After talking about Caterham Sevens for so long, I’ve gone down a different route…
Local legend has it that Henry ‘Harry’ Frederick Stanley Morgan – just known as HFS these days – built his first motor vehicle because he was tired from cycling over the Malvern Hills.
The facts are, I think, a little less romantic. The eventual founder of Morgan Motor Company had plenty of access to cars from the earliest years of the 20th century, when he ran a garage and hire car business in Malvern Link, but it is true that in 1908 he bought a twin-cylinder engine, constructed a single-seat three-wheeler around it and only later decided to put it into production.
It took a while to gain much traction. The production vehicle made an appearance at the 1910 Motor Cycle Show at London’s Olympia. The initial single-seat design was so unpopular that Morgan quickly gave it two seats. Still, in 1912 we reported that it remained “a little known runabout known as the Morgan”, which in its early days “had made no great stir”.
That was until HFS took it on speed trials, in which it “performed so remarkably well in competitions during [the first] year that it was no surprise to find it perhaps the greatest centre of attraction” at a later show.
Cheaper to buy and tax than many four-wheeled cars and with competition success in its sails, it was in such demand during the following years that Morgan could barely keep up.
Eventually four-wheeled rivals became sufficiently cheap as to give it a harder time. Morgan persisted making only three-wheelers until 1936, when it introduced the four-wheeled 4/4. Three-wheelers remained on sale alongside four-wheeled cars until 1952, at which point Morgan decided to concentrate on the latter.
That was until 2011, when it reintroduced a trike, the 3 Wheeler, with an S&S-built V-twin making 80bhp and a weight as tested by us of 580kg, full of fuel. I fell for it hard enough to give it five stars in our road test, which you could perceive as entirely appropriate or completely absurd, depending on your outlook. But the remit of the road test is to assess how fit for purpose a vehicle is, and given the 3 Wheeler’s remit was to put a smile on its driver’s face, which it did not only for everyone who drove it but also for just about every bystander, what more could you have asked for?
Towards the end of the last decade Morgan was planning to give it a makeover, but in the same way that it recently got carried away with facelifting the Plus Six and instead turned it into the Supersport, its designers and engineers let their imaginations run wild, resulting in the 3 Wheeler’s replacement by the Super 3. Morgan’s first clean-sheet design since the Aero 8 of 2000, it arrived in 2022 with a superformed aluminium monocoque, “unashamedly functional” detailing and design inspired by the jet age. I liked it even more than I liked the 3 Wheeler.
I don’t think it has sold quite as well as Morgan hoped it would, and it’s impossible to know what effect, if any, Andrew Flintoff’s painful crash in one on Top Gear had on its popularity. But to my mind it has remained a really endearing car to drive and a beautiful piece of product design – a shape you could put in an art gallery.
Instead, I’ve put one on my driveway. The Super 3 you see pictured here, which has done the rounds as a demonstrator and was the car pictured in our road test (9 November 2022), is now mine. And I still can’t quite believe it. I’ve just been over to the window to look outside and make sure it’s real, and there it is, sitting alongside my Audi A2 and old-shape Land Rover Defender in an utterly dreamy three-car line-up.
Registered in 2021 and with 25,000 miles on it, it’s one of the earliest and must be among the leggiest Super 3s, but you wouldn’t know it to drive it. And two days into ownership, I’m starting to think that perhaps this is a car I will keep forever, letting the adventures roll beneath its wheels, and the memories build like the patina it will eventually take on too.
There will be more on these pages about it for years, I imagine. For now, I’m smitten.
