Morgan Plus Four at 75: from 68bhp to nearly four times more

Not the first time they’ve done that recently: the Super 3 was only meant to be an engine change for the 3 Wheeler. I think it’s the consistency of the Plus Four that has allowed those models to evolve. And I wonder if the diversification of the range actually reinforces the identity, the central traditional appeal, of the 75-year-old Morgan. 

If you’ve always wanted a Morgan, it will look like a Plus Four. I haven’t driven an original Plus Four before, but Martyn Webb, Morgan’s archivist, has owned his 1953 car (the same as a 1950 one) for 40 years. In the mid-1950s, Morgan introduced a curved grille and a Triumph TR2 engine, which a lot of owners latterly fitted to earlier cars, so there aren’t so many original original Plus Fours like Webb’s. 

See an old and a new Plus Four together and it’s notable how much taller and more ground clearance the former has. If, like me, you’re used to a Plus Four looking like the later one, it’s a surprise to note how different they are although with them back to back, you can spot those trademark wheel arches. 

This is a shape that a car designer wouldn’t draw these days, as Jon Wells, Morgan’s designer of the past 17 years, tells me: there are circles and curves whose centres don’t match each other, and the wheel is offset within them “perfectly imperfectly”. But it does give the Plus Four its enduring, unique, shapely rear.

In an original Plus Four, you sit upright and close to the dashboard, to give you leverage over the large, unassisted steering wheel. The H-pattern gearbox needs more rev-matching than a new car, but it’s very accurate, it’s snickety and there’s a lot of torque. The steering lightens as you pick up speed. 

Morgan’s introduction in 2020 of its new CX aluminium architecture (launched 110 years after the company’s founding) was perhaps the biggest change in the Plus Four’s history. So it’s testament to Wells and his team’s work that the car still looks so familiar to the mind’s eye.

So it’s testament to Wells and his team’s work that the car still looks so familiar to the mind’s eye. “It doesn’t look like it but it has been redesigned,” Wells says. “That’s the game on the Plus Four: preservation.”

Discreetly, as the car recently got wider, the headlights got bigger, to retain familiarity. The Plus Four of today feels much more sophisticated, of course (optional dampers make the ride a particular pleasure), but the headline we ran in 1950 – high performance, light car – is one we could still run now. 

Let’s hope that in 2100 it could read the same way again – and that they’re still squeezing those wheel arches out of the same press.