There's no room for middle ground. My girlfriend thinks it's uglier than the Elephant Man, but I, on the other hand, love it. That's not to say I'm brave enough to suggest it's the sort of shape that has the likes of Sergio Pininfarina blubbing into his sketch book with green-eyed envy. Let's face it, the Aero 8 has a mug only a myopic mother could love. Wearing the pained expression of something that's been kneed squarely in the goolies, it looks uncomfortably squinty from all but a handful of angles. And yet, when you see it for real, witness the outrageous proportions and knee-high stature in the metal, it is gloriously gawpsome. It's not just an ugly car, it's powerfully ugly - a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse at one end and Marry Feldman's face pinned to the other.

Go on, take another look and tell me I'm wrong. That preposterously long bonnet, the gunslit windscreen and those flamboyantly swooping wheelarches rolling from stem to stern like ocean waves. It's a classic, familiar, defiantly old-fashioned shape taken to extremes by the need for aerodynamic efficiency. Critics point out, not unreasonably, that dressing such an advanced car in caricature early 20th century bodywork does the Aero 8 a grave disservice.

Point taken. But when a manufacturer has spent the last nine decades nurturing a form so distinctive that it is one of the few shapes to be granted worldwide protection by the Trademarks Registry (Coca Cola's famous curvy bottle is another), it would surely be folly to abandon it for an anonymous wind tunnelsmoothed blob. Anything else just wouldn't be a Morgan.

Besides, to fully understand how the Aero 8 stirs the emotions you need to see one in anger. Only then will you feel the jolt of adrenalin as it bursts into view. It has a brutality, a broad, road-filling seriousness that few cars possess, and you simply react to its physical presence. I guarantee the first time you see one on the road you'll be impressed.

Not as impressed as you'd be from the driver's seat, though. Evo is one of the few magazines to be offered a drive, and it's my privilege to slide into the Aero 8's snugly supportive driver's seat and venture into the hills in one of the ten handbuilt pre-production cars. Although final judgement will have to wait until we've driven the full production version, on all kinds of roads and in all conditions, this test should reveal plenty about the Morgan's dynamics.

Sitting in the Aero 8 is like finding yourself in an alien world. Tempting though it is to pore over the delicious detailing, you have to ignore it and concentrate on locating your reference points. The steering wheel, a lovely hand-made aluminium and leather Moto Lita, is upright and close to your chest, almost like an XK120 Jag's. Looking through the windscreen is more like wearing a pair of glasses, as it all but sits on the end of your nose. The bonnet is endless, stretching ahead of you like the deck of a supertanker. It dominates your line of sight so completely it's easy to miss the broad wheelarches that flare out from either side of that coffin-lid engine cover.

Perhaps because you sit so far from the pointy end, piloting the Aere, 8 in bustling traffic is