So there are physical controls for the audio, physical controls for the HVAC.

And it makes an enormous amount of difference.

And those are things that we'll see more of on cars in the future.

And just take a little step back, like all three of us,

well, me and Jim, we're massively into cars because we review

cars on a daily basis, a weekly basis and that sort of thing.

What's kind of your background?

How did you sort of get into working for MG in the UK?

Be quite interested to hear about that.

Well, I've only ever worked in the motor industry.

So on September the 1st, which is just over a week away,

it'll be my 20th, well, it will be 2025, so it'll be 26 years

to the base since I started in the motor industry.

I've always been, always been into cars.

My dad was was in the motor industry,

doing cars and then in trucks for all of his career.

So it was the only thing I was ever really going to do.

But my roles, I've kind of had opportunities

on both sides of the fence.

So I started off in retail, so I started off working in dealerships.

So my very, very first job in a dealership was answering phones

in the service department and doing service bookings

and did lots and lots of roles, mainly in showrooms, selling cars,

which I think if anyone is ever going to work in this industry,

you can't really have a better experience

than doing it at the sharp end, so to speak.

But, but, laterally, more involved in the OEM side of things,

the manufacturing side of things.

So prior to coming into MG, which again,

it's nearly my fifth year anniversary,

so I started in September 2020.

Previous to that was at 10 years at Highamdi,

where I did various roles across planning,

across product and head of sales operations as well.

So to really, I suppose, my roles here at MG

are almost a combination of the three major jobs

that I did at Highamdi, but yeah,

they're entirely motor trade based.

I will only ever work in the motor trade

to see anything I'm interested in.

And to be honest, I really wouldn't want to do anything else.

Fair enough, yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

I come from a completely different background.

I've been doing this for like four years or something now,

but I come from a very sort of corporate background.

And I'm now in that boat where I think,

yeah, I'd never do anything else.

And Alex has one foot in each,

but it's interesting because all these people

from different backgrounds sort of come together

and at heart we're all car people,

so we all kind of speak the same language

and yeah, I just think it's the most exciting time

to be involved in doing what we're doing.

I mean, you've got the kind of EV haters,

the fossil fuel haters, these full-blooded arguments

that go on between everyone,

but I just think that we haven't seen this

kind of change in the industry since

the horse and cart sort of moved on.

And it's a great time to be here.

And I think MG is a really interesting one

because a lot of people consider,

I think if you stopped a lot of people in the street

and said, what's MG?

They'd probably say it's an EV brand.

And I think that's testament to the massive success

you've had in the EV space.

And you certainly haven't had probably some of the issues

with the mandate that some of the other brands have,

but obviously you do everything.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I think we probably re-established ourselves more

with the advent of EVs

because MG wanted, had been acquired by PsycMotor

and started selling cars again in the UK.

We'd do anything, but probably a dozen years or so

until the first generation ZSCV came out in 2019.

And that's when EVs were really kind of starting to wake up.

The market share of an EV in 2019 was still probably

only one or two percent, it was microscopic.

And at that point, there really wasn't an awful lot out there

that was affordable.

It was very much the domain of the earlier adopters,

the ones that had significant amounts of money,

the ability to charge at home

and all that kind of good stuff.

But ZSCV came along at a point where, you know,

EV car grants were A there and B quite generous.

And it meant that people that wanted something

could actually have thought it.

So that was probably the car from an EV point of view

that I suppose made people wake up to the fact

that MG was here and it actually had

a credible product to offer.

And I think, again, up to that point,

it probably didn't across any individual power train.

And then it started to gather momentum more

with the MG5, which was one of the very few

and still one of the very few EV state cars

that was available.

The second generation ZSCV that came along,

but the thing that really changed,

it was a course MG4, which came out in 2022,

towards the end of 2022, in fact,

almost exactly three years ago.

And we're now looking at probably 45, 46,000 cars

on the roads later.

It's been an absolutely phenomenal success story

in this market.

And yeah, that's probably been the car

without a shadow of a doubt that really reestablished us.

And certainly a car that nobody really saw coming.

So yeah, that's very, very briefly the synopsis

that's kind of close to the point of where we are today.

Yeah.

And I think what the MG4 did was probably draw a little line

under the fact that you asked the MG

because you had something that was actually

handled really well.

