A conversation, rather than a brief, is where the most interesting cars tend to begin. So it was with the Midsummer Coupé, the latest special commission from Morgan Motor Company, which traces its origins to a single owner who looked at the open-topped Midsummer of 2024 and wondered aloud what might happen if you gave it a roof. Morgan’s answer, unveiled in Malvern this summer, is not a barchetta with a lid bolted on. It is something altogether more considered, and a good deal more ambitious.
Only nine clients will ever own one. The car shown now is the reference example (known within the factory as the artists’ proof), and it sets the template for the bespoke commissions that follow. Each of those will be developed individually, in a one-to-one dialogue between owner and design team, so that no two examples will share quite the same character beyond their underlying architecture. It is exclusivity in the truest sense, and it sits squarely within Morgan’s long history of low-volume, hand-built specials.
The exterior is again the product of a partnership with Pininfarina, the Italian house whose designers worked alongside Morgan’s own team throughout. The collaboration first bore fruit on the original Midsummer, and here it reaches a natural conclusion. Adding a roof, it turns out, changes everything. A third line enters the silhouette, the proportions shift, and the whole car gains a tension it did not have before. Viewed from a high rear three-quarter, the glazed canopy sweeps into the bodywork in one continuous gesture, lending the stationary car a sense of motion. The side-window treatment nods to Italian sports cars of the 1960s; the lower body wears polished stainless steel, a deliberate thread back to the open Midsummer that preceded it.
What lifts the Coupé above mere styling exercise is the engineering beneath. The roof was never intended as decoration. It is a working part of the structure, forming a stressed skin that stiffens the whole car. The windscreen and the glass roof are both bonded directly into the aluminium body, so that the glazing itself carries load, an approach Morgan says cuts peak stresses in critical areas by roughly half. Billet-machined aluminium A-pillars feed roof loads into the front structure while anchoring the doors and the newly developed drop-window system. The upshot of all this cleverness is a car that, despite gaining a fixed roof, weighs a mere 2.5 per cent more than a Supersport wearing a hardtop.
Underpinning it is Morgan’s CXV-Generation bonded-aluminium platform, light and flexible enough to accept an entirely new upper structure without abandoning the firm’s lightweight creed. It also retains the BMW-derived B58 six-cylinder powertrain familiar from the Supersport 400, so there is genuine touring pace to match the touring intent. And touring really is the point: full weather sealing, proper climate control and a generous boot designed around fitted luggage make this a car conceived for long journeys rather than fair-weather posing.
Inside, the marine-inspired cabin is awash with teak, used throughout as a unifying theme… though future owners may specify other timbers entirely. The detailing rewards close inspection. A solid aluminium rail spans the cabin, carrying the sun visors and rear-view mirror; the gear selector wears a teak inlay; the window switches sit overhead in the roof structure, turning a mundane action into something memorable.
The making of each car is where Morgan’s particular character shows most plainly. Centre bodies are wheeled by hand from flat aluminium sheet, each demanding hundreds of hours of work. Solid aluminium rivets, double-countersunk into the skin, borrow a technique from pre-war aircraft construction. Yet laser scanning checks every panel against the digital model to a tolerance of 0.3mm across the body’s length. Old craft and new precision, working perfectly in concert. The proof car is bound for the Louwman Collection in The Hague, where the public can see it before the first commission takes shape at Pickersleigh Road.
For Morgan, the Midsummer Coupé is the concrete proof of how far a coachbuilder can travel when an owner asks “how far it can be pushed”.
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Article edited by Massimo Basile
Editor & Founder