Proof of concept
HOW MANY times have you seen a radically exciting new car announced, only to find out in the small print that it’s merely a concept? For once, that’s not the case here. Morgan is building eight examples of its CX-T off-roader – and it let Octane hoon around in the first customer car before it headed off to Germany.
‘CX’ is the codename of Morgan’s latest platform and ‘T’ stands for Trials, because the CX-T was inspired by evocative images of Morgans competing in these events during the 1920s and ’30s. Story goes that CEO Steve Morris was showing some Italian investors the Morgan design office, they saw some concept sketches stuck up on the wall, and the project was given the green light there and then.
While it undoubtedly looks the part, what’s really impressive is that none of the styling features and accessories is there simply for effect. The ‘leather case’ on the offside running board (pictured left), for example, houses a massive lorry airfilter for coping with thick clouds of dust. The exo-skeleton that wraps around the car can be used to lift the whole vehicle (there’s a roll-cage inside the cabin); all the electrics are raised much higher than on a regular Morgan; there’s a 5mm-thick full-floor undertray so the car can be skidded over obstacles… you get the picture.
The CX-T is a collaboration between Morgan and Cheshirebased
Rally Raid UK, which specialises in building and prepping Dakar-style vehicles. Its experience really shows. Every tool and accessory on the outside is mounted on the ‘one layer deep’ principle, so that you don’t have to remove multiple items to get to the thing you want, and the attention to detail extends to fitting a traditional filament bulb in the map-reading light, since modern LEDs cause flickering in the eyes of exhausted co-drivers.
The starting point is Morgan’s Plus Four, which has largely been left alone mechanically. A stock BMW-sourced TwinPower Turbo 2.0-litre four, good for 255bhp, drives a six-speed manual gearbox and provides plenty of punch; it’s not especially rorty but there’s a pleasing growl at lower revs.
The big difference from a regular Plus Four is the BMW X-Drive rear diff ’, which can be left open, switched to limited-slip or fully locked. On a properly slippery surface, the latter mode is huge fun and you can slide the car around like a chain-gang Nash, while still being able to gain extra traction in a straight line. To look at, the CX-T might not appear to have much suspension travel but that’s far from the case: modified, longer Plus Six wishbones allow greater ‘droop’ and the oversized all-terrain tyres slide neatly up within the wheelarches. The drive-over ground clearance is a respectable 230mm.
Morgan stresses that the CX-T is not a full-on Dakar machine but what it describes as an ‘adventure’ vehicle. Even at a price of £170,000 plus taxes, the eight build slots sold out almost immediately, so there’s clearly a demand. How many of those eight will end up tackling the Australian outback rather than the mean streets of Chelsea remains to be seen – but the CX-T at least has the talk to accompany the walk.