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"Unashamedly, the 3 Wheeler sets out to put the biggest smile imaginable on its driver's face."

And, I can testify that it not only puts a smile on its driver's face either, but on a recent trip through my local town, virtually everyone who I passed, smiled, laughed and drew it to the attention of the people they were with - truly a happy car. I love it.

@charlesmorganuk : Woken up to find Morgan 3 Wheeler still has 5 Stars in Autocar, > No other car IN THE WORLD has1.6 stars, per wheel.

After a half-century absence, Morgan returns to three wheels

The new Morgan 3 Wheeler is a characterful, evocative and terrifically fun car to drive

Pull open a small drawer in the Autocar office and hundreds of index cards are revealed, cataloguing more than a century of this magazine’s content. And there, nestled between Moon and Moskvitch, you’ll find two cards marked ‘Morgan’ that are annotated with the past road tests and features we’ve written about the Malvern manufacturer and its products.

We’ve checked and double checked, but despite the fact that three-wheelers were the vehicles with which HFS Morgan formed the company and were on sale for 40 years, a three-wheeler has never before been road tested by Autocar.

That a three-wheeler is back is cause for celebration, even by the standards of a business that regularly treats us to thrilling driver’s cars. Few hold the same promise of purity and intimacy as the 3 Wheeler, because few follow so closely the original formula like it does: grunty, two-cylinder power driving the rear of a lightweight roadster chassis. With two wheels at the back it sounds terrific, but with one? Let’s see how it stands up to the scrutiny of the toughest test in the car media business.

DESIGN

Driver and passenger get separate, non-adjustable and surprisingly effective wind deflectors

Early Morgan three-wheelers looked little like the latest 3 Wheeler. It wasn’t until the Super Aero of 1927 that it began to take on the shape we today recognise as that of the classic Morgan: low slung to aid grip, handling and, crucially, stability. And compared with the earliest cars, it’s relatively aerodynamic, too.

So from the late 1920s onwards that’s how the sportiest Morgan three-wheelers looked, and that’s the basic design that has been mimicked today. To call it retro somehow doesn’t seem right. It isn’t a pastiche of the original like, say, a Fiat 500 or the latest Minis. Instead, it just follows the original formula: a steel tubular chassis, some ash framework and an aluminium body. It’s pure, honest, authentic and real.

In the same vein, the engineering beneath – and in front of – the Morgan’s nod to styling isn’t a pastiche, either. Morgan has taken what it believes to be the best V-twin for the job. Now, as then, it’s a motorcycle engine. But now, unlike then, it’s made by American engine maker S&S.

S&S started out tuning Harley-Davidson motors, but after a time, as such companies do if they’ve got the nous, it began making entire engines. Today, if you buy a complete S&S motor, it’ll have the same pushrod V-twin layout as a Harley unit, but none of the internal components will necessarily come from Harley. This one is pure S&S, and built to a unique Morgan specification. It’s a lazy, old-fashioned motor, square of cylinder dimensions and with two overhead valves per cylinder, operated by pushrods. As a result, it makes a leisurely 80bhp, combined with a healthy 103lb ft of torque, peaking at just 3250rpm – a grunty set of stats for a bike motor.

That’s mated to an MX-5 gearbox via a transitional case that contains a damper necessary to smooth the big V-twin’s otherwise peaky torque output. From the ’box there’s a bevel gear to change the direction of rotation, then a belt driving the single back wheel, which is suspended by a trailing arm. Front suspension is by wishbones, and there are coil springs all round – and no driving aids.

INTERIOR

Like all cars of this ilk, the 3 Wheeler’s interior is notable for one thing: there isn’t much to it.

What’s also true is that you can discern a great deal about a car’s maker from the way it’s finished. Some niche car makers all but forget about interior finish and realise only too late just how much about the overall quality of craftsmanship buyers infer from cabin presentation. After all, it’s their foremost point of contact with a vehicle.

In the Morgan’s case, all the evidence is encouraging. Two pleasing dials sit in the centre of a dash that’s notable not just for its spartanness but also its neatness. The toggle switches look good and operate with pleasing positivity, while there are evocative or imaginative touches, too. The start button, for example, sits beneath an aircraft-style toggle cover, while the indicator stalk is bespoke.

Mind you, Morgan does have an advantage here because the 3 Wheeler only has to comply with legislation geared towards motorcycles, which means that extrusions on the body, components that stick out in the cabin and radii of surfaces are not under the same scrutiny as they would be in a conventional car. Which goes to show what nonsense some of the legislation is when it comes to specialist cars.

The 3 Wheeler’s cabin space is par for the course. There’s as much foot and legroom as you’ll find in a Caterham Seven, but the Morgan’s steering wheel and dash are set higher, which puts you in a heroic-feeling driving position and allows enough room to twiddle a relatively large wheel (although it’s one that could do with a clearer indication that it’s pointing straight ahead).

There is a boot, of sorts; the rear of the bodywork swings backwards to reveal an odd-shaped cubby.

PERFORMANCE

The 3 Wheeler's 1983cc V-twin is supplied by U custom motorcycle specialist S&S Cycle Inc

What’s most notable about the Morgan’s performance is not how much it has, but how it’s delivered.