And it was a bit more fun at the time

than a lot of the other cars sort of in that,

certainly around that price point,

there were lots of good, sensible EVs,

but it sort of had a bit of a smirk and said,

come on then, that gives a push on the B roads

and things rather than just,

I'm really fast in a straight line.

And obviously that continued with the Cyborster,

which I'm guessing you were part of the reason

we got the Cyborster, were you?

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, Cyborster was a product

that actually started here, you know, in London

as a bit of a kind of after-hours project, if you like,

up in the design studio and go way back

with the 2017, 2018.

And those guys, as an advance design studio,

so very much looking into the future,

very much looking at the future trends, you know,

what is the market going to be wanting in five, 10 years time

as opposed to the next couple of years?

But they were really keen on developing something

as part of the 100 year anniversary,

which was over 2020, 2020 and 2024.

So, you know, they were already looking five or six years ahead

and saying, what could we do to mark that?

Of course, being British, you know, being part of the UK,

their view was they really wanted to do something sporty,

something convertible.

And it was always considered as an electric car,

you know, there was never a case of saying,

well, let's develop something, let's take a VA

in front of it, it was like, no,

the EV is actually the most important part

of the project and the platform

and the way that the weight distribution works,

actually, it suits a convertible really, really well.

So, their ambition, if you like,

was really important in order to get this project

off the ground.

And it took a long time for it to actually happen

because of course you had COVID right in the middle of it.

Probably in all honesty, it was like a lot of the cars,

they were probably delayed by a good year or 18 months

just purely because of the pandemic.

And a lot of cars probably never even saw the light of day

because of all of the pain and suffering

that companies had to go through during the pandemic.

It was probably a case of in many circumstances,

well, let's just strike that one off

or cross that one off because we can't afford to do it

because of this, that and the other.

But luckily, we were able to keep that project going

and it was from memory, the Shanghai Motor Show of 2021

where the chairman at the time saw what was at that point,

the concept and effectively said, let's do it.

It was very much a case of that.

And then by 2024, I think maybe on now, yeah,

it would have been 2023 where the first,

the car was first shown,

so we first showed the car at Goodwood in 2023.

And then, yeah, we're pretty much a year on now

from when the first cars hit the road.

So it's been a long time to get it there,

but it's been an absolutely fascinating journey

in order to actually do something.

And something that was bringing in the visa market

is purely there for design

and purely there for driving pleasure.

It's something that I've never been involved in before.

I remember doing the media presentation

and it got about two thirds of the way through

before I even started talking about range

and battery capacity, no one really cared about it.

It was very much about,

this is a car that people want to buy

and people want to enjoy driving

and people want to enjoy looking at

and that's exactly what it does.

Yeah, which is a brilliant thing

and I've said it on other shows and stuff,

but keeping the car enthusiasts engaged

and not just us having a sea of things

that make great financial sense

and they're cheap to run or good for the environment

or whatever else.

Coming up with progressive stuff

that actually keeps car people engaged,

I think is very important.

And I think, I mean, we've seen it now

with the Renault 5.

There are lots of people that I'd never, ever have an EV

and they see images of that

and they're like, well, actually, that looks quite nice.

And I think that's the thing that will

allow more people to have pleasant conversations around

cars and fuel sources and things in future

rather than it being sort of us and them,

this kind of tribal mentality that happens at times

which upsets me greatly.

I like everything.

Sorry, there's no question there, it's just like

I've just gone off on one again as I do.

Alex, ask a question.

Yeah, based on the thing that Jim was saying a minute ago,

MG's got both, well, it's got hybrids, petrol cars and EVs.

How do you think that MG has sort of done better

than other brands in terms of that the ZEV mandate,

for example, because a lot of other brands

are struggling a little bit.

If you know what I mean, not riding it that well,

how do you think MG have navigated that?

Do you know what, it's actually quite interesting

because we've actually started to reduce

the proportion of EVs that we've been selling

as an overall mix of the cars that we have been selling

particularly because we've grown so much.

So if you looked at the last year

before the ZEV mandate came in,

our EV mix was 39%, but it was only 27% last year.

And again, it's because we've actually

got quite a broad church of powertrains that we offer.

