Morgan Super 3 First Test: Pointless Is the Point

The world can’t agree on much, but it can agree on SUVs. They’re the dominant form of personal motor vehicle, for multiple reasons: A box is the best shape to carry the maximum amount of people and cargo, and ground clearance and all-wheel drive give peace of mind (even if illusory) that the driver will be ready for any road conditions. In a word, they’re practical. The 2023 Morgan Super 3 is not that.

From a usability point of view, the 2023 Morgan Super 3 is at best a method of conveyance. It’ll transport you more quickly than walking. To a pragmatic person, it is almost entirely pointless. And that’s the point. Neither car nor motorcycle, the Super 3 isn’t meant to be a useful tool for any situation. It is entirely about fun, and it’s a lot of fun.

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Fangio Dreaming

It’s as you’re leaning out the left side of the Morgan Super 3, bracing yourself with the steering wheel and looking over the outboard left-front wheel and its bicycle fender, you feel it. In that moment, it’s as if you’ve been transported back 70 years to the earliest days of Formula 1. You feel like Fangio racing Ascari, Brabham, Hawthorne, and Moss down some country road standing in for a racetrack.

You’re leaning out of the car through that left-hander because there’s little side bolstering to speak of in these seats, partly an artifact of period-influenced design and partly because large bolsters would make it even more difficult to get into and out of the vehicle. Right-handers are easier because you have the side of the “car” to lean against.

It takes a little building up to reach the leaning-out-of-the-cockpit stage. The three-point seatbelt wasn’t invented until the year after Fangio retired, and it’s cold comfort. Everything from the armpits up is always outside the vehicle, and although helmet laws vary by state, we recommend a full-face lid for bug- and rock-strike protection as much as the illusion of safety. For what it’s worth, Morgan says the Super 3 offers some frontal crash protection, but let’s not kid ourselves about the most likely outcome of a high-speed collision.

The experience of speed is simply more visceral and unfiltered in this vehicle than almost any other. The cockpit is tiny, and one arm almost always hangs out of the Super 3 whether you’re driving or riding. The windshield, such as it is, is almost entirely cosmetic. You watch the front wheels bobbing over bumps and turning through corners. Your face is in the wind, and your ass is inches off the ground. It’s as close as you’ll get to driving an early open-wheel race car without buying one. Once you get it, it’s thrilling.

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Some Experience Required

Unless your local dealer is located at the top of a mountain, your first experience driving the 2023 Morgan Super 3 will be on urban streets and highways, where you’re eye level with the lug nuts on a pickup truck. Prior experience riding a motorcycle (which is how the Super 3 is classified under federal law, though all but one state recognizes it as an “autocycle” and doesn’t require a motorcycle license) is an enormous benefit. If you’re used to watching the body language of every car around you, keeping out of blind spots, and generally assuming every other vehicle on the road is actively trying to kill you, the Morgan will feel like old hat.

Even if you’re all right with the idea of driving a three-wheeled bathtub around semis, it can still be a harrowing experience for the first hundred miles or so. Despite its diminutive cross-section, the Super 3 is highly susceptible to crosswinds, and its extremely quick steering ratio makes it easy to overcompensate when you get blown around. Morgan says the Super 3 will do 130 mph if you’re brave enough, but anything above 80 starts to feel dicey. As with everything about this vehicle, it takes getting used to. Before you get used to it, it can be absolutely terrifying.

Aside from the quick and heavy steering, it’s relatively easy to drive. Turning the wheel at parking lot speeds will give you the vintage sports car experience as you flex those biceps, but the clutch take-up is nicely weighted and easy to modulate. The five-speed manual transmission is out of a third-generation Mazda Miata, and the shifter’s throws are about perfect. The naturally aspirated Ford inline-three under the hood doesn’t like coming off idle, but once you get it up past 2,000 rpm it’s a willing playmate, though there’s no need to take it all the way to redline where it starts to fall off early. You’ll also hit the limiter before the tach flashes red, so just short-shift and be done with it.

