Key considerations
• Available for £45,000
• 2.0-litre turbo four, rear-wheel drive
• Plenty quick enough in either manual or auto guise
• Big strides forward in dynamics, build quality and customisability
• £45k for a unique, hand-built and well-built car
• Buy it, enjoy it, and sell it for low-cost memories
This time we’re scoping out the Morgan Plus Four, previously known as the Plus 4, a ‘trad’ Morgan that’s been around in substantially the same visual form for over 75 years. Actually it’s more than just visual. You could take bits off a 1950 Plus 4 and put them on a 2025 Plus Four, or vice versa, sort of.
That kind of interchangeability over such a long timeframe makes no commercial sense for mainstream car manufacturers who depend on decay and change for their survival. The catalysts for change are safety, efficiency, performance, durability, comms technology and staying in tune with fashion.
It’s different at Morgan. For them, it’s about preservation, not decay. Fashion is something that happened a very long time ago. They latched on to a look that was once normal and stuck with it. Today that look is unique and still loved by enough people to keep the tills ringing. As long as they can keep ahead of the curve in the right areas there’s zero reason to suppose that people will stop buying them. As Soichiro Honda said, “in the future there will be just half a dozen car companies… and Morgan.”
Coachbuilding cars isn’t necessarily seen as a positive these days, and it’s a fact that in order to sell cars in viable numbers Morgan is having to toe more mainstream lines, but they’ve been managing that process brilliantly with the considered replacement (in some cases only very recently) of the old manual tooling stations that have been in use for many decades by CNC machines and 3D printers. They’re still hand-working wood and sheet metal, but the improvement in build quality brought about by the judicious introduction of smart machinery means that the Morgan buyer now needs to make far fewer allowances about their purchase.
Five years ago the move to the new and much stiffer CX bonded aluminium chassis would have passed most onlookers by, because the car still looked the same, but it was probably the most significant change in Morgan’s long history. Ash was still used for the frame that supported the hand-beaten body panels, not just because it was cool and different but also because it made (and continues to make) engineering sense. More on that in the Body section of this story.
Another area in which the Plus Four has managed to stay on point is performance. 75 years ago, the insertion of a 2.0-litre Standard engine caused much excitement in the Morgan fraternity. The engine in the 2020-on Plus Four that we’re looking at today, BMW’s B48 TwinPower 2.0 litre, has moved the game on in a similar way. Producing 258hp and 258lb ft it’s the first turbocharged four-pot to be used by Morgan. The choice of auto or manual gearboxes was another first for the Plus Four, which stayed true to another key Morgan mission statement: lightness. It only just edged over the 1,000kg mark in either manual or automatic form. Speed was guaranteed.
A series of worthwhile updates in the 2020s have taken in the type of enhancements that other manufacturers have been routinely supplying for yonks but that count as major advances in the Morgan community, like selectable Sport/Sport+ modes, electronic stability control and posh audio components. Nevertheless, although more powerful CX-chassised Morgans like the Plus Six (now the Supersport) have been allowed to depart a little more from the core ‘look’, the relatively slender Plus Four with its narrower body, shorter wishbones and downsized wheels and tyres retains a good dollop of authenticity.
At launch in 2020, new Plus Four prices started at under £63k for the manual. As of November 2025, the entry price before options had risen to £69,995. At the time of writing order slots were still open for seventy-five Plus Four 75 cars slated for delivery next summer (2026) at prices starting from £75k, in celebration of 75 years of the Plus 4/Four (sorry about all the 75s and Fours there).
Used CX Plus Fours with low enough mileages to qualify them as the next best thing to new start at £45k. When Volkswagen is asking similar money for a Golf GTI, that seems like a bargain for a hand-built and totally unique sports car. The cheapest one we saw for sale in the UK at that money – or even less, if you’re good with VAT – was available in PH classifieds. We’ll give you a link to it in the Verdict at the end.
