There are really two base models, but each has been expertly teased out across the decades and spun out into new, relevant cars. Just a company with the goal of making exciting cars by hand. Even more so when everyone is else is touting 200mph hypercars and they launch… a car with three wheels. They themselves admit to finding it rather amusing to be at international motor shows right next to industry behemoths like Mercedes-Benz and BMW, producing triple-digit numbers more cars in a month than Morgan do in 12. Everything is here: design, manufacturing, sales, production – you name it, and people just seem to want to be involved in anything they can. Requests from family and friends for their own three-wheelers turned his pet project into a business the following year.Ĭurrently Morgan have just 180 staff top to bottom, yet manage to produce 1,200 hand-built cars a year. Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan produced his first car – the three-wheeler Runabout – in 1909, and used it to commute to work. The company itself passed its 100-year anniversary five years ago. It’s all technology – just different kinds. The noise is of hammering and drilling, sawing and smoothing – not automation and robots, hydraulics or lasers.įor Morgan, there’s super-forming aluminium on the one side of the workshop, chisels and clamps on the other. Every single Morgan still uses wood in some part of its construction, even the Le Mans racers.Īll the way through you see people and cars first. Even smells normally associated with the building of cars have different flourishes here, new notes: deep oils and sharp metal tangs are met by the buttery softness of… freshly worked wood. There’s enormous pride in the old techniques, yet an openness to new ones.
There’s a natural harmony at work that makes perfect sense once you see the operation in action and talk to the passionate and committed staff. Think of it as a celebration of how 105 years of building cars can be threaded into a single, almost uninterrupted and coherent narrative. What are Morgans? Have they ever changed? Are they old? New? Was the Geneva show car demonstrating some kind of schizophrenia with its exposed metal and wood? Not at all. It comes down to whether you want a computer-made robot or an artisan-built work of art.Īt first there can seem to be a bit of a clash. Hand-made for their customers at prices which, specifically for the basic car, frankly made me fall off my seat. They’re not mass-produced sportscars pretending to be bespoke and special. So if you love cars, then there will be at least one area here that will make you respect Morgan at the very least, but ideally want to drive one. And they’re very, very comfortable with that. Morgan are what you want them to be, not what you expect them to be.
Morgan is a blazing skull, oozing hot rod ethos and café racer styling. A Morgan GT car raced at Le Mans as recently as 2004 and they currently badge LMP2 prototypes. The legendary Brooklands oval was Morgan’s playground in the 1930s, and they still compete in top level racing to this day. Morgan is a racing car it always has been. Morgan is a glorious heavy metal 400hp V8 thunderclaps wrapped in art deco sculpture, making everyone in the immediate vicinity jump out of their skin and supercar drivers dive for the inside lane. Morgan is also about low-slung attitude, style, the power and glory, forever and ever, continuing with a 50-year-old design but letting you make it exactly how you want. The crazy thing is, yep, Morgan is all those things. But you really have to park any preconceptions you might have at the door. The outside of their factory – celebrating its 100th year in operation in 2014 – with its old fashioned, red brick, slant-roofed workshops nestling below and looming Malvern Hills in the background might reinforce your idea of a Morgan being about slow about considered drives to the local pub on a Sunday lunchtime – only in nice weather of course, and probably wearing a flat cap. Factory tour? Artisan workshop? Museum? Cutting edge technology demonstration? Hospital for the automotively deranged? Whatever, it’s all inspiring, and absolutely not what you might be expecting. I’m not even sure what a visit to the Morgan Motor Company actually counts as.
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