Leather-gloved hands down, Morgan Motor Co. is our favorite retro-modern car maker. We live in a world where automobiles are learning to drive themselves, manual transmissions are an endangered species, and the question of whether dashboards support Apple or Google is a major consideration, and that's mostly OK. But it’s comforting to have Morgan, which still talks about 1960s styling and hand-builds cars to order using ashwood frames.
Morgan Motor Company was founded in 1909 by Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan, and sometimes it seems little has changed since then. Although the cars are thoroughly modern under the hood---the company favors BMW drivetrains---the exterior styling stopped evolving around the time of the Blitz. Morgan was retro before retro was a thing, and even futuristic concepts like the hydrogen fuel cell LifeCar looks like they came straight out of the 1930s.
Morgan sings a similar tune with the Aero 8, which made its debut this week at the Geneva Motor Show. It's the latest in a line Morgan launched in 2000 and thoroughly modern, in the sense that it’s being built in 2015, it's got a 4.8-liter V8 engine under the hood, and the requisite sports car hardware like limited slip, ABS, and such. The engine's good for 367 horsepower if you rev it to 6,300 RPM, and of course you should because it undoubtedly sounds glorious.
In another nod to the past, Morgan offers the Aero 8 with three pedals and six-speed manual, which alone makes it worthy of high praise. Or you could wimp out and get the automatic. The manual tops out at 170 mph, walloping the slushbox by 15 mph. Either way, you'll hit 62 mph in 4.5 seconds.
Oh, it also comes with airbags and air conditioning, two features we rarely see touted in 21st century press releases. The A/C, Morgan says, will be nice to have in warmer climates, “a reflection of Morgan’s expansion into new markets across the globe.” Which means places beyond England, we guess.
The drivetrain is, in some ways, almost irrelevant because the styling is what sets the Aero 8---or any Morgan, for that matter---apart.
Morgan says it drew inspiration from the long, low shoulder lines of the cars of the 60s, an era that gave us landmark sports cars like the Ferraro 250 GTO, Aston Martin DB5 and, of course, the Jaguar E-Type. Those long, sweeping lines of the front fenders are enough to make you swoon, and the proportions---long hood, short rear, muscular haunches---are spot-on. The clamshell trunk opens with a flair rarely seen in modern cars, which makes us more forgiving of the bulbous front end and grille that looks a bit too narrow. Morgan says the Aero 8 is designed to resemble a boat deck when seen from above, “enhancing the sense of adventure and escapism,” which sounds great for when you see the car from your helicopter (and notice you forgot to tuck your driving cap in the glove box).
Pricing starts around $121,000, according to Top Gear, and production starts in late 2015.
