Just Remember, If You Ever Feel Like An Idiot, There Are People Out There Who Paid $50k+ For One Of These Things

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

There is a growing sense of futility washing over our cosmopolitan desert republic this week as the cost of everything keeps going up and the only people who can help us largely aren't.

That with wages being a stagnant as they are, the rising costs are cutting into what little people had left. Life has fast become one battle after another for millions. A string of things people don't want to do, but have to do in order to survive. But people are right in saying this is currently one of the best, if not the best place to be right now. People can be right and wrong at the same time.

As things get harder, times get tougher, one thing that can provide a mild, temporary sense of spiritual comfort, like a good honk on the green whistle does after you've dislocated an ankle, is that there are people walking among us who have paid over $50,000 for a MGU9.

It is the size of a good off-shore fishing boat. Something like an entry-level Grady White centre console or something. At 5.5m long, it's essentially an 18-foot Fisherman 180 on 18-inch Chinesium alloy wheels. It weights 2500kg. Yes. And it's tide-like performance is thanks to a 2.5L 4-cylinder diesel engine that works harder than the Temu fulfilment team. If anyone has ever owned a massively under-powered car, as a hot-headed young man, you will know that equals high fuel billls.

Once upon a time, I owned a 2003 Rover CityRover. A sort of cultural cousin to the new range of MSG-flavoured MGs.

The CityRover was Rover's last-ditch attempt to field a small city car before the whole house of cards came down. It was a rebadged Tata Indica, an Indian-built hatchback that Rover slapped its own grille and badges on and had the nerve to sell in British showrooms at near-Fiesta prices, which I obviously didn't see a problem with. The Indica itself was a perfectly decent car for the Indian market. It was a motorbike with doors and a windscreen. The problem was that Rover charged European money for it while delivering absolutely nothing to justify the premium, not the interior, not the refinement, not the ride, not even a straight face when pitching it to dealers. The sole powertrain on offer was a 1.4 litre petrol unit that had 75hp, they must have been Shetlands. Which sounds acceptable until you actually drove the thing and discovered it needed to be wrung out completely to keep up with traffic. I put 25 000 miles on that going up the M1 to Leeds from my gaff in West Ealing. One one trip, I would've lifted my foot from full, unabridged throttle maybe 3 times. That 1.4L of displacement had disappeared as much fuel as my boss's XJ6 did on the same trip. It was truly fucked, inside and out, when I sold it to a Polish plasterer for £200. Anyway, buyers were scarce. The car was quietly discontinued having shifted embarrassingly low numbers, leaving behind nothing but a lesson in corporate delusion. It now stands as one of the more humiliating entries in British automotive history, a badge-engineering exercise so transparent and so poorly executed that it seemed almost designed to accelerate the brand's inevitable collapse, which duly arrived in 2005. Rover deserved better than this. The CityRover was not better than this.

This is what the MGU9 is, in my mind. I look at it and see my CityRover, just the same as I often look in the mirror and see an idiot.

More to come.