Driven! The 2025 Morgan Plus Four Is an Exotic at a Much Nicer Price

Motor Trend

a day ago

Forbidden fruit no more! Morgan's defiantly anachronistic Plus Four roadster is now available in the U.S. The Plus Four is here thanks to a provision in the 2016 FAST Act (Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act). Under the provision, automakers building cars based on a licensed design that's at least 25 years old are now allowed to sell up to 325 replica vehicles a year in the United States without them meeting complex and costly modern U.S. safety regulations.
The 2025 Morgan Plus Four, now available in the U.S. thanks to the 2016 FAST Act, offers a vintage style with modern features. Priced at $84,995, it combines hand-built exclusivity with a BMW turbo engine, delivering 255 hp. It's a unique, charismatic alternative to pricier sports cars.
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There are a couple of caveats: Only automakers building fewer than 5,000 cars a year are eligible, and the act requires their vehicles to have engines that meet current EPA emissions standards.
The 2025 Morgan Plus Four easily qualifies on all counts. It looks as if it has driven straight out of the 1930s, with the same sweeping fenders, cutaway doors, flat windshield, and long louvered hood that four-cylinder Morgans have had for decades. It's hand-built at the factory on Pickersleigh Road in Malvern Link, England, where Morgans have been made for more than 100 years by a workforce that last year produced about 850 cars in total. And it's powered the same turbocharged four-cylinder engine that powers a range of BMWs currently sold in the U.S.
Morgan has been selling its fun and funky Super 3 three-wheeler here since 2023 (and its predecessor for years before that). But it's been 20 years since American sports car enthusiasts have been able to buy a new Morgan with a full complement of wheels between their backsides and the bitumen. The good news is the new Plus Four, which sits between the Super 3 and the new six-cylinder Supersport in the recently modernized Morgan lineup, has been worth the wait.
For all its vintage exterior style, the Plus Four is a modern car. It's built on the ultra-light CX bonded-aluminum chassis Morgan unveiled at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show and has a multilink suspension front and rear, ABS-modulated disc brakes all around, traction control, stability control, and a limited-slip differential.
A Dynamic Handling package, which includes adjustable shocks and a rear axle roll bar, is available as an option. U.K. buyers can order a Plus Four with a six-speed manual transmission, but all U.S.-market models will be equipped with BMW's smooth eight-speed automatic with Comfort, Sport, Sport+, and Manual shift modes.
The Plus Four comes standard with power steering and remote central locking, as well as a 36-month, 36,000-mile warranty. A Bluetooth-controlled Sennheiser audio system and air conditioning are available. The modern stuff you don't get is the modern stuff you won't miss, stuff like cruise control, lane keep assist, speed warning chimes.
Even with that automatic transmission, the Morgan gives serious drivers plenty to play with. In Plus Four spec, BMW's versatile B48 2.0-liter turbo-four develops 255 hp at 4,000 rpm and 295 lb-ft of torque from just 1,000 rpm to 4,300 rpm. In a car that weighs less than 2,400 pounds, that's muscle enough to get it from 0 to 60 mph in a claimed 4.8 seconds on the way to a top speed of 149 mph.
Those numbers don't tell the entire story, though. Torquey and compact—it's more than 20 inches shorter and 5 inches narrower than a base Porsche 718 Boxster, with a 13 percent better weight-to-power ratio—the Plus Four is exhilaratingly rapid on narrow, winding two-lane roads. Indeed, with the powertrain switched to Sport+ mode and using the fixed paddles behind the steering wheel to shift manually, with the wind in your hair and your elbows exposed by the cutaway doors, the Morgan feels almost as quick as a Porsche 911 Carrera from 45 mph to 100 mph.
While it's quick between the corners, once you arrive at them, the Plus Four likes to be braked early, turned in early, and have the power fed in early. The stiff, relatively short-travel suspension and the BMW engine's insistent torque mean the Morgan can feel a little skittish if the road surface is lumpy and greasy and you're too eager with your right foot. That said, once your backside is calibrated to sitting barely a foot ahead of the rear wheels, the yaw motions feel relatively relaxed.
The power steering is light and accurate, but the dialogue between the tarmac and those distant front tires is not particularly explicit. Learning to compensate for that is the key to getting the most out of this old-school roadster. It can be challenging to hustle hard, the Morgan Plus Four, but only in the sense that you must learn to work with its nuances. That said, the automatic transmission and easy torque make the Plus Four a breeze to drive around town. Punch the gas, and you'll easily plug gaps in the traffic drivers of wider modern sports cars won't dare contemplate, enjoying waves and grins from folks who wouldn't look twice at a Ferrari.
The Plus Four comes standard with 15-inch wheels, the design of which has a faintly '60s/'70s vibe, but it can be ordered with classic wire wheels in a variety of finishes, from silver to chrome to colors ranging from black and blue to red and green. The wire wheels are genuine center-lock items that fit over splined axles, which means cars ordered this way are literally built from the wheels up. Fittingly, the standard 205/60R15 tires are by Avon, a niche British brand that started making auto tires in 1906, four years before Morgan was founded, and since 1997 has been owned by Ohio-based Cooper Tire.
As the Plus Four is hand-built—each takes about a month to complete—it can be painted and trimmed exactly the way you want. For the U.S. market Morgan offers four standard solid colors, with 12 additional solid colors, 14 metallic colors, and three pearl finishes available at extra cost, all of which can be teamed with one of seven soft-top colors. And if none of those paint colors appeals, Morgan will do paint to sample.
The seats can be trimmed in one of up to 18 soft- or pebble-grain leather colors or one of five two-tone leather combinations. You can have the dash painted silver, black, or body color and have matching leather or one of seven wood veneers put on the center console if you don't want it painted black or body color.
At $84,995 (excluding import duty, sales taxes, and destination charge) the Morgan Plus Four is, in the context of a Mazda MX-5 Miata, an expensive four-cylinder roadster. But what your money buys you is an ultra-exclusive sports car from a specialist automaker that's been building cars like this for more than 110 years.
In that context, this Morgan is a stone-cold bargain when compared with, say, an Aston Martin Vantage, let alone a $4.3 million Bugatti Tourbillion. Quirky and charismatic, the Morgan Plus Four is the antithesis of today's sanitized sports cars, and it's a sports car with an arguably more authentic pedigree than a modern Porsche 911. It's not for everyone. But you wouldn't want it to be.