It’s no surprise to me to see how good the Morgan Super 3 looks on the dreamy, sun-dappled roads of California.
What car wouldn’t look good there? But there’s something about the 3’s retro-futuristic appearance that particularly suits the place. It looks more at home there, I think, than in a Cotswold village.
And last week Morgan announced that its three-wheeled vehicle is to make a return to sale in the US, with the latest model federalised there, like its predecessor, by the application of a few discreet reflectors and by moving the headlights inboard – thus making it look even more spidery.
Morgan has certainly taken deft advantage of the fact that trikes are subject to different regulations than four-wheelers, but still, for a small car maker to send a modern car into the wild, legislated for so many markets and yet staying entirely true to the company’s long-standing ethos and values is a credit to it.
That’s no easy task these days for a small-volume manufacturer. Lotus, if you believe some of the below-the-line comments on reviews of the new Lotus Eletre SUV, hasn’t managed to do the same. There’s little of Lotus’s values of simplification and lightness about the 2500kg 4×4, and it doesn’t drive so much like a traditional Lotus, either.
This is a modern problem that will particularly afflict makers of lightweight cars. A Rolls-Royce can weigh 2.9 tonnes, as the Spectre does, but still feel like a Rolls; Caterham will have to work a lot harder for Project V to feel like a Caterham.
Does the Eletre’s weight matter? I suspect not if it helps the company sell the 150,000 cars a year it would like to by the latter half of the decade, and if that in turn helps to pay for the development of some competitive Norfolk-built sports cars.
But still, I have a bit of additional respect for a manufacturer that manages to face the future while still maintaining the qualities that gave its cars such character in the first instance.
Protecting the working man’s SUV
I spotted a hand-scrawled note taped inside the rear window of an early 2010s Land Rover Defender 110 while driving along the M25 this morning: ‘Essential Working Vehicle’, it read.
There was no livery and the car was clean, but it was an old Defender 110, and we know what that means: noisy, cramped shoulder room, a heavy-pedalled driving experience and waiting an age for it to cool down or warm up.
