MG: from Morris Garages sideline to SAIC-owned badge

MG began life not as a carmaker but as a showroom sideline. In the early 1920s Cecil Kimber, manager of William Morris's Morris Garages retail business in Oxford, boosted sales by reworking standard Morris models into sportier specials, and the octagon badge was registered as a trademark in May 1924. A standalone M.G. Car Company was incorporated in July 1930, by which point output had settled in Abingdon, near Oxford.

Ownership churn defined the decades that followed. Morris sold the firm into his own Morris Motors group in 1935; the 1952 merger of Morris and Austin created BMC, which later became British Motor Holdings and then British Leyland. Under BL, MG sat in the volume-oriented Austin-Morris division, got little investment beyond a V8 MGB, and lost its Abingdon home in October 1980 — after which the badge mainly appeared on hot versions of Austin Rover's Metro, Maestro and Montego.

The modern chapter is Chinese. After MG Rover slid into receivership in 2005, Nanjing Automobile bought the marque, and Nanjing's 2007 merger into SAIC Motor delivered MG to its current owner; production restarted in China that same year. The MG6, launched in the UK in June 2011, was the brand's first all-new British-market model in 16 years, and by 2022 MG had become the fastest-growing car brand in the United Kingdom.