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Learning Curve

That’s the thing about the 2023 Morgan Super 3, though. The longer you drive it, the more you understand it and the more you enjoy it. At first, those skinny front tires and their tiny contact patches seem ripe for understeer, and you find yourself having more than enough fun at the speed limit to push it any harder. Eventually, though, you do, and you find they have quite a lot of grip. We saw 0.79 g average on the skidpad and coaxed a 27.9-second figure-eight lap out of the 3 at 0.60 g average, the slowness of which had as much to do with its 118 hp and 111-lb-ft as it did with itty-bitty contact patches.

That is, at least, in a controlled environment. On the test track, where there’s nothing to hit, we got comfortable throwing the Super 3 around hard enough to get some real oversteer, which was easy to catch with the quick steering. Provoking it, however, generally involved locking up the brakes, which you can do since there’s no ABS, or locking up the rear wheel by screwing up a heel-toe downshift. Thankfully, the long brake pedal has excellent feel, so threshold braking is a breeze, and the pedal spacing makes heel-toe as easy as can be, so just don’t get sloppy.

Still, three small contact patches can only do so much. Our best braking result was 133 feet slowing from 60 mph to a stop, which is longer than the average small SUV. Similarly, a 6.1-second sprint from 0 to 60 isn’t anything to write home about, but it certainly feels more exciting in a vehicle like this. We even provoked wheelspin on the 1–2 and 2–3 upshifts driving it hard enough.

In the real world, though, your self-preservation instinct will kick in long before you drive this Morgan hard enough to get sideways. Ten to 15 mph past the posted speed limit is about as fast as you want to go and leaves you enough leeway to brake early, get your downshifts right, and power out of corners without locking any wheels or spinning the single rear tire. Really blowing the downshift and locking the rear wheel is about the only way to really screw things up on the road, and it’s easy enough to avoid.

The real thing to be careful of is forgetting how far those front wheels stick out. You sit so far inboard of them, it’s easy to accidentally run into a curb trying to park close enough to the gas pump for the hose to reach the center-mounted filler. This creation is much wider than it seems from the inside or outside.

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Other Considerations

You buy a Morgan Super 3 for its raw, heart-pounding thrills, but it has some concessions to civility, too. Most are related to cold weather, including optional heated seats and a footwell heater, both of which work quite well. There’s also a two-piece tonneau cover you can split in half and cover only the passenger side to keep the wind out when no one is sitting there, though it does flap around a bit in crosswinds.

When not in use, the cover can be stored in a small trunk. That and a backpack are about all you’ll get in there, but it’s better than nothing, and the way it’s reverse-hinged looks cool when it’s open. There’s also an optional lockable storage compartment under the passenger seat that’s worth buying just to have somewhere safe to keep the registration and insurance.

Other accessories (of which there are many) are a matter of preference. The interior cargo netting doesn’t hold much, and the eyehooks can dig into your knee if you have short legs (the seat doesn’t adjust; the steering wheel and pedals do, but a 30-inch inseam is about as short as you can get and still drive comfortably). Our test vehicle didn’t have the cell phone holder, GPS attachment, or cupholders installed, but all seem useful, and mounting the cupholders to the side blades outside the vehicle just seems like silly fun. (Spring for a modular helmet if you plan to eat or drink while driving.) Whether the soft- or hardshell cargo containers and rear luggage rack are worth it depends entirely on how far you really think you’ll drive a vehicle like this in a single go.

Then there’s the matter of cost. At nearly $54,000 to start, it’s a lot of money for what will be a second or third car at best, but what price do you put on fun? Hardly anything else you can buy for that money will be nearly as enjoyable or garner nearly as much attention. You’re also almost guaranteed to be the only person in town with one, so it’s rarer than a Ferrari and far more accessible (assuming you can do the F1 driver shimmy in and out of the cockpit).

You can also keep the cost in check by forgoing the nearly endless list of options, most of which are aesthetic modifications. The vast majority of the $11,000 in options on our test car were visual, not functional. Then again, if you can afford to drop midsize luxury SUV money on a three-wheeler, budget probably isn’t your biggest concern, so go nuts on the customization—there’s a lot of fun stuff in the catalog.

Pointless Is Fun

There’s that word again. The 2023 Morgan Super 3 is plain fun, and that’s all that matters. Forget all the P words like practical, pragmatic, and pointless, and focus on this one: purpose. The Super 3 is all about putting smiles on faces, yours when you drive it and yours and everyone else’s when they see it. You’ll never have more fun at legal speeds, and that’s the real point.

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