The 3-Wheeler is a fantastic car to drive. It’s all about sensations. Like going back in time to pure driving experience. You are sitting so low that you can touch the tarmac if you want. The steering is direct, no assistance at all, and you can see the exact path the front tyres go to.
You may think that the 3-Wheeler is quite an uncomfortable car to drive, and that after some kilometers behind the wheel you’ll have all your body in pain. But that’s not exactly true. To be fair, the 3-Wheeler is far away from the comfort of a modern car, but it’s not such a torture rack. In fact, it’s surprisingly comfortable for the concept and characteristics of the vehicle.
So, despite most of its owners use it just for daily drives, AM and I plan to make longer getaways, whether it’s a weekend or even a week or more.
But for this kind of “long range campaigns” as we like to call these longer trips, the 3-Wheeler shows one of its obvious weaknesses: a very limited space for luggage.
You only have a molded plastic boot inner tray over the back wheel. And this space accepts a couple of small size soft bags. Maybe a third if you find the correct bags combination.
There is a nice option that we bought when we ordered the little rocket: the luggage rack. This option allows you to add extra luggage up to 22-25 kg on top of the boot. It is a chromed stainless steel rack, and the fixings of the last version that we have are frankly well resolved. The system may not be perfect, as to open the boot you must remove the rack completely, releasing it from its front fixings that are mounted on the roll hoops. If these bindings had a simple hinge system, allowing the grill to pivot to vertical position and open the boot without inference, it would be almost perfect.
You can put on this luggage rack anything you want with a weight limit of 22 – 25 kg. The bag or trolley you’ll put on it will be fully exposed to driving and weather conditions, and it will obviously affect aesthetically the look of the 3-Wheeler.
We looked at different bags options that could result elegant and practical at the same time. We admit we had nice laughs looking at some weird pictures of luggage solutions in the internet, obviously taken just for fashion purposes…
But we thought that, being the 3-Wheeler a unique kind of vehicle, it doesn’t deserve a bag that breaks its aesthetics. So, we ended up ordering a tailor-made luggage set, trying to maintain the elegant look, but optimizing the trapezoidal shape of the luggage rack.
We designed the bags and discussed with our fantastic upholsterer the way to make them elegant, practical, and easy to fix on the rack. We chose the same weatherproof dark brown leather than the interior, which is also the same we used for AM’s back cushion (see our post “Hangar works #3 – The back cushion for AM“) and the steering wheel bag (see our post “Hangar works #1 – The steering wheel“).
The upholsterer made a couple of beautiful pieces of art, with quilted exterior, green piping matching with the Morgan Sports Green color of the body, and nice and smooth cotton fabric interior.
The large bag is larger than a regular cabin-sized trolley. And the small one is half the size of a cabin-sized trolley. A good combination.
Adjustable shoulder straps, removable thanks to 360º rotating carabiners and double metallic lockable zipper.
In the above picture you can see the green piping detail, and the leather belt clips to secure the bag to the rack with a luggage strap.
This is how they look on the luggage rack.
The bags are not too wide, so they don’t result too tall while put on the luggage rack.
We got a couple of leather luggage straps. Passing them through the side leather clips of each bag, they fix them securely to the rack.
In the above pictures the luggage straps are not really tightened, but with these, we may not need any extra fixing to be sure the bags won’t move!
We really love the result! And they match in perfection with the car interior and the steering wheel bag.
IMPROVEMENT: before our long range campaign to the Swiss border, we improved the luggage set, in a very simple way: we added a third transversal strap, so the big bag has now two straps fixing it to the luggage rack, and a long longitudinal one that goes over the two bags all along them. The result is a perfect and secure holding of the bags. They don’t move a single milimeter whatever the speed and curves are! You can see the final result in the nice following picture!
We hope you like the result too!
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