One Customer's Question Turned Morgan's Roadster Into a Nine-Off Coachbuilt Coupe

Morgan doesn't usually need much of an excuse to build something strange and wonderful, but this time the spark came from outside the factory gates. After the open-top Midsummer Barchetta sold out almost as soon as it launched in 2024, a customer asked the obvious follow-up question: could it work as a closed coupe? Instead of simply dropping a hardtop onto the existing car, Morgan treated the request as a full coachbuilding project, and the result is the Midsummer Coupe — a nine-car run that was fully spoken for before most people even knew it existed.

Pininfarina, the design house behind the original Barchetta, returned to handle the transformation. Rather than just capping the roadster, the team reworked the entire silhouette so the roofline flows cleanly into the tail, giving the car a fastback-like profile it never had in open form. Most of that roof panel is glass, which keeps the cabin bright and stops the added structure from visually weighing down what was previously a svelte, top-down machine.

The engineering behind that roof turned out to be far more involved than a simple bolt-on fix. Morgan describes it as requiring a genuinely different approach to the car's architecture, with billet-machined aluminum A-pillars, bonded structural glazing, and countersunk riveted construction all working together to stiffen the body. Despite that added hardware, the Coupe ends up only about 2.5% heavier than a Supersport fitted with a hardtop — a remarkably small penalty for going from an open roadster to a fully enclosed grand tourer.

That's arguably the whole point of the exercise. Morgan says the sealed roof brings real gains in refinement, weatherproofing, and touring range, meaning owners can actually use the Midsummer Coupe as a proper long-distance car rather than a fair-weather toy that gets parked the moment clouds roll in.

Familiar Morgan touches carry over from the Barchetta, including the hand-formed vented fenders, polished stainless steel trim, and door handles that blend into the aluminum beltline running down the car's spine. New forged 19-inch multi-spoke wheels distinguish the Coupe visually, while the reshaped roof also frees up a little extra room behind the seats' headrests inside the two-seat cabin, which mixes leather, wood, and aluminum finishes.

Peel back all that hand-formed aluminum bodywork, though, and Morgan's oldest tradition is still there: a wooden chassis frame sits underneath it all, just as it has in Morgans for generations. Power comes from the same source as the Barchetta too — a BMW-supplied 3.0-liter inline-six, mounted to the marque's familiar aluminum platform.

With all nine examples already claimed, each buyer gets to personalize their car to their own taste, turning what began as one customer's curiosity into a genuinely bespoke, ultra-limited grand tourer that blends old-world coachbuilding with modern engineering rigor.