TG Awards 2011: not-a-car of the year

The Morgan 3Wheeler is a stupid idea. It's a modern interpretation of an iffy premise from a time when smoking was considered a perfectly acceptable hobby and crash safety involved nothing more than a strong desire to be thrown clear. It's not even a car, for goodness' sake. It has one too few wheels, is several cylinders short of the usual number and does without doors, a windscreen, heater, radio, or any of the other things that make driving bearable.

Top Gear drives the Morgan 3Wheeler

By modern standards, it isn't fast, has a quaint attitude to cornering and uses a V-twin engine that delivers torque like a sledgehammer: one massive thud, and then it's all over. And yet this literally pointless grown-up tricycle is an utter joy, precisely because of its deficiencies rather than in spite of them. You have to drive a 3Wheeler, immerse yourself in the experience, invite the entire world into your exposed, noisy, furious explosion of wind-whipped hair and manic grinning. It has guts, emotion and vitality. Something you don't get in cars twice as fast. Less, in this case, really does equal more.

The Morgan 3Wheeler. It's not a car. But it is unique. And that makes it very special.

Read this and much much more in our huge new Awards issue of TopGear magazine, on sale now