Top Gear Magazine Subscription – 5 issues for £5 It's the electric mopeds that want you dead. They bolt from pedestrian walkways, arbitrarily pelt across traffic lights, over and undertake in vicious little chattering packs. Some have metre wide boxes strapped to the back, delivering items too big for a top box and too heavy for their own good. One was carrying a small coppice of 2.5m lengths of bamboo strapped to the side, like some lumberjack knight ready to lance the unwary. Even for cars, rights of way are fickle, vague and open to interpretation. And beyond all reasonable expectation... it kind of works. But for a time dilated foreigner, downtown Shanghai in rush hour is still a throb of culture shock. It doesn’t help that I’m in an MG Cyberster, the kind of two-seat convertible sports car that isn’t hugely common in Shanghai, or China in general, and you’ve never known fear until you’ve had a near disastrous head-on collision with a man in an extended wheelbase Passat who then points at the car and gives you a calm wave. The six hours I spent getting a – very – temporary driving licence was pointless. I’d have been better going straight to therapy. Or possibly basic training. Advertisement - Page continues below But here we are in MG’s little disruptor, and it feels good. An electric two-seat convertible sports car out and about way in advance of offerings like Porsche’s EV Boxster or Polestar’s 6, never mind the Tesla Roadster. A car that, at a starting price of around £50k in the UK, will be multiples cheaper than any of them. First impressions? It’s comfy. It rides well. The interior quality is right up there and it has properly amazing graphics on the screens. The roof is super fast and laughably one touch simple. This is no joke, no matter how many people want it to be. Before long, we end up in a little place called Thames Town in the Songjiang district about 20 miles from the centre of Shanghai. Possibly the weirdest place to take a new pseudo British MG-branded two seater, because it’s an insane photocopy of a UK market town. The church is copied from Christ Church Clifton near Bristol, the fish and chip shop is a clone from one in Lyme Regis in Dorset, and the pub from somewhere in Chester. Really. There are red phone boxes, cobbled streets, faux Tudor stapled to the view. It’s a Disney version of Stevenage. You might like Photography: Jonny Fleetwood You’d think it would work... MG in the square, heavy on the Hànzì Mandarin signage. A nod to the classic MGB heritage, with a little bit of the national colour of the Chinese owner SAIC. But it doesn’t. Thames Town feels like a theme park, and the Cyberster doesn’t feel much like an MGB. Eventually, it shreds your nerves, so we identify a vague squiggle on the map down by Ningbo, and head out to the mountains to do some proper testing. Testing with corners, and far fewer cameras – of which there are a lot. Turns out Shanghai is likely one of the most surveilled cities in the world, and that means cameras everywhere. There are traffic drones that can check if you’re using a mobile, cameras that flash every car through multiple junctions. It’s not the kind of place to test a fast car. Advertisement - Page continues below Luckily, and like most things, one perspective is not the entire view. And China can be utterly stunning. It takes a few hours to extract yourself from the urban sprawl of Shanghai, rolling down the G15 motorway and over the 22.2-mile Hangzhou Bay bridge, a bridge that ghosts into sea fog like a road to nowhere, but you can get there. And when you do, the endless green is a balm. Oddly well surfaced roads that sweep up through 18m tall bamboo forests that seethe with potential myth. Hairpin bends, sweepers – the lot. OK, so the driving standards are largely similar to the city, but there’s 99 per cent less traffic, so it’s much easier to process. As is the Cyberster. Because by this point we have spent time looking at it, driving it, charging it. And I am impressed. Designed by a team led by Carl Gotham (European advanced design director for SAIC) from a studio in Marylebone, the Cyberster is good looking rather than stunning. Easy to assimilate. There’s a long bonnet with some nice feature lines, slightly generic headlights. It’s an easy one on which to press comparison – various people mentioned Alpine, Porsche, BMW, Jaguar – basically any two-seat convertible. But the profile is strong – aided by a black belt line under the roof that helps slim things down, and the rear looks wide and settled, with a full width light bar. The arrow shaped rear lights are a bit on the nose – and are apparently supposed to gently resemble a union flag – but generally it’s a well proportioned and detailed car. Long, but neat. In fact, it’s a bit bigger than you imagine – bigger than a BMW Z4, more F-Type. It looks decent enough with the roof up, and there’s a useful boot too. The electric scissor doors are a neat bit of theatre, and one that I assumed would start to chafe after a bit. But they don’t. Stand too close and sensors prevent them from slapping you in the face, and the Cyberster is easy to get in and out of, no matter how tight the parking space – amiable mention to the van that parked 20cm from the side when charging, and I could still open the door. And once you’re in, there are more surprises. Quality, fit and finish are excellent, general layout and ergonomics traditional but useful.