Launching a new EV is hard. Launching one that steals faces? Hardest.
MG learned this the painful way last June.
Chen Cui leads MG brand ops. He sat down on June 29 to sell the MG07, their new fastback sedan. The plan was simple: explain the style. The reality was chaos. Viewers didn’t care about his talking points. They saw a Porsche Taycan. Or a Xiaomi SU7. Comments poured in calling it a copycat. Chen insisted they “plagiarized a single detail.” He got upset. He ended the stream early.
Awkward.
Chen tried again offline. At a press briefing, he spun it differently. He said the car copied MG. Not Porsche. Sina reported that Chen pointed to the 1965 MGT fastback as the real ancestor. The idea? This sedan is a modern version of their own history. Decades in the making.
I look at the MG07 and I see very little MGT. I see drag coefficients.
Modern cars are just slippery tubes. Whether you burn gas or juice electricity, physics demands efficiency. Low nose. Smooth sides. Door handles that vanish. Roofs that slope like a slide. Tapered tails. Everyone wants the same aerodynamic stats. There isn’t enough air left to be unique.
But let’s be fair.
The headlights do look like Porsche’s. Some wheels feel borrowed. Park the MG07 next to a Xiaomi SU7—which loves the Taycan—and the family resemblance is undeniable. Did MG copy? Maybe not. Does it look derivative? Yes. Is it ugly? No. But it has no soul of its own.
This is the EV crisis.
Physics pushes everyone to the same shape. A slip of sheet metal becomes the universal car. The hard part now isn’t making it fast or efficient. It’s making it you.
MG is trying to convince us theirs is a family heirloom. It feels more like a rental.
