If you’re American, you probably haven’t heard or thought about the Morgan Plus Four, but its history stretches back decades.
Well, here’s a car you don’t see everyday. This week, British boutique car maker Morgan confirmed orders for its ‘Plus Four’ model are open to U.S. customers, with the first examples hitting our shores early next year, pending regulatory approval.
“What the heck is a Morgan?”, some of you may be asking. Believe it or not, the company has been building its cars for 114 years, though it’s had something of a checkered history selling its creations in the U.S. Now, alongside the Super 3 (formerly known as the 3-Wheeler), you’ll be able to buy the Plus Four as the company’s first four-wheeled car on sale in the American market for almost two decades. That said, it won’t be cheap: It will, in fact, cost you at least $84,995 to get your hands on one.
As you can tell just by looking at it, Morgan Motor Company takes a markedly different approach to virtually every other automaker, small-scale or otherwise. It still builds each of its cars by hand, and as such doesn’t build many examples for public consumption (only about 850 cars per year). The new Morgan Plus Four, which is itself a modernization of the “Morgan +4” which was intermittently produced between 1950 and 2020, rides on a new “CX-Generation” platform. And if you’ve heard about Morgan building its cars from wood, it does still use an ash timber frame for this new model.
Even so, this time capsule of a sports car still uses modern propulsion. The new Morgan Plus Four uses BMW’s 2.0-liter B48 engine, putting out 255 horsepower and 258 lb-ft of torque. Its use of a well-known engine, in part, led to Morgan’s success in actually importing this car to the U.S. for sale, though it have to work with BMW to certify its engine to meet “Special Purpose Motor Vehicle” requirements. While overseas models can get a 6-speed manual transmission, Morgan says the Plus Four will only be available in the U.S. with the standard ZF 8-speed automatic.
If you do want a Morgan Plus Four, you’ll have to go through a network of about 12 U.S. dealers (mainly on the coasts) to get your hands on one. Expect the model to be exclusive not just because of the price, but because of government provisions in the “FAST Act” (Fixing America’s Surface Transporation) that limits low-volume manufacturers to 325 replica vehicles per year. Although that legislation restricts how many vehicles Morgan can sell, it also omits the Plus Four from typical federal safety standards which would be incalculably expensive for the small automaker to overcome.
