The Morgan XP-1 is an extremely eccentric English electric vehicle

The three-wheel convertible EV weighs little, so should actually be quite efficient.

The UK's Morgan Motor Company is best known for making new cars that look like old cars. Not only that, but barring a false start with an electric take on the Three Wheeler, the EV3, it's all gas, all the time. Perhaps that won't be the case forever, as it has revealed its latest development vehicle, XP-1: a Super 3 with an electric heart.

Where the production Super 3 has a 1.5 L Ford three-cylinder engine under the hood, XP-1 gets a 33 kWh battery pack hooked up to a 136 hp (100 kW) 251 lb-ft (340 Nm) electric motor that sits in the transmission tunnel. It weighs 132 lbs (60 kg) more than the gas car and comes with a lot more torque.

A happy side effect of that weight is a real-world economy of about 4 miles/kWh (15.5 kWh/100 km), giving a non-homologated range of roughly 132 miles/212 km). Oh, and Morgan has thrown in fast charging—up to 50 kW—so it can get itself a full charge in less than an hour.

It has been developed using the sort of tech you wouldn't expect from a company that most people wrongly assume makes cars out of wood.

"We use a MATLAB Simulink, which is a kind of programming software that's used by all the big OEMs. They use it for creating control software for vehicles. We're using it to simulate how an EV will work. When we built this, we had it in the simulation platform, so we knew roughly how far it was gonna go. It allows us to kind of drill down and kind of optimize how the system works," Matt Hole, Morgan's chief technical officer, said. "I think for a small manufacturer, it's generally unheard of to have that kind of level of simulation technology."

The motor and batteries aren't in-house developments, but thanks to work done in the virtual space, they've been specced to suit the Super 3's rather odd chassis dimensions. Its less-than-conventional shape was thoroughly tested for drag, and aero tweaks were made to help it cut through the air a little better.

To improve the aerodynamics, staggered vents sit in its clear side blades to help airflow from the front of the car, there's only one windscreen for the driver, the front has a more aero-friendly shape, there's a flat underbody, and more. This is necessary, says Hole: "We knew from the simulation tool that by changing the aerodynamic value, we could massively decrease or increase the range. We can only have a certain size battery because of XP-1's dimensions."

Inside it looks like a regular Super 3, though a dial sits where you'd usually find a gear lever, and the speed/info twin screens have morphed into a single unit for the electric version. XP-1's dials currently show speed info as per usual, but also things like battery and motor temperature so Morgan's team can keep an eye on what its water-cooled system is up to.

There are also some chillies placed delicately on its screen. More chillies equal an active, spicier ride, and by the sound of things, it can get pretty wild, and traction control swiftly became necessary: "We quite quickly found out that traction control was almost necessary, because with more than 250 lb-ft, we found it rapidly increased the rear wheel speed." With tunable traction control, Hole and his team had some fun: "One of the benefits of our ECU is that we can calibrate the traction control—You can have a more wild mode where it lets you slide it a bit."

Under load, Hole says it sounds like something you'd hear in The Jetsons—not a noise that has been programmed and fired out through a speaker, but simply the noise the car's new drivetrain makes.

While it's very much a prototype, Morgan's design team has still had fun with it. There are 100 tiny changeable LEDs in its nose to show what drive mode it's in, or its state of charge, for example. The charge port cover is shaped like a binary "0," and the usually solid side blades are clear, giving "see-through PS1 energy," commented Head of Design Jon Wells.

So far, no one outside of the company has driven it, but Hole insists it feels like an authentic Morgan—it's small, light, and its battery is positioned high to create the sort of weight transfer you'd expect from a Super 3. "We want future electric Morgans to be the most analog EVs," Hole says, which bodes well.

Before you get too excited, it's not going into production—at least not in its current form. XP-1 isn't a preview of an upcoming model, nor is it a hint at something coming in 2025 or… whenever. It's a testbed to see what Morgan can get up to with a set of batteries, a motor, and a healthy dose of engineering.

Hole explains why the firm's talking about it now: "This is the beginning of starting to talk about it [EV development] publicly, but I think we're sort of, as a business, we're kind of pre-arming ourselves a little bit… We feel like we're doing it the right way—rather than jumping in a little bit like we did with EV3 by showing the world a prototype and then building it before we're ready."

It's a pure learning exercise. It's packed with experimental tech, neat design details, and it's the car that many fans have wanted since the ill-fated EV3 failed to appear. Why can't we have it now? It's simple: Morgan wants to get its EV solution right before committing to anything firm. The days of announcing a product and then figuring out how to make it work are over at the factory on Pickersleigh Road.

XP-1 is an open statement of intent that something is coming… one day. Whether it's got three or four wheels remains to be seen, and whether it's based on a current Morgan product at all—when Malvern's finest has its cards in order, we'll know about it.