Yahoo Autos Morgan Midsummer Is a Dreamy Collaboration with Pininfarina
The Midsummer is a collaboration between British sports-car maker Morgan and Italian design house Pininfarina.
This roof-free barchetta limited edition evokes the spirit of the 1950s.
It features BMW straight-six power and an eight-speed automatic gearbox and will sell in the neighborhood of $200,000.
England's most traditional sports-car maker, Morgan, has been building eccentric cars for eccentric buyers for more than a century. But rarely in its long history has it managed to produce anything as eye-catching as this limited-run Morgan Midsummer, a coachbuilt collaboration with Italian design house Pininfarina.
Based on the chassis of the Morgan Plus Six, the Midsummer is a screen-free and roof-free barchetta with unique bodywork and trimmed in teak timber. Just 50 will be built, with Morgan saying the full allocation has already been sold out, presumably by buyers who don't need to regularly drive through the rain.
While most of the the Midsummer's proportions are similar to those of the Plus Six, the exterior bodywork is effectively all new, most obviously the elongated tail and the much more chiseled front end. Morgan says that the hand-formed aluminum panels for each car take more than 250 hours to produce. The car looks like a 1950s motor show concept, which is intended as high praise.
Morgans have long featured wood in their construction, with bodywork fitted to the chassis with an ash timber frame. But the Midsummer also gains exterior wood in the form of motorboat-style teak sections that surround the two-seat cockpit and fill the gaps in the top of Morgan's traditional low-cut doors. These are formed from laminated layers of teak, none thicker than two-tenths of an inch, and the one on top of the dashboard is made from 126 separate sections. These wooden components take another 30 hours to create for each car. One surprising detail is what Morgan claims to be an "enhanced" Sennheiser audio system, albeit one it is going to be hard to hear on the move given the lack of a windshield.
Mechanically, the Midsummer is identical to the Plus Six, using the same engine and gearbox. This is a brought-in BMW 3.0-liter turbocharged six-cylinder that makes peaks of 335 horsepower and 369 pound-feet of torque, driving the rear wheels through a standard eight-speed automatic gearbox. BMW's bulbous gear selector has survived the transition, too—looking particularly incongruous in the Midsummer's art deco interior. Morgan hasn't released any performance numbers, but with a targeted weight of less than 2200 pounds, they should be brisk.
Morgan and Pininfarina worked together on the Midsummer's design, but the engineering is all Morgan's, and the car will be created at the Pickersgill Road factory where all the company's products have been built for the last 110 years. Morgan hasn't confirmed pricing, but we are told it is in the region of $200,000 before taxes. The car won't have federal approval for U.S. sale—the lack of a windscreen would likely be an issue—but Morgan says that the American customers who have bought cars have done so "for their residences in homologated markets." Which gives a good indication of the wealth of the likely clientele. Deliveries will begin at the end of the year.
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