MG Reviews

Okay, before you do anything else, take the keys and hide them so nobody can drive the car. If the rear wheels are randomly locking at any speed, you have a major safety issue on your hands and the car should be towed back to the dealership from which you bought it.

The cause of this could be anything from a faulty wheel bearing, a park-brake with a mind of its own or a problem in the transmission, suspension or braking system. But what ever it is, the car can not be driven anywhere in the interests of your and everybody else’s safety.

I would be talking to MG’s Australian customer service department to arrange for it to pick the car up and either sort it out under warranty or replace the vehicle. MG also needs to figure out whether this is a one-off problem, or something that might be a problem in other examples of this model. At which point, a safety recall may even be required.

This model MG is designed and set-up to run as an EV for as much of the time as possible. That’s how it saves fuel and keeps running costs and tailpipe emissions as low as possible. To do that, the petrol engine mainly works to keep the battery charged, rather than actually drive the car’s wheels (which it can, but only in limited situations).

So, what you’re probably experiencing is the engine whirring away independently of the car’s actual road speed, as it attempts to keep the battery charged while going up a hill where the energy required is greatest.

This problem is more common than you might imagine and applies to a lot of different makes and models. It’s a simple cases of physics, in the end: The petrol is being pumped into the filler neck at a decent rate, sometimes enough for some splash-back to occur as the fuel hits the side of the filler neck and bounces around.

The problem will be much worse if the filler neck can’t 'breathe' (air has to leave the tank for fuel to get in - physics again) so make sure there are no blocked breather lines or holes inside the top of the filler neck.

Beyond that, the best advice is to try turning the fuel nozzle, say, 45 degrees each way from vertical to see if that lands the fuel in a more agreeable place in the filler neck. Either that or you’re stuck with trickling the fuel into the car at a slower rate (the rate of flow of the nozzle is adjustable according to how far you pull it).