Morris Spiaggetta

In 1969, Giovanni Michelotti had an idea that might have seemed perfectly reasonable in Turin and rather more ambitious in Birmingham: take a British Morris, dispense with nearly everything that made it a conventional motor car, and turn it into something better suited to the beaches of Australia than the traffic of an English industrial town. The resulting Morris Spiaggetta was built in Michelotti’s Turin workshop, where the designer had already experimented with the peculiar possibilities of the beach car. The DAF Alassio, later presented to the Dutch royal family as the Kini, and the Fiat 850 Shellette had demonstrated how an ordinary mechanical platform could acquire an entirely different purpose once the constraints of conventional motoring were abandoned. The Morris took that thinking beyond the Mediterranean, towards a country whose enormous coastline promised a rather different future for the Italian spiaggina. Unlike the exclusive Shellettes destined for private yachts and wealthy holidaymakers, the Morris was conceived with the possibility of series production in mind. According to Edgardo Michelotti, the prototype was presented to Morris as a potential beach vehicle for the Australian market, where its open body and uncomplicated character might have found a clientele considerably larger than the handful of customers commissioning bespoke Italian coachwork. The proposal was reportedly well received, but there was one rather inconvenient detail: the Morris model intended to provide the mechanical foundation had already gone out of production. Without a suitable donor, the project quietly ended, leaving Michelotti with a finished prototype and an Australian summer that would never materialise. The car itself proved rather more durable than the business plan. Preserved by Swiss collector Sandro De Giuli, it resurfaced at the 2023 Concours d’Élégance Suisse in Coppet and appeared again at Eclectica in Crans-Montana in 2026, where it received the Esprit d’Eclectica award. More than half a century after Morris declined to put it into production, Michelotti’s little beach car was still finding admirers, albeit considerably farther from Australia than its creator had intended.