Not everything was great about the 1950s, but if there was one thing I could bring back about the era, it’s the frankly adorable commercial vans that used to tool around the streets of England. Thankfully, Morris is doing just that with its brand new all-electric Morris JE.
Morris has been making cars since the 1920s, with its iconic J-type van making a production run from 1949 to 1961. After a series of mergers that saw multiple marques, Morris was fully incorporated into the British Leyland Motor Corporation and ceased production in 1971.
In its day, the J was everything. Transport vans, ice cream trucks, ambulances, postal trucks—if you can name it, a Morris could do it. And what better way to revive a legend than to bring it back looking as gorgeous as it did back in the day but with a brand new all-electric powertrain?
The new JE is expected to have a range of 200 miles with the charger being located behind that iconic pear-shaped grille. According to Morris, you’ll be able to get up to an 80 per cent charge after only thirty minutes. It’ll have a top speed of 90 mph and almost 195 cubic feet of storage space in the back. And possibly the very best feature here is the fact that you can design your own. I am personally a big fan of bubblegum pink with cream sideboards, but that’s just because I would love nothing more than to turn the JE into a patisserie on wheels.
There currently isn’t a cost listed (a press release expects that it’ll sell for around £60,000 ($112,704), but you can sign up for the round of preorders that’ll kick off sometime in December. Production will kick off in 2021, but if you want to see the first prototype, you can find one at the Design Museum in London.