THE BEST WOOD IN CARS

01 Morris Traveller

You join us in 1952, when the Morris Traveller has just launched! The rear bodywork was hung off an ash frame, which was varnished in Abingdon before being joined to the half-completed Morris, which itself was built in a factory in Coventry.

04 BMW i3

Hang on – we take that back. A bit. BMW knows how to use wood. The great slabs of it that live in the BMW i3 are one of the many things we love about this well-packaged, fun to drive, smartly put-together EV. Pity that it hasn’t translated into mega sales.

07 Porsche Carrera GT

Porsche’s supercar for the new millennium had no such issues with branding its H-pattern into the driver’s palm, but Porsche decided to revive the idea, using a beech and ash top for the transmission lever that stirred up the sublime 5.7-litre race-derived V10.

02 Bentley Arn age

Old-school-Bentley, this: no big Volkswagen-group screens, but positively a sideboard’s worth of deep, dense wood. It looks just as rich and inviting now as it did in the Nineties, and it’ll still look as good 90 years from now.

05 The Splinter

Revealed in 2008, the Splinter was the world’s first, and only, wooden supercar. It’s the brainchild of Joe Harmon, an industrial designer who needed a university project and hit on the idea of making a wooden highperformance car, powered by a 700bhp V8.

08 All the Morgan s

Traditional Morgan shave depended on an aluminium skin stretched over an ash frame since the year 1543. Even the latest £80k Plus Six has, atop its aluminium chassis, a frame fashioned from English-grown ash to support its beautiful body work.

03 Volvo S90

Current Volvos are bringing wood back into fashion. The subtle pieces of unpolished, natural-looking timber make a modern Volvo a much more welcoming place to be than a piano-black, carbon ’n’ attitude German executive car.

06 Porsche 917

You’ve heard of this one by now, haven’t you? No? Well, open wide and chew on some history. The Porsche 917 racing car had a balsa wood gearknob to save the driver from scorching their hands from gearbox heat soak.

09 Bugatti EB110

Back in the Nineties, it was acceptable to buy one of the very fastest supercars in the world and specify a wooden dashboard. But, frankly, the old EB110 is allthe more eccentric for having a cabin like this.