SPECIFICATION | MORGAN PLUS FOUR (2020-)
Engine: 1,999cc four-cyl turbo
Transmission: 6-speed manual (or 8-speed auto), rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 258@4,400rpm
Torque (lb ft): 258@1,000-4,300rpm
0-60mph (secs): 5.0 (4.6 auto)
Top speed (mph): 149 (auto)
Weight (kg): 1,013 (1,009 auto)
MPG (official combined): 39 (40 auto)
CO2 (g/km): 165 (159 auto)
Wheels (in): 15
Tyres: 205/60
On sale: 2020 - on
Price new: £62,995 (£64,500 auto)
Price now: from £45,000
Note for reference: car weight and power data is hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive
ENGINE & GEARBOX
Like today’s Plus Four, the previous non-CX Plus 4 was also powered by a 2.0-litre engine, but that was a normally aspirated Ford GDI unit producing around 150hp. The change to BMW’s twin-scroll turbo 2.0 with variable valve timing and lift (as seen in the Z4) added over 100hp to that, and knocked at least 2.5 seconds off the Plus Four’s 0-60mph time.
The power and torque specs put out by Morgan for the CX Plus Fours at launch in 2020 were 258hp at 4,400rpm and 258lb ft from 1,000-4,300rpm. In 2025, they’re claiming an even wider torque spread from 1,000rpm to 5,000rpm, with peak power at 5,500rpm. However you interpret them, we’re talking about great power to weight figures here, and a car that doesn’t need to try too hard to thramp up the road at a rate of knots or (with the stability control disabled) kick the back end out in a non-threatening manner.
The new Four was also a lot more efficient than the old Ford-powered car in either manual or auto guise, but especially with ZF’s 8HP well-regarded eight-speed automatic in place. Instead of 29mpg from the Ford motor you were getting 40mpg with the auto or 39mpg with the manual box. Those numbers were real. The tank was not particularly large at 55 litres, or 12 gallons, but 300 miles between fills was easily achieved.
The auto Plus Four was noticeably quicker through the 0-60mph than the manual (4.6 seconds vs 5.0 seconds). The box performed very well on a sporting drive and was easy in traffic if you weren’t too bothered about the odd jerky change from first to second. Ease of driving figures quite low on the list of desirable attributes for Morgan fans who have historically always been able to derive pleasure from crudity. That’s why for every Four auto you’ll find for sale in the classifieds there’ll be two manuals.
The manual had a decent if not spectacularly slick change and pedals that were well placed for heeling and toeing as long as you weren’t too tall, like 6ft 4in or thereabouts, in which case you might find the manual physically impossible to drive. Gearing on the manual was long – 1,500rpm in sixth was enough for 70mph, compared to 1,900rpm for the same speed in the auto’s top gear – but there was enough power on hand to achieve and maintain high speeds despite the aerodynamically unhelpful body shape. Six-cylinder Morgans didn’t have a manual option.
In terms of potential mechanical issues, the B48 used to have a reputation for cracks in its original oil filter housing that could lead to leaks of either oil or coolant. We’re saying ‘used to’ there because the placement units don’t seem to suffer from the same fate, which is handy as its position under the intake manifold means a fair amount of disassembly for access and a big bill from a BMW dealer if you ask them to do it. Ascertaining cooling system levels wasn’t facilitated by the use of aluminium for the tanks with no external sight gauges. Redesigned coolant tank caps that made life easier for owners were issued in May 2023. Water pumps and coolant return line hoses can cause problems. It’s important to check for drips under the car, to keep an eye on the integrity of any Jubilee-clipped joints and to look out for any signs of oil/coolant mixing.
The B48 is a direct injection engine and technically prone to carbon buildup in the intake valve area but other technologies have come along in more recent times to reduce the likelihood of this happening. The turbo charge pipe has been known to crack under high boost pressures however, and the PCV (positive crankcase ventilation) system can degrade, leading to oil leaks.
Sport+ mode delivered a sharper throttle response and some pops and bangs through the optional ‘adaptive’ sports exhaust that might not be to everyone’s taste. Some owners have reported the car sticking in Sport+ mode and refusing to come out of it even when the S+ button was pressed and held in as per the instructions in the handbook.
Pre-2010, Plus 4 servicing intervals were every 5,000 miles or 12 months. From 2010 the mileage intervals were extended to 10,000 miles/12 months and that continues to apply to the new Plus Four. At a respected specialist such as Allon White in Cranfield a ‘medium’ service on the old pre-2020 Plus 4 will typically cost £300-£500, or £800 for a full service. For the CX Plus Four Allon White will ask £435 for an ‘interval’ service or £665 for a full service. They recommend annual servicing irrespective of mileage and will advise you on the right service for your car based on its mileage and previous service history. Parts availability is excellent through the dealer network or via specialists like VSM in Malvern and insurance costs are surprisingly low.