So it's not just combustion engine, it's hybrid,

it's plug-in hybrid, and of course, EV as well.

And that's probably been one of the reasons

why we have enjoyed a lot of volume success

over the last three or four years.

It's because we do offer everything,

it's because we're not necessarily pigeonholed

for want of a better word in one particular powertrain,

whether or not it's just purely combustion engine

or whether or not it's just purely electric.

But of course, the other thing that sometimes

doesn't get missed as far as the ZEV mandate is concerned

is that there's lots of nuances to it.

So you don't necessarily have to achieve

the actual threshold of electric car volume

if you demonstrate a considerable improvement

in terms of your overall CO2 averages.

And that's really important for us

because one of the things that we did do

and one of the decisions that I was directly involved in

and we took probably two or three years ago now

was to jump directly from combustion engine to hybrid

and kind of miss out the mild hybrid bit in the middle.

And that's been really, really important.

So if you look at some of the cars

that we were selling even last year

and the cars that we're selling today,

the difference in terms of their CO2 performance is huge.

And that's really helped us

in terms of hitting our ZEV mandate target

without necessarily having to get

to the actual individual thresholds.

But because our MG3 hybrid, because our ZS hybrid,

because our HS hybrid, our HS plug-in hybrid

are miles better than their predecessors

because we've gone from combustion engine to hybrid,

it means that we don't necessarily have to achieve.

Of course, that's what we're aiming to do

but we don't necessarily have to achieve

the actual ZEV target in order to remain compliant.

And like that, I think that's,

it's one of the things that does get a little bit missed

because people are very, very focused on the industry,

must be at 24% last year,

must be at 28% this year, must be at 33% next year.

Actually, that's not the case if you can demonstrate

or if you're in the position like we are

to be able to demonstrate a considerable CO2

improvement based on your 20 to 21 feet average.

Yeah.

Can I, I've got a bone to pick, basically,

but it does lead on to a question.

I really liked the MG5.

Okay.

And it was the only affordable EV estate car, pretty much,

and you can't get one anymore.

As that ship sailed, does nobody buy estate cars anymore?

And the second part to this is at Geneva last year

where we saw some IM cars,

and we'll talk about IM in a sec,

we also had the MG7 and the MG9,

which I thought were pretty fab,

but, you know, big saloon cars.

Again, are we just not buying them in the UK

because everyone's giving us SUVs

and very few are giving us alternatives.

Yeah.

I think that there's all this talk,

isn't there, about, you know,

people don't want to buy manual cars anymore,

or people don't want to buy convertibles anymore,

which to some extent is true,

but to a large extent isn't,

because not many people make manual cars anymore,

and very, very few manufacturers

actually make convertibles anymore.

So ultimately, I suppose,

what people can choose is ultimately dictated by,

by what's on offer.

Yeah.

And because so much of the combustion engine

in space is now directed towards hybrids,

for all the reasons I was talking about just now,

from a CO2 point of view,

then they are automatic transmissions.

They can't be manual transmissions by definition.

And lots and lots of segments

have just kind of disappeared.

If you think about how many, you know,

convertibles you were able to get

sort of 15, 20 years ago,

when we went through that period

where sort of hard to top convertibles,

so per-show 308 cc's and focus cc's and stuff like that,

just didn't exist any up to that day.

Why that is, I actually have no idea,

but going back to the state car thing,

I think when it was,

when it was decided,

and this was before my time to be fair,

that something like an MG5 could work in this market,

it was again, because there was so little of anything

that you could buy in that EV space that was affordable

and within the vast sort of pantheon

of sites product portfolio,

it was a case of, right, this car could actually work.

You know, you go to China,

they're absolutely everywhere, those types of cars,

and they did a combustion engine version as well.

And I think that when we were selling it

and selling it really successfully,

our view was, do you know what?

Maybe there is room in the market for a state electric car,

which was fine until MG4 came out.

And when MG4 came out and it was more efficient,

it was cheaper, it was much better to drive,

not the MG5 was a good to drive, it was absolutely fine.

To some extent, people stopped buying it

because it really wasn't about,

it was more about affordability

than the fact that it was in the state car.

That's really what it came down to.

So I think if we were to say, right, clean sheet of paper,

what is the kind of, the next two or three cars

that we might be looking at or gaps in the market

or niches that we don't currently occupy?

