Well, it certainly set some kind of sales record. And not one that any manufacturer would want, the MG XPower SV finding precisely no buyers during the time that it was on sale with its maker. Admittedly that wasn’t long, the SV enjoying little more than a troubled year in the retail sun, but this dismal record is up there with Renault’s chilling discovery that it had not made a single sale on the debut day of its ground-breaking 1984 Espace.
It had taken nine years of tortured journeying from genesis to the appearance of the in your face, chest and groin MG XPower SV at the 2002 Birmingham motor show, its embryo spawned in Italy from thoughts triggered by the success of a British sports car. Which was not an MG. If you think that sounds mildly complicated, this paragraph is a mere taster.
We start with the De Tomaso Bigua, a 1996 sports car concept born out of a series of mid-1990s trips to the UK made by Maserati’s then technical director Giordano Casarini, who had noticed TVR’s Griffith on his travels, not only for its handsome style and clever multi-position roof, but also its growing popularity. He reckoned a Modena cooked version of the same recipe could be a winner. Around the same time, small-scale auto tycoon Alessandro De Tomaso, a good friend of Casarini, had suffered a stroke and asked what direction he should take his company in. Casarini suggested his Italian Griffith idea, the 1996 Bigua concept the first fruit of this thought train.
