Getting it all wrong

Forty years ago, driving from New York to Mexico City, I stopped in a little town south of Monterey known for basket weaving. A really beautiful woven-reed picnic basket tempted me, but I decided to pick one up on the way back to the States. The one I bought six months later—and still use—looked just as nice, but its bottom panel is a  piece of particle board. obviously, it was easier and cheaper to make, but looked much the same. I didn't mind that incorporated modern materials in a traditional design, since it didn't show.

A year later, I visited the same town and discovered an aesthetic disaster. Someone had sold the towns people endless rolls of extruded plastic band with four half-round shapes incorporated in it. The weavers were making baskets with this nasty stuff.  Giving them a coarser surface and an unpleasant, shiny look. The towns products had changed from beautiful traditional objects, refined over hundred of years. to cheap and nasty tourist crap. The basic function, of the picnic baskets—being containers—still existed, but they looked awful. Some change is all right. Too much change is, well, too much.

I thought about that as looked at the grotesque Morgan Aero 8 at the Geneva show this spring. Third generation Morgan Motor Company proprietor Charles Morgan has given  the venerable company something it has needed and merited for a very long time; a modern chassis with fully independent suspension and a thoroughly modern engine. In effect, this returns to the days of Morgan three wheelers, which suspended each  wheel individually, not that there was much flex  in their springs. No question, a new chassis was a good idea. That the one developed is expensive is unfortunate, but the very best in technology is always extremely dear,  and even mid-range stuff, like the new Morgan's riveted and bonded aluminum chassis, is usually more expensive than what it replaces, at least at first.

The problem with the new car lies in its styling, a ham-handed amateur attempt to combine Thirties shapes with contemporary racing aerodynamics. I presume that the new shape works very well for penetration and down force and that it has been seriously developed, but its look, not to put too fine a point on it, is absolutely disgusting.  It's easy to understand why Morgan has tried to keep some of its basic 1935 styling. Years ago,  an ungainly fiberglass envelope body was plopped down on the ancient Morgan chassis by second generation proprietor Peter Morgan. The Plus Four Plus was a complete failure in the market place, with only twenty-odd sold before it was scuttled. Imagine a then-modern body on an antique chassis that twisted and flexed and caused the plastic skin to crack; you obviously had the recipe for a commercial disaster, but Peter Morgan didn' t see it that way. He told me that the car was extremely beautiful, much better than its contemporary, the first Lotus Elite, but that it failed because people wanted a Morgan to be traditional. No, it failed because 1) it was ugly and 2) it was functionally deficient viz the twisting and cracking.

But the family lore about the Plus Four Plus has had its effect on Charles, who has valiantly tried to  preserve the traditional narrow cockpit, inadequate luggage space, flat windshield and cut-down doors of 1935 in the Aero 8. That he took from his father is admirable, but it is tragic that he did not understand what people are buying when they order a Morgan. Morgans are pretty awful automobiles by modern standards, but many people, me included, love them for one good reason, they look wonderful and are authentic period pieces. True, over the past sixty-five years, the grille and the headlamps have changed, the proportions have been altered here and there—doors are longer, width has increased, overall height has been reduced—but the basic look has been constant, and the traditional shapes haven't been compromised by attempts to "modernize" the straightforward, honest Thirties style.  The cross-section of the fenders has remained the same radius-cornered rectangular shape, even though it has become wider over the years to accommodate ever-wider tyres. When you see a Morgan you know what it is, just as you always recognize a Porsche 911, even if not a single surface is  identical between the first model and the latest.

And, like Porsche, Morgan has met every legal requirement imposed on manufacturers. The engines have catalysts, cockpits have air bags, crash tests have been met, and standards have been surpassed, all without destroying the ambiance.   Up to now.

Where these two icons diverge is in the way development has been managed. Both firms have maintained  racing programs which give their products an aura of seriousness.  With the new car, Morgan is trying to put a racing car on the road while Porsche has realized that what its customers want is daily-use practicality. Once  you accept the usual limitations of two seaters—the lack of space and the awkward entrance conditions—there is no better everyday sporting car than a Porsche 911.  Morgan is now trying to peddle a racer with a blobby, cross-eyed nose that ensures aerodynamic downforce for a clientele that may enjoy a burst of speed from time to time but appreciates  more a gentle top-down trundle through the countryside in a pretty car.

I asked Charles Morgan if  the company  would be prepared to build cars with the old bodywork on the new chassis.  All that question got me was a sharp poke in the diaphragm from the Morgan index finger,  but I suspect it will be asked by others whose orders are already in on the years-long queue for a new Morgan.  I hope their answer will be a bit more accommodating.

I would hate to see my favorite sports car company disappear beneath the weight of erroneous assumptions.