I baulk at the idea of cars having soul or personality, but the Morgan Super 3 has character even standing still.
That’s partly from the design, at once traditional and space-age. At the front are three aluminium castings with multiple purposes, helping make this trike compact and light but also beautiful. They mount the suspension and engine and deflect air to the radiator but are also gracefully finished.
It’s automotive engineering left exposed to become aesthetic. It goes on with the switchgear, wind deflectors, stressed bodywork and those turbofan wheels.
Driving the Super 3 seals its place as the most charming car of 2022. Not objectively the best, not the fastest, the best value, the most luxurious or the most comfortable. But it’s the vehicle that’s made me smile the widest.
Its three-cylinder Ford engine rasps away in half-a-Porsche style, the rear wheel sending all 635kg down the road with an entirely adequate turn of pace. The steering can chase cambers, but the Morgan feels alive and alert, its gearshift precise, the brakes firm and progressive.
It’s fantastic to meet a vehicle that decides what a driver really needs is to hold on to a beautiful piece of engineering as it nibbles along a B-road, where it brings a little understeer on the way into a corner and a nudge of oversteer on the way out, all with a speedo number starting with an unthreatening ‘2’ or, gosh, a ‘3’.
So many cars score on measurable qualities, so it’s lovely to find one that thrives in the realm of the immeasurable.