H.F.S. Morgan built his first three-wheeler in 1909. The final Morgan three-wheeler with the now-iconic V-twin engine up front was made in 1946, and the last of the 20th century production three-wheelers to roll out of the Malvern factory was a four-cylinder F4 in 1953. However, Morgan aficionados tend not to refer to the cars by their engine types, but rather to the number of forward gears they possess, so the twins are two-speeders and the F2/F4 are three-speeders. Well, why buy a Morgan and then do things the same way as everybody else...?
However, that was not the end of the Morgan three-wheeler story, as the car in these pictures clearly shows. But while the Malvern company stunned the automotive world when it exhibited the brand new M3W (Morgan Three-Wheeler) at the Geneva Motor Show in 2011, this story really starts with a guy called Pete Larsen in Seattle at the turn of the century. Larsen made a living from building retro sidecars for Harley-Davidsons and was keen to buy a Moto Guzzi-powered Triking. When his search proved fruitless, he decided to build a Harley powered trike for himself, called it the Liberty Ace and put it into limited production.
That is rather glossing over the years of hard work that went into developing the Ace, but we need to move the story swiftly on to 2009, when Larsen's project had caught the interest of various people at Morgan. They were no longer able to make Morgan cars drive through all the legislative hoops required to sell them in the USA, and that had got some of the management team thinking seriously about reentering the market the company had left back in 1953 – a three-wheeler would be classed as a motorcycle rather than a car, and so subject to different (and much less onerous) rules.
This story is from the February 2020 edition of Classics Monthly.
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This story is from the February 2020 edition of Classics Monthly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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