The mouse that roared.

San Francisco   Is it not the measure of how far the once mighty British automobile industry has fallen? Thanks to the mysteries of international finance, the venerable Morgan company of Malvern Link, Worcestershire,  can proudly proclaim to be the largest English owned manufacturer currently exporting cars to America. Now that Rolls and Bentley, Land Rover, Rover, MG, et al are in German care, now that Malaysian capital owns Lotus, now that Jaguar and Aston Martin report to Dearborn, Michigan, Morgan achieves this lofty honour by conducting retail business with roughly fifty Yankees each year. (We deliberately spelt honor wrong to honor the colorful English spelling.) Weigh Morgan's sales against expected U.S. demand for more than 16 million cars in 1999, and you're looking at what the professional marketing types call the teensy-weensy end of a bull market.

So maybe it is not worth phoning Mother to report that Morgan has recently introduced what is possibly its most comprehensively revised model since the family-owned firm made the radical decision to put four
wheels on its cars back in the 1930s. (As every self-respecting anglophilic gearhead knows, three-wheeled machines had been Morgan's stock in trade since its 1909 inception by H.F.S. Morgan.

Mother may not care about the new Morgan. In fact, my mother, who photographed the car you see here, was over heard asking why anyone would buy one, but, then again, she may merely be holding
out for more news on the even newer Plus 8 GTR rumored to be kicking around the Malvern skunkworks with a space age aluminum chassis and a 4.4-liter BMW V-8. You know Mom.

Even so, the latest Plus 8 Morgan equipped with air bags and the latest desmogged Rover 3.9-liter V-8, is worth alerting driving fools like yourselves right away. We speak of the new long-cabined Plus 8, which offers two inches ot additional legroom and some-strange-how packs a modicum of civilization into the equation without losing any essential Morgan virtue. An example of the new-tech Moggie, placed in our care for a return journey between the Fog City and Laguna Seca - a few hours down the California coast - completely upset expectations in this regard, turning out be the greatest thing from England since the tea bag (excepting, perhaps, the Lotus Elise, the old Morgan, about a dozen and a half other British sports and racing cars of fond memory, plus various foodstuffs, frothing libations, and pithy locutions that have tickled our fancy over the years). Pity about the ugly steering wheel, though.

Morgan may have the unlikely distinction of being Britannia's export king, but its not exactly Big Blue. So traditionalists will be pleased to learn that Americans looking to join the Morgan family are still pointed in the direction of two long-standing specialists working on opposite sides of the country but sharing the American market between themselves, Isis lmports of San Francisco and Cantab Motors of Purcellville, Virginia. Although Morgan engineered the Plus 8's passive-restraint system - depowered dual air bags and leather-covered knee bolsters - these small, competing American outfits complete the federalization process by installing side-impact beams, latch reinforcements, stronger bumpers, and other minor modifications the factory apparently can't be bothered to undertake.

There's said to be a quiet rivalry between Isis and Cantab, which would make sense in family psychology terms - two wayward children fighting for the attention of a distant, aging, and eccentric parent. For no particular reason, it was Bill Fink of Isis Imports we hooked up with some years back, but we're sure the Cantab guys are swell and look forward to meeting them down the lonesome highway. Remember, gents, there's no room for fisticuffs in the dealer body when the dealer body numbers just the two of you.

Fink's a real nice guy, anyway, with an even nicer place of business. Someday, someone will make a film at the rear of San Francisco's Pier 33, where, for more than two decades, this overeducated solo practitioner has set to the quixotic task of federalizing new Morgans (while selling old ones in his spare time) next to the stalls of fishmongers and Asian import-exporf outfits. It's atmospheric in every sense of the word.

Fink got into the U.S. Morgan business in the late 1960s when the company, faced with mounting regulation, furled its flag, packed its bags, and split. Fink went to work in an unofficial capacity and, although it never made him rich, he continues to keep the faith. It was reportedly his retired dad's mathematical calculations that were helpful to the air bag manufacturers in convincing the engineers in Malvern Link that their cars could be air bagged without major re-engineering.

Needless to say, long association with the Morgan family and its notoriously nutty factory has required Fink to maintain a perpetual state of Zen composure in the face of all disturbing developments and exasperating prospects, including the imminent exhaustion of Morgan's supply of OBD II Rover
V-8s (as fitted to U.S.-bound Land Rover Discoverys) and the imminent departure from his premises this afternoon of one of AUTOMOBILE MAGAZINE's biggest Morgan fans in his one and only demonstrator.

Fortunately, there's something about driving a Morgan that keeps a citizen on his toes - probably the wind in your hair and the fact that the low-cut doors enable you to calculate precisely the spot where the out-of
control Freightliner is going to regrade your reality highway. The superior power to weight ratio is no problem. In the dry at least, the Morgan's rear leaf-sprung limited-slip differential can put 190 bhp down completely, pulling off 0-to-60-mph runs in 6.7 seconds. Available braking power is prodigious, although summoning it is not for the weak kneed. The Morgan's British electrical system, having easily caught up by the rest of the world and its standards for 1983 or thereabouts, must be considered a vast improvement over all previous systems.

In the end, its the diabolical ride that eventually separates the true Morganist from his more sensible countrymen. From previous experience, i remembered, you felt not just every expansion joint in the road in a Morgan but also every grain of sand in the concrete and possibly every electron in every atom of the grain. Most people don't buy a car to be punished.

But this Morgan was different. Don't ask me how. Its suspension, who's basic principles are depicted in contemporaneous accounts of the Peloponnesian War, holds no explanation for the newfound comfort.
The design hasn't been changed a whit for close to a century, although new cast alloy wheels and sophisticated Pirelli rubber may hold a due. So might the seats. Redesigned for anti-submarining effect and repositioned further away from the wheel to enable the air bag to expand without taking one's chin off, the new chairs are more comfortable for a short guy or gal, essential for the tall and portly, and could well figure into a ride that no longer made us bite our tongue and crack our fillings.

Maybe it was blessed with a particularly mellow batch of ash for its wood-framed coachwork, but I could actually see driving this car every day if I had a backup car, of course. And since I do, several in fact, a
Plus 8 is back on the must-have some day list.

The only depressing moments driving the Morgan occurred when onlookers asked if it were a replica or kit car. "Its got a VW engine in the back," one philistine told his girlfriend, besmirching the hand-built sportster's beaten aluminum panels and hand-sewn leather. "Morgan, what's that?" others asked and, after a while, it got tiresome to even be polite, much less to bother explaining. (Although, to be fair, you can't blame people for thinking you're a crank who wants to talk to them about Morgans when you're a crank driving a Morgan.)