Morgan: US tariffs won't hurt sales, only growth

Sales of Morgan sports cars will not decline in the US despite the imposition of a 25% tariff on all foreign-built cars imported into the country, according to the marque’s managing director, Matt Hole.

Speaking to Matt Prior and Steve Cropley on Autocar’s My Week in Cars podcast, Hole said: “We gained the homologation in October last year for the Plus Four, so last year we didn't have any US Plus Four volume – it's all additional. And if you look at the 200 cars that we'll add in production this year compared to last year, that entire growth is fundamentally the US market.

“So what we don't have is a hole in the business, but what we're not getting, potentially, is as much growth as we would have liked. We are quite confident that sales of Morgans in the US won't decline significantly, based on the news.”

He conceded that the firm is likely to lose “a few sales per year” but he remained bullish because “you wouldn’t have been able to buy a four-wheeled Morgan new in the US for almost 20 years, so there’s a pent-up demand there”.

He added: “It’s not a car they can go and buy. There isn’t a Morgan in the US. There’s not a Morgan anywhere else in the world. You can’t get this hand-built, hand-crafted car, manufactured in the UK out of an ash frame; you can’t buy that anywhere else.”

Hole (pictured below) said Morgan and its dealers have decided to absorb some of the cost of the tariff so that prices will not increase dramatically for US customers. He described this as “a pragmatic solution”, having worked “really closely with the dealers”.

“We’ve done what we can to reduce the impact on the customers and it will impact us really on reducing the amount of growth that we’d anticipated for the year,” he added.