I'm sorry to say,

the state car probably wouldn't be in there.

Sure, yeah.

Okay, I'm not surprised.

But it is, yeah, I always have these kind of thoughts.

Does nobody buy this anymore

because there aren't any to buy

because it does make it difficult.

But then you wonder why there aren't any to buy,

perhaps nobody bought the ones that were available to buy.

But yeah, okay.

And the big saloons, I guess,

I know like the MG7, MG9 are probably purely

for Chinese market, I guess.

And again, is that,

do we see any future for those kind of vehicles in the UK?

No.

I mean, I drove an MG7 in China,

two-litre turbo, nine-speed automatic, lovely,

made a great noise, completely infractical

and would never sell,

even though it's lovely to drive

and really lovely to look at,

but nobody would buy it, so it doesn't work out.

But they will buy an IM.

Well, we hope so.

We hope so, yeah, because why would we be doing that?

We weren't confident that the people were gonna buy it.

And the difference purely comes down to the power trade.

You know, it is strange, isn't it?

How, and we've found this when I was at Highland,

how much EV democratizes brand,

you know, the kind of very traditional market

that was entirely dominated by German brands.

You know, the reason why Ford stopped doing them on the AIs

and Foxhall stopped doing insignias

was because people just bought three-series

and A4s and C-classes.

But all of a sudden, EV comes along

and people I think are more willing to try different brands

and they're willing to accept unfamiliar brands as well

when it comes to needs of technology.

And that's a real big departure

for what is traditionally quite a,

well, quite a traditional industry, isn't it?

And this is definitely where, you know,

lots of new brands coming into this market

have been able to take advantage of those sort of trends

or those mentalities, if you like.

But that's quite willing to accept spending,

you know, 30, 40, 50, 60,000 pounds, whatever it might be,

on something that might not necessarily

have a German badge on the front of it.

Yeah, we first saw, I am a good word,

which was last month, wasn't it?

It was.

Yeah, time goes very quickly at the moment.

We saw your presentation.

I remember it well.

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember it well.

Yeah, I spent a good amount of time on the MG stand

just filming bits and pieces

and the amount of interest in those two cars was immense.

Just the people flocking, people looking inside it.

I could barely get anywhere near it, to be honest,

at one point.

So what's been the reaction to that new,

those two new cars?

Because it's kind, it is a sub-brand in China,

but it's kind of sort of a different model line-up

in the UK, isn't it?

It's a little bit different.

Yeah.

So you're quite right.

It's a sub-brand in China,

but where it's being sold internationally,

it's being sold through the established MG network,

which is far bigger and far more influential,

if you like, in some of those export markets.

The UK being a classic example.

And I suppose we felt that if we were gonna have

the best opportunity with it,

we've got a ready-made dealer network of 155 dealers

that are really good at selling electric cars.

And it's an area of the market

that we don't currently operate in.

No one that's gonna buy an MG IM,

I think we'd probably consider buying an MG4,

maybe they would, but they probably don't.

So we're not really trading on anyone's toes.

And we're giving ourselves an ideal network,

like a really, really amazing opportunity

to go into a different space and say,

here is an amazing car, a five-meter car,

a 4.9-meter car with huge amounts of power,

amazing levels of technology for what is still

in the true MG fashion,

an extremely good value-for-money opportunity.

So I think that the reaction, Alex,

that you saw was something that very much we saw as well.

Nobody really saw it coming.

We're quite good at keeping things a secret

and doing things very much at the last minute.

And taking people by surprise.

We did it with MG4,

and Cybers are less so,

because obviously it was quite a long gestation

in terms of bringing the car out.

But I think with this product,

it's like, I would say it's really taken

lots and lots of people by surprise.

Within a couple of weeks,

people will be able to start seeing them in showrooms

because we're getting pretty close now

to starting being able to deliver them.

Nice. Great.

I think your fleet sales guys,

people selling into fleet must be absolutely

licking their lips at the moment

because it just feels like the thing

they've been waiting for has just arrived.

Yeah. I mean, we are extraordinarily good

at selling electric cars to private retail customers.

In fact, outside of Tesla,

we've sold more electric cars to private retail customers

than any brand since 2019.

