Automotive Business Magazine – Q2 2026 – Digital edition - Magazine - Page 28
INT E RV I E W
MG
then clearly we'd have an issue. But we're
not.
“My biggest issue on sales at the
moment is that I can't get enough cars,
which is immensely frustrating, because
while we will exceed what we sold last
year, I will still miss my personal targets.
That's not because we haven't sold the
cars. It's because we haven't got them.”
Strategy changes
This is not to say that MG will just sit
around and let its dealers get on with
things. The company is making a series
of changes to support its retailer network
and the customer experience.
Pigounakis explains: “What we are
looking at is things like how we interact
with our dealers, how we communicate
with them.
“We're beefing up all our customer
services elements and parts supply, to
make sure that we are at the cutting
edge of OEMs when it comes to all the
other activities that support the sale and
onward ownership of motor cars.
“One thing that we learned in the last
five years was the impact of the car parc
in aftersales.
“For a year, the only business that
dealers were doing in aftersales for us
was PDIs for new cars, and preparing the
part exchanges against them to sell as
used cars. You’ve got a bit of warranty,
no routine servicing because they were
only a year old, no routine mechanical
work, because it was all covered under
warranty.”
MG found that warranty work on
its cars at dealerships was not being
prioritised, and has since fought for its
share of workshop space.
Pigounakis says: “When you're
working in a multi franchise environment,
as we all are nowadays, if your techs
are looking at doing a warranty job for
MG, or a nice full retail job for another
brand, guess what gets pushed to the
front.
“This is the first year where we've
actually got parity, in terms of vehicle
parc and the mix of business that's
going through a dealer workshop – like
warranty, PDI, retail work – with a longestablished legacy brand. It's made a
huge difference to us.
“We spent three years fighting for a
share of the voice in workshops, which
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Q1 2026
of course has an adverse impact on
customer experience as well, because the
customer doesn't care about why they're
not getting their car fixed as quickly as
they want to. They just know they're not
getting their car fixed as quickly as they
want to.”
Further influences on MG’s strategy
include wider concerns, including
that “we can't pretend there aren't
global warming issues that need to be
addressed.”
MG has, to this end, developed an
algorithm that tracks CO2 output in realtime, enabling it to see where it stands at
any point in the year.
This enables the company to implement
incentives and adjust vehicle ordering to
ensure compliance.
Pigounakis says: “It's like the
doomsday clock counting down towards
where we are with our CO2 content.
“If it's tracking to where we think it is
at the end of quarter one, fine. Halfway
through quarter two it might start
deviating, and we might start putting
incentive programmes in to address that.
“You get to quarter four, and you're
running out of time to address anything.
You might be looking at massive demo
programmes for dealers, self-registering
cars, lots of economically unsustainable
actions to make sure that we hit our
targets. Every manufacturer will be doing
the same. Everyone.
“It's also forced a lot of pressure on
some dealers. We haven't done this, but
if we talk to multi-franchise dealers, their
whole demo lineup is unused electric
cars, which have just been registered to
hit targets.”
Driving forward
At various points in history, MG has
exclusively sold two-seater sports cars.
Its legacy as a performance brand is
strong, yet it took SAIC Motor years to
make a performance variant of any
modern MG.
The MG4 EV revived the XPower
nameplate, used previously on the SV. It
was a V8-powered, carbon fibre sports
car made in the mid-2000s, and is
probably the craziest car to ever wear an
MG badge. A few years ago, MG released
the Cyberster, a return to the sports car
segment that had defined the brand
for decades.
