To put my own perspective on MG cars by actually mentioning the 2 other EVs I owned might help.
I had one of the first BMW i3s and in 3 years of ownership it had £12,000 of warranty work and had covered around 18K miles when I got shot of it. I had to get rid of it because some of the big ticket items that were due to go wrong had not gone wrong
yet. There was the charger rectifier fault and a range extender REME machine fault overdue. These faults to fix were months off the road and 4+6K to fix (+VAT) respectively. I selected another I 3 a later model 2017, drove to Bradford and around 30M from the garage finally saw the dreaded REME fault. We stopped for 30 minutes and had a cup of tea, fortunately when I went out the fault had cleared, but I went the rest of the way on battery only to try and help the Range extender fault pop up again. The dealer was looking over the car and fortunately no faults showed on the Dash. I had got rid of the Lemon back to a BMW dealer.
My 2017 i3 was absolutely fault free for 6 years. BUT, you
NEVER want to run a BMW i3 without an extended warranty. The warranty costs round £900 per year with an excess of around £250 or £400. The problem is with an i3 bit like Josh Fiddler (Cary on camping), the minimum charge for anything is £1000. In fact on my first i3 the garage stripped all the bolt receivers (clip on) and bolts on my engine cover and on one service presented me with a bill of £750+VAT (the only time I had seen a bill for less than £1K. 30 bolts and receivers at £20 each + £150 to replace them. Needless to say I refused to pay this as I hadn't damaged them and I didn't think it was reasonable the threads would all strip after the hatch had been removed 3 times at most, I also suggested they start them by hand rather than spin them in all the way with power tools.
The point of the story, first i3 = lemon of epic proportions, 2nd i3 = fault free.
I suspect it's the same with MG4 EVs. Sure mine had a fault with the charge controller and the software is so pants it's unbelievable. Designed by a bicycle riding Chinese person no doubt. With the software the main niggles are:
- It's hard to find stuff and some things are not explained well (e.g. Intelligent battery heating..never, ever turn it on)
- It won't stay with the last settings you used and you have to spend 3m setting it up before you drive off
- You can have speed limit control, which is great, but why oh why can't you have cruise control available at the same time
- It sometimes throws up an Autohold fault
- I can no longer find the intelligent battery heating option anywhere except the app since the last update
- No one gives you a list of what the updates are set to address
- If you have DAB radio on google maps/android auto gives no voice commands, although it does quiet down the radio when it would be doing so
To balance things out some software functions are good. Overall the MG4 is way better than the BMW I had even though I had the top spec World trim. The BMW was too clever and advanced for its own good. Special tyres, £1K if a dealer fitted, carbon fibre body, mag alloy underpinnings etc.. all to minimise power consumption per mile, which rarely topped out at 4.8 miles per kWh in perfect conditions at a
steady 50 mph. Do 60 mpg and it did a Monica Lewinski on your battery, draining it really fast. My Max range 125 ml in summer for a car that cost 42K then!
Compare that to my MG4 LR, cheaper for parts, cheaper to work on, no clever tyres or body tech and 5.4 miles per kWh at 60 mph. Range of almost 290 miles at 60 mph, costing £28,500 and servicing at 1/2 the price. So IMHO it's the better car.
That said, it's important to realise that EV's are all disposable cars, at around 10 years old they will be worthless and no one will ever put a new battery in them!
