LONDON -- MG gave its Cyberster all-electric roadster ‘scissor’ doors that open upward because it needed visual drama to stand out in the increasingly competitive Chinese market, said Carl Gotham, the brand’s head of advanced design.
The costs to engineer scissor doors have restricted their use to ultraluxury sports cars, but they are becoming more common on more affordable Chinese electric cars, such as the Aion Hyper GT midsize sedan, a Tesla Model 3 rival.
“You have got to take in context what you are seeing coming to China and Shanghai. There is a fight for attention,” said Gotham, head of MG’s advanced design studio in London and creator of the Cyberster.
“You need to turn up with some drama. It’s got to be 110 percent,” Gotham told Automotive News Europe at the sidelines of the Shanghai auto show.
The China-built Cyberster is expected to arrive for sale in the UK and mainland Europe in the summer of 2024, MG said. It was revealed at the Shanghai show in April in a video on the MG stand.
The roadster uses a version of the MG’s new MSP electric platform that underpins the MG4 electric hatchback available in Europe.
While some automakers give their battery-electric cars a futuristic design, MG took a different approach, seeking to strike a balance between modernity and the brand’s sporting past, Gotham said.
“It was tempting to go fully EV for the look for the car,” he said. “But we steered away from that and decided to go for ‘designers’ emotive’ rather than something that feels like a machine.”