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Jun 04, 2025

Character Separates 2025 Morgan Plus Four from Everything Else

Morgan has been around since 1910, and while it refuses to let go of hand assembly, it has made concessions to modernity with this all-new Plus Four. A bonded aluminum chassis now cradles a 2.0-liter

Morgan has been around since 1910, and while it refuses to let go of hand assembly, it has made concessions to modernity with this all-new Plus Four.

A bonded aluminum chassis now cradles a 2.0-liter BMW turbocharged four-cylinder mated to a ZF automatic. It’s imported through the The Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act.

The Plus Four starts at $84,995. On sale now at 12 Morgan Dealers in the US.

If you say the new Morgan Plus Four is the best of both worlds, you’re really talking about the old world just after the Bronze Age and whatever the latest creations come from the high-tech German engineering of BMW AG.

By Morgan standards the Plus Four model line is almost new, having got its start in 1950, while the company itself traces its roots back to 1910 when founder HFS Morgan left his job at the Great Western Railway in order to build himself a cool car.

What followed was a series of ultra-classic and very fun sports cars—some with three wheels, some with four—bearing the name Morgan and built or at least overseen by generations of HFS Morgan’s descendants.

And while the chassis of Morgans themselves were never built from ash wood, the framework upon which the hand-beaten aluminum panels rest were. Thus, the 2025 Plus Four you see here has an all-new bonded aluminum chassis (called the CX internally) that is much stiffer than the steel ladder frames of yore. To that aluminum is bolted the ash wood framework upon which is hung the hand-beaten aluminum body panels.

The drivetrain starts with a BMW B48 turbocharged four-cylinder making 255 hp and 295 lb-ft of torque, mated to a ZF eight-speed automatic with paddle shifters, sending power to the rear wheels.

While 255 hp may not seem like much in this world—where even 500 hp doesn’t impress on a spec sheet anymore—the Plus Four weighs only 2,224 pounds, which is unheard of in today’s modern car market. So whatever it lacks in power it more than makes up for in power-to-weight.

The whole thing has a starting sticker of $84,995, though my particular Plus Four was optioned up to $112,193, which is pretty easy to do given the long list of about 100 options, 31 of which were on my loaner.

For instance, mine had the $2,410 adjustable dampers and a rear anti-roll bar, the $3,770 Sennheiser Bluetooth speakers, and the $1,600 air conditioning. Yes, a/c is an option—it never gets warm enough in Jolly Olde England to warrant making the comfort of climate control standard.

You can customize your Morgan with choices of 33 colors, 24 shades of leather, 21 styles of wood, nine wheel choices, seven hoods, and five radiators. Somebody multiply all those together and come up with a total number of configurations available.

“Morgan is the world’s pre-eminent coachbuilder, providing a fitting antidote to mass-produced automotive manufacturing,” the company proclaims.

Thus customized, off I drove from Morgan West (3003 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, California, www.morganwest.net) into the squiggly roads above Malibu to try it all out.

First thing you notice is that everybody likes it. Thumbs up abound—something you may not get when piloting, say, a Porsche or Ferrari. The Plus Four is non-threatening but still fun.

Up into the tortured curls of Latigo Canyon, the Morgan probably thought it was back in the Midlands, if the Midlands had brush fires and movie stars. The car felt immediately light and tossable, like a Miata with a really long hood, though it’s smaller and lighter than a Miata and has more horsepower.

While the body overall is definitely stiffer than the old car, there is still some torsional twist, as if Ucuetis—the Celtic blacksmith god—were twisting it with a giant hand on either end. You sit way at the back, almost on top of the rear axle.

I’ve never driven a Cheetah, but I imagine this might be how it feels, minus half the cylinders. You can see the hood twisting, or at least I thought I could.

Push it a little in the corners and the first thing that squeals is the inside front tire, specifically the inside edge of the inside front tire. Being on very narrow roads in a car I didn’t want to ding, I limited the amount of rear slide I could get the car to do, but you surely can slide the rear end out as much as you want.

That long hood is like an old front-engined C4, again minus half its cylinders. If you watch enough YouTube videos of Great Lakes ships, those with the wheelhouse in the stern, you get an idea.

“Enhancing occupant interaction with Plus Four has been a primary focus for the company’s design and engineering teams, and is consistent with the ethos of blending tradition with appropriate modern technology,” is how Morgan explains it.

My own occupant interaction was, indeed, my own primary focus. The car is agile, if not quite as tight as I’d like it to be.

The Plus Four has its own unique approach to cornering, one that insists you play a more involved role in its driving. You have to make slight corrections to the line as you squeal around corners. It’s not “set it and forget it” all the way to the apex and out.

The eight speeds of the ZF tranny are more than enough to access peak power at 5,000 rpm, a grand below the 6000-rev redline, while torque plateaus from right around 1,500 to 4,500 rpm.

What would I change about the car? You really can’t change anything, because once you do, it becomes less a Morgan and more some sort of generic modern “car,” one that may have traced its own inspiration back to Malvern Link in the Midlands.

A couple things that were weird and could be changed: the Bluetooth speakers can’t be linked to your phone; the seat heater knob is way down under the dash (which I didn’t find until long after I’d frozen to death in LA’s May Grey); and the top takes a good long while and an engineering degree to put up or take down.

But all that is classified under character, and character is what separates a Morgan from everything else.

Do you want character or control in a sports car? Let us know below.