Morris Minor

Among the 16 Morris Motors entries in the MotorJury library, the Morris Minor holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1928. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Morris Minor properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1920s were the vintage era, when coachbuilt bodies, six- and eight-cylinder engines and the first true luxury marques defined a golden age of craftsmanship. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the DKW DKW Typ P, the Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz W06, the Plymouth Plymouth — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Morris Minor reads like this: the record lists its engine as Wolseley 847 cc single OHC / Morris 847 cc side-valve Straight-4 Engine clutch and gearbox mounted as a unit at four points on rubber washers.; quoted output is 20 bhp @4,000 rpm / 19.25 bhp @4,000 rpm / Tax horsepower 8.06; kerb weight is recorded at 700 kg 13¾ cwt (2-door saloon) ; drive goes through three speed gearbox / central gear change lever / Clutch: single plate dry / propeller shaft: inside torque tube / Hardy disc joints / final drive: spiral bevel / four speed gearbo; the layout is front engine rear wheel drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 29 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear. Production is recorded at 86,318 units, which makes it a solid production run.

Its place in the Morris Motors story

Within Morris Motors's own catalogue the Morris Minor sits alongside the Morris Big Six, the Morris Eighteen, the Morris Fifteen, the Morris Fourteen. The record names the none as its predecessor and the Morris Eight as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to layout = front engine rear wheel drive. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Cowley, Oxford (Cowley plant).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Morris Minor was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.