MG ZT 190 | Shed of the Week
Good Lord - a Shed of the Year 2025 contender right out of the gate! With one minor drawback...
They don’t do New Year’s resolutions in the Shed household. They do amnesties. The deal is that Mrs Shed doesn’t touch Shed with her frying pan as long as Shed doesn’t touch, set eyes on, mention in passing, or accidentally think about the postmistress.
Last year Shed managed three headache-free days before the unpapered walls of the family residence once more resonated to the dolorous clang of aluminium on cranium. Mrs Shed’s choice of lightweight non-stick cookware for this job isn’t because she’s getting soft in her old age, by the way: it’s because it’s a lot harder to get Shed’s Brylcreem off her cast iron skillet. In contrast, Shed’s first selection of 2025 – a late, low-mileage, facelift MG ZT+ with a 190hp V6 engine, a manual gearbox and what he thinks might be Firefrost Red paintwork – looks like it would be a pleasure to clean.
You could argue, and maybe some will, that by the time MG Rover went into administration in 2005 it was producing some pretty good cars. Not everybody liked the 2004-05 facelift models, but if you could get past that the ZT (which appeared in MG brochures from 2001 right up to that fateful day in the spring of 2005) was a very capable machine with a willing chassis and a ride quality that was more than decent, if not quite as plush as the Rover 75’s.
You had to stir the motor up to 6,500rpm to attain max power, a tuneful if not especially economical process that could drop the mpg down from 29mpg combined to somewhere in the teens. Maximum torque of 181lb ft came in at 4,000rpm, the 0-60 was 7.7 seconds and the top whack was 141mph. Unless they’ve changed it since Shed pinned the VED table up on his wall, which is entirely possible, the CO2 emissions figure of 235g/km puts it into the mystery K* £415 tax bracket.
The ‘+’ part of the name referred to the Plus pack which was the only official non-standard spec option for the ZT. On facelift cars like our Shed that pack added dual-zone climate, rear passenger vents, electric rear windows, a CR80 radio cassette and a six-CD multichanger. In reality, the Monogram optioning scheme meant you could have more or less anything put onto your ZT at the ordering stage. Well, within reason anyway.
After the death of the firm, most of the last Rover 75s and MG ZTs languished unbought and very much unloved for a good while. Fears about service and parts backup saw unused auction disposal cars going for not much more than SOTW’s £2,000 limit. This particular ZT looks like it sat around in the automotive equivalent of the dog pound for an unfeasibly long time as its first registration didn’t take place until October 2006. It is in Northern Ireland though, a few miles east of Belfast, and Shed has no clue as to how their registration system operated.
What he does know is that MOT info for cars tested in Northern Ireland is only available from 2017 on, and even for those years the detail is not published online. We can see however that this ZT got a clean pass on its latest test in September. It needed a second go, admittedly, but relying only on his nose – which despite being bulbous and warty can usually be relied upon to sniff out a wrong ‘un – Shed reckons that this three-owner 72,000-mile car with a folder-load of receipts and an MGOC membership doc in the glovebox has a pleasantly fragrant virtual smell.
We’re told that the timing belt and water pump have already been replaced. We’re not told when, but the official schedule for that work is six years/90,000 miles. Some say that the belts will last for far longer than that if you enjoy the thrill of the unknown. Others, like Haynes, aren’t so trusting and say you should change them at 45,000 miles. One of the car’s owners has evidently taken the safer line.
Shed also knows that if you fancy bringing this car over east side of the Irish Sea there’s a mess of politics involved. Five years ago Northern Ireland left the EU with the rest of the UK, sort of. This eventually led to the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Windsor Framework and – oh, look, a squirrel! Shed was brought up never to talk about sex, religion or politics unless it helped him in some way so you’ll need to look elsewhere for what it all means. In short, though there’ll be lots of bits of paper to be found and Shed has got an uneasy feeling that there might be VAT and customs duties to be paid on top of the cost of going over to Belfast and then putting the MG onto the ferry. All those shenanigans would take it well beyond our £2k upper limit, but of course none of that applies if you live in NI and you like the look of it. If that’s you, athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh and Shed’s is a large one.
Take no heed of Shed's ramblings about customs and the NI protocol, we're in the UK. Drive the car onto a ferry, drive it off again (only after reaching the other side of course) register it to your home address and tax it, simple.
If i had a spare £2k just now I'd buy this myself.
You even get to keep the "cherished" plate, I believe.
As point out in the comments too, it's a UK car - UK being GB and NI, so it's already a UK car. None of that VAT waffle, just a ferry - as long as you can find one that's running.
Oddly, along with a low mileage e46 330d Touring and a Discovery 4, the MG is one of the many cars I've had that I miss the most.
I then had a 'brain-burp' and bought a Vauxhall Vectra - aagh!! worst car I ever had.....
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