So we occupy this space that's kind of,

I don't know, 20,000 to 30,000 pounds.

We have that to ourselves, actually,

for probably a couple of years over the last,

certainly over the last 12 to 18 months,

everyone has been coming into that space.

So it's become harder without shadow of a doubt.

The competition is getting better and more numerous

in terms of the choice of great consumers.

So it makes even more sense to my mind

that we branch out into an era

of the marketplace that we're currently not represented in

and actually aren't particularly good at selling into it

because the corporate customer that buys a car

through salary sacrifice,

buys a car through a benefit and kind

and can actually have access

to some pretty serious pieces of machinery

but not a huge amount of money

in terms of certainly, in terms of a monthly tax bill.

So with this kind of car,

this gives us an opportunity to compete with the cars

which occupy those price points

and offers the same levels of technology.

Yeah, it looks very, very interesting.

I've reserved a space on the drive for one of those.

So yeah, let Richard know that I need to be near the top

of the list, please.

Don't worry, there's not a lot to demand out there, Jim,

but I'm sure we'll have actual funds for you.

Yeah, yeah, no, I can only imagine, I can only imagine.

Well, I think we've held you for long enough

and it's time for you to take your freedom

but thanks very much for joining us, David.

It's an absolute pleasure.

You're welcome.

Actually, one final thing.

When we first met,

it was over something that looked very much like a cyber stir

but didn't necessarily have a soft top.

What would have happened then?

That may have been a roadster.

Possibly.

And lying me further, go on, look after him.

It was, so it was in December,

somewhere off the A34, other people were there.

It's not sinister as it may sound.

And I think he had a cyber stir and a roadster

and I think the roadster was the only one in the UK.

They basically very much had the look of a hard top cyber stir.

OK, so we're talking about the cyber GTS, I think, aren't we?

The cyber GTS, there we go.

Yes, so that is something that we showed

at last year's Goodwoods and it's actually downstairs.

It's in the showroom in our London head office

alongside the other car that we had at Goodwood last year,

which was the EX-E181, which was the homage to the land speed

record cars of the 1950s that were driven by Phil Hill

and Sterling Moss, but yes, they are pretty spectacular

looking and certainly the cyber GTS was a car that captured

a lot of people's imagination when we showed it last year.

I think your question to me is probably going to be along the lines

of if and when or what, like when.

I wouldn't I wouldn't be so bold, but now you mentioned it.

You'll forgive me if my official call for answer is

that officially it's still a concept.

Yeah. And my my electric or petrol head

or whichever way you want to you want to look at it says,

would I love to do it? Absolutely.

I think it would be a fantastic addition to the range.

You look back in the history, the original MGB

was came out as a roadster to start off with,

and then it was joined by the hatchback or the coupé,

if you like, whichever way it is, you want to look at it.

Those types of cars, it's always the hard top

that outsells the convertible practicality reasons,

if nothing else, I think it would be great.

I think it would work really, really well.

But at the moment, I'm still waiting for the final confirmation

as to when we do it or if we do it.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great looking thing.

And it's always kind of stuck in my mind.

So, yeah, I'd be very interested to see one of those on the road.

Right, we are going to wrap it up this time.

Alex, take his help.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much for your time, David.

It's been really, really good to chat to you

and learn about your history and what you're doing as well.

And obviously, I am stuff that's coming pretty soon.

Where can people find more about you

if you've got some online presence?

Well, you'll find my name

and lots of quotations pretty much everywhere, really.

So I quite often have a look at myself.

But yeah, I have a LinkedIn page.

If anyone wants to let me up on LinkedIn.

And in most recent editions of your popular automated publications,

you'll find many, many quotes from me

or interviews and stuff like that.

So I'm out there somewhere.

Very good.

Yeah, you can find this podcast in video on YouTube,

in audio on Spotify and Apple podcast and that sort of stuff there.

Where can people find you online, Jim?

Notaguru.co.uk or my website.

My that is my website, my YouTube channel,

which is definitely not a guru.

Sweet.

You can find my website, the interface.uk

and all my car reviews over on YouTube, the interface cars.

Again, thank you so much, David, for your time.

And we'll see you again next week.

You're welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

Motoring Goals with MG UK’s David Allison

Audi S5

5 Renault 5

MG3

7 Mg7

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