Olde-worlde charm meets modern tech in revised manual-specced roadster
A few years ago, one of Britain’s oldest car makers entered a new, outward-looking modern era.After the business had been owned and run by the Morgan family for more than a century, a controlling share of the Morgan Motor Company was bought by Italian-led venture capital firm Investindustrial (which also remains a minority shareholder in Aston Martin Lagonda). Then, the company’s first all-new models in decades – the new Morgan Plus Four and Plus Six – entered production, based on a box-fresh aluminium platform and powered by up-to-date turbocharged BMW engines never used by the Worcestershire-based outfit before.Tradition is a concept that lies at the core of any Morgan’s appeal and yet it is a word to be applied quite carefully to this car, because this was the first four-cylinder Morgan not to use the steel ladder-frame chassis first introduced with the Morgan 4/4 of 1936. As much as 84 years is a pretty decent innings for any model platform, to Morgan diehards who have favoured what had become known as the marque’s ‘trad’ roadsters, ‘traditional’ is clearly the last thing that the new Plus Four may seem.It uses the 2.0-litre turbo four from the entry-level BMW Z4 but unlike that car can be specified with a six-speed manual (as can the range-topping Z4 now, slightly confusingly). It has been updated for 2024 but still looks mostly the same as the 1955 4/4 from which it’s loosely descended (even if the only real physical connection between the two these days is the continued use of ash wood for the frame). The Plus Four is only a few years into its current era, having switched onto an aluminium monocoque in 2020 and been zhuzhed up a couple of years later. This latest update is rather subtler: there are new one-piece light clusters at each end, the splitters are now less prominent for being painted matt black and the mirrors are lighter aluminium items. There has also been a bit of chassis fettling (which we will come onto) and the optional Sennheiser sound system has been improved.
