Here we have a special car. This is a Nanjing MG TF roadster, seen in Beijing back in 2014. The poor car stood abandoned under trees, dirty and without license plates, with non-matching alloys and tires.
Happily it was red! The Nanjing MG TF was assembled for a very short while in China after Nanjing Auto bought the MG brand. It was basically CKD production, with 99% of the parts shipped in from the United Kingdom.
Production of the China-made MG TF started in late 2007 and lasted until early 2011, but numbers were very low, figured at less than a hundred cars a year, most of which went unsold. The TF was priced between 249.600 yuan and 265.800 yuan. Power came from the Rover K-series 1.8 4-cylinder with 135hp, mated to a five-speed manual or a CVT.
Nanjing Automotive bought the rights to the MG brand in 2005 and Nanjing Automotive was bought by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) in 2007. At the time SAIC already had the rights to the automobiles manufactured under the Rover brand, which continued in China as ‘Roewe‘. The purchase of Nanjing Automobile by SAIC thus brought, in a way, Rover and MG back together, and so they are until today.
TF badge on the left. Nanjing MG badge on the right. In 2007, the Chinese car market just wasn’t ready for a sporty two-seat roadster yet. Not much has changed thought! Even today small sportscars are a hard sell in China.
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