CHASSIS
The Plus Four has been described as the ‘driver’s Morgan’. Its bonded and riveted aluminium tub chassis was almost the same as the Plus Six/Supersport’s, with only three per cent of components being carried over from the old Plus 4. It’s currently fabricated and put together outside of Morgan’s Malvern facility by one of their partners in the West Midlands, but there is talk of bringing it in-house at some point in the future.
Suspension was independent all round with double wishbones. The steering was significantly improved over the old model’s, and surprisingly light. Overall, it was more planted on a smooth road than any of its predecessors and the balance was great, but it could still be a fidgety thing in the classic mould on bumpy roads. Morgans are light, which is a good thing, but some owners have wondered what it might be like being thrown and bounced around a bit less. Outfits like SLS (Suspension Supplies Ltd) offered a front suspension kit with progressive (rising rate) springs and adjustable Spax dampers to bring an extra degree of compliance, and Nitron had a full set of dampers that were adjustable for both damping and ride height. They weren’t cheap at £3,000+ a set but by all accounts the difference over the standard suspension was night and day.
Fitting Nitrons opened up a whole new world of maintainable speed and knocking on from that some newfound weaknesses in the braking department. Improved AP Racing brakes were fitted on ’23 model year cars. We gather that it wasn’t possible to retrofit that equipment to earlier CXs but of course there were many aftermarket pad options to explore. Litchfield for example was offering a kit consisting of Pagid front brake pads and better brake fluid. Morgan now has a Dynamic Handling Pack with adjustable suspension and a rear anti-roll bar.
The things you need to watch out for on Morgans aren’t mileage-related. Well, they are. but not in the normal way. Any of the problems you might have are more likely to be related to low mileage, not high, like tyres that are perishing or flat-spotted from being sitting around in a garage for weeks or months waiting for a good weather day, sediment accumulation, dried-out gaskets and so on.
It’s good practice to have the tracking checked as this can go out of alignment quite easily. The process of combining four-wheel tracking and levelling up the chassis with shims is known as ‘flat flooring’ and recommended at around £300.
Many Morgan owners wouldn’t dream of anything other than the painted 15-inch wire wheels that Plus Fours generally came with but outfits like Williams Automobiles in Chipping Sodbury could very easily tempt you with their lovely Minilite-style wheels. Replacing the standard 205/60 tyres will never be expensive. Conti All Seasons are not much more than £100 each and budget brand hoops are as little as £40 a throw.
BODYWORK
A Morgan doesn’t have a wooden chassis but even on modern CXs like the Plus Four they do still fit a non-structural, hand-cut, biscuit-jointed ash frame onto the aluminium tub and it’s this that supports the single-skin aluminium body panels. Ash is used because it’s fast-growing, resulting in fewer branches or knots to disfigure it and change it over time, potentially causing issues. It’s all FSE-approved kiln-dried wood, most of it coming from a long-established Lincolnshire forest. Although ash is classified as a hardwood, it’s actually soft and easy to work with and it helps to absorb vibration. The curves worked into the ash frame by Morgan’s artisans determine the shape of the aluminium panels that are hammered and pinned onto them.
The front wheelarches or fenders of a Plus Four dominate the view ahead and make it easy to place the Morgan very precisely on a narrow road. LED headlights were standard. By 2024 the indicators had been incorporated into the headlight units to get rid of the separate lenses and the wings were reshaped. Similarly, the rear indicators and brake lights were aggregated into one lens unit and the diffuser was redesigned. These changes really cleaned up the look of both ends of the car, although the switch to a cheap-looking boot badge was a retrograde step in the eyes of many. The polycarbonate sliding windows were a relic of bygone times, as were the external door handles and the machined aluminium external mirrors which looked great but didn’t give you much of a view to the rear.
There were reports of bubbling paint on windscreen pillars on early CX Plus Fours. This was recognised by Morgan and corrective work has been carried out under warranty. Sidescreen frames have suffered from broken welds, causing fitment issues for the mohair hood.
‘Wet leg syndrome’ on fast roads in rainy weather can still be a thing even on modern Morgans like these. Velcroing foam and D-profile strips along each door edge greatly improves matters by reducing the invasion of not just water but also wind noise when the hood was up. Sticking some silicon into any gaps around sometimes poorly fitted screens helps, too. On the subject of the hood, deploying that used to be an operation best avoided as it was painfully involved and slow, but it’s become a lot easier on these later models.
