on one of my weekly trips to don mills public library - and i can’t remember how old i was at the time but i’d hazhard a guess i was in high school - i came across a book chronicling the history of the morgan motor car company. written by gregory housten bowden, i drooled over this book and dreamed of the day when i would be wealthy enough to be able to buy myself a yellow plus eight and whip up, down, and around the streets of wherever i lived. i borrowed the book many times and traced some of the pictures in it - bringing them to a sort of life.
you can still buy copies of this book from here but it is one of the older titles out there and there are many more current histories of morgan available through the usual sources.
even before i borrowed that book, morgan (as it is commonly referred to) was not an unknown to me as every so often their cars would crop up in one of the mainstream auto magazines for the simple reason that morgan produced extraordinarily fast little vehicles whose designs were, shall we say, anachronistic. the combination of classic sports car styling and high-end speed appealed to anyone with a taste for sports cars. morgan’s history is long and rich and well-worth reading.
my one direct experience with a morgan was as a passenger in a plus four. the driver informed me prior to the ride that the ride was so stiff that it was possible to drive over a penny and tell whether it was heads or tails as you drove over it. he was correct!
visit the home of morgan and you will see their 2008 lineup which includes what they ackowledge and refer to as their “classic range”. here is a sales brochure for the morganclassic range. the most desirable car in my eyes is the “roadster” which will leave a traffic light and everything sitting beside you or behind you in the dust as it accelerates from 0 - 62 mph (100 kph) in 4.9 seconds! eventually, the roadster will top out at 134 mph or 215 kph. more than most people need and more than can be legally used. overall fuel consumption is just shy of 30 mpg or 9.84 l / 100k.
here are a few of my favourite things - well morgan plus 8’s:
these are pictures of an amazing car which comes with an amazing story. it seems that a young man whose stars aligned for him most incredibly accepted an apprenticeship with morgan during which time he penned some sketches of an idea he had for morgan to produce a car that at once reached back to morgan's rich history and then took morgan forcibly into the future.
the aero was born. and the young man got a job with morgan.
in addition to reminiscing about things past i want to to show you where morgan is heading. the latest incredible design to come out of the tiny little factory in malvern links that makes a grand total of nine cars per week ladies and gentlemen, (each of which has taken three months to build) has looked at the future becoming present and is unleashing this car on an unsuspecting world.
here's the chassis under construction . . .
if this vehicle intrigues you or if you’d like to see more images and read more about it, then visit morgan’s life car site.
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