Thumb the starter button and the S&S motor spins lazily as it tries to bring to life two cylinders that displace a litre each, the flywheel and the rotational damper. It usually takes a few seconds to start, upon which you’re rewarded with fulsome, lumpy and delightfully characterful ‘whumps’ as the motor idles.

Throttle response is terrific: not too frantic, not too lazy. There’s a tendency for motorbike-derived motors to have hyperactive reactions, but the size and configuration of the Morgan engine help it to avoid such traits. It spins with just the kind of response you’d want and is lively to a tickle of the throttle, but with enough inertia to resist stalling when you let the clutch out to get moving.

The clutch is well weighted and the five-speed gearshift slick, as you’d expect from an MX-5 unit. And the Morgan licks along at a healthy pace given that it totes only 80bhp, assisted by the fact that it doesn’t weigh much more than half a tonne.

Its track acceleration figures show that it’s slower than most of its rivals – a 0-60mph time of 8.0sec wouldn’t have a warm hatch writing home these days – but the Morgan feels livelier than that. It’s always eager, always keen, and seems to have oomph in reserve at any point in its rev band. It’ll roll along at 80mph or more with no worries and was always as fast as we felt we wanted it to be.

And all the while it’s an utterly charming powerplant. The heady thrum of the V-twin engine when you work it, particularly the exhaust burble on the overrun and between shifts, is magical. Meanwhile, not being particularly fast means that it’s possible to enjoy more of the 3 Wheeler’s performance for longer; in the same way that a 1.6-litre Caterham Seven Supersport is the most appealing in the range, you feel like you’re getting the best that the Morgan has to offer on almost any given road with a national speed limit.

RIDE & HANDLING

With a wide track, large front wheels and so much weight upfront, the Morgan feels stable once you learn to trust it

The fact that there’s only one rear wheel, and that it’s bang in the middle of the car, has as significant an effect on the Morgan’s handling as you might imagine.

First, it affects the ride a little. The 3 Wheeler is deftly sprung, and it’s terrific to watch from the cabin as those diddy front wheels bounce up and down on the asphalt. But while the rear is also well damped, from time to time you do notice that it’s bounced by bumps that don’t affect the fronts. It’s not uncomfortable, or even unresolved, just sometimes surprising when you realise you’ve been unsettled by a bump or a pothole that you deliberately steered the front wheels around.

The steering itself is terrific, mind (although the turning circle is atrocious), with first-rate weight, feel and feedback. Morgan has found it possible to set up the steering system so it combines the best in weight, accuracy, response and feel in one package – a boon of having skinny tyres and a lightly loaded front end.

You can place those narrow front tyres with pinpoint accuracy, while the steering wheel tugs delicately at your fingers as it traverses bumps, ruts and cambers. Driving doesn’t get any more interactive or immediate and no other production car puts you so in touch with its engineering elements.

That serves to make the Morgan both utterly beguiling and an absolute giggle from start to finish. For every one of our testers who approached the 3 Wheeler with scepticism and drove off in it with some doubt about its abilities, you could guarantee one thing: that they’d return with a whopping grin on their face.

And, given that that seems to be the Morgan’s general raison d’etre, it’s hard to argue that it does anything other than hit its spot as well as any vehicle we’ve tested in years.

MPG & COST

There’s something you can guarantee with a traditional four-wheeled Morgan that we’d bet will also apply to the 3 Wheeler, and that is that it will hold its value well.

At the moment production is flat out to meet a demand that doesn’t look like drying up any time soon. And we’d be willing to bet that the 3 Wheeler is set to become a mainstay of the Morgan range for years. It’s practically a classic as soon as it’s delivered.

Fuel economy was excellent. Even at the test track the 3 Wheeler returned a credible 19.8mpg. Overall it gave us a very respectable 29.6mpg. We couldn’t undertake our typical touring route, but drive in restrained fashion – unlikely, we’ll admit – and you should see high 30s.

One word of caution, though. A car like the 3 Wheeler won’t have completed months of winter and summer testing or thousands of durability laps of the most punishing circuits, as mainstream production cars are subjected to. Nor has it been race bred like many niche products.

So don’t expect to be able to treat one like you would a robot-built automotive appliance. But treat it 
like a cherished classic from day one and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

VERDICT

Good
Bags of character
Lovely steering and handling
Terrific engine response

Bad
Dirt and spray can get into the boot
Wide turning circle
Tonneau isn't standard

Unashamedly, the 3 Wheeler sets out to put the biggest smile imaginable on its driver's face

The question that overrides all others when it comes to producing an Autocar road test is this: is it fit for purpose? So when anyone in our office doubted that the Morgan 3 Wheeler was worthy of the five-star rating it gets here, we stuck them in the driver’s seat and asked them to return some time later.

And now there is no one within these walls who doubts the 3 Wheeler deserves its full five stars.

Unashamedly, the 3 Wheeler sets out to put the biggest smile imaginable on its driver’s face. It cares not for Nürburgring lap times or market segments, and it and the motor industry are all the more wonderful for it.

The 3 Wheeler is the most fun thing Morgan, or quite possibly any other car maker, produces today.

As a template for making motoring enjoyable, Morgan’s attitude should be both applauded and more widely adopted.