There are three wiper arms, a Morgan quirk since at least the days of the old Plus 8s in the 1970s. On some cars, the two outer arms can make clonking contact with the screen frame. This is usually because someone has mistakenly fitted 205mm or even 208mm blades when they should be 200mm. There again 195, 195 and even 210 length blades will work OK depending on which arm you put them on. The wiper arms can solve this clonking problem for you by falling off if you don’t notice them sneakily unscrewing from their drives. These arms are different lengths. We’re not sure what the correct array is, but one owner reported having R1, R2 and R3 length arms on his car, while another had R1, R2, and R1 again.
The standard fuel cap was not lockable but firms like Newton Equipment do locking ones. Replacing the fiddly fuel cap with a big chromey one from Pinnacle is a popular mod. So is tightening the doors so that they don’t fly back and cover your pants with muck every time you open them on an upslope or in the wrong kind of wind.
INTERIOR
The analogue interior contained many natural materials including Scottish leather (only A grade stuff used throughout, very customisable for the seats), box-weave wool carpets and veneers in walnut, ash, zebrano or practically any other wood you can think of, all mixed in with space-age features like Bluetooth for your phone or, in the case of an auto, BMW’s jarringly modern gear selector. For some, the matt black wood featured on the dash and transmission tunnel of the press car did a disappointingly convincing impression of plastic, but the general fit and finish and the operation of the minor controls on these trad Morgans has become good by any standards, let alone handbuilt ones. Heating was powerful and cosy (for your lower half anyway), even when the top was down.
Unlike older Plus 4s which could be had in two- or four-seat formats, the newer ones are only capable of carrying two people. The seat padding was revised for the new Plus and helped to hold you in place. Comfort Plus seats were a £600 extra and heating for them was also reasonably priced at £420. Air-con was a bit more expensive at £1,325 although this did become standard in cars with a Touring pack. Some owners have noticed their AC apparently cycling through hot and cold of its own accord. In some cases, they’ve been told by dealers that the system needed regassing, hmm. Morgan’s factory answer was that it was normal for the AC not to blow continuous cold air through as it would turn off once it reached 5 degrees celsius and not turn back on again until the cabin temp got back up to 12 degrees.
Plus Four storage wasn’t brilliant. Unlike in the Supersport there was no boot at all, so if you wanted to carry big bags the only way to do that was to fit a luggage rack on the rear panel or hope your other half didn’t mind you shoving bags into their footwell. There was a parcel shelf of sorts behind the seats, but the taller you were the more you had to crank the seats back and the less space you had for your (presumably large) clothes. The only door pockets were optional leather slip affairs that didn’t hold much more than a few receipts.
Resourceful owners have come up with neat extra storage solutions of their own, like cheap elastic nets that could be fixed to the factory pockets with the existing fasteners, and/or basic cupholders bought off tinternet and Velcroed to the passenger side of the transmission tunnel. There were USB sockets but they were a bit buried away in the back of the small glove box. Wind noise at motorway speeds would bring instant dismissal for the NVH engineers at any other car company, but it’s all part of the Morgan experience.
PH VERDICT
The average bod in the street is generally going to think that a modern Morgan is the same as an old one, but the reality is that it’s gone through some very clever design integration work in the face of ever-changing legislative demands to achieve and maintain that visual trick, while also improving the dynamics. In this department, Morgan cars remain imperfect, and that’s dictated to a large extent by the design. Again there have been big steps in the right direction in comparatively recent times. In any case imperfection is a big part of the appeal for owners who fondly remember a time when mending and/or improving cars was not only allowed but essential, and doable.
It doesn’t make much sense to spend another £20k or so on a Supersport when the 2.0 four provides all of the performance most of us would ever need or want in a car of this type. A mid four-second 0-60mph time might not sound that impressive but it certainly feels it when you’re experiencing it from the wide end of a hand-louvred pre-war bonnet. The only thing you might wish for in the Plus Four would be a more evocative exhaust noise, but you can’t have everything.
The level of effort you put into the ownership of a CX Plus Four can be as high or as low as you like. Either way, you’ll reap the rewards of a wonderfully unique and charming relationship – and it will almost certainly be a cheap one too thanks to low depreciation and what we think are low initial buy-in costs for what you’re getting.
Although there were fewer than twenty new-gen Plus Fours for sale at the time of going to press in November, the length of time that some of these cars have been on sale suggests that it’s still a buyer’s market. Six months sitting in the garage or on the dealer’s sales floor is quite normal. One car that started off at a whisker under £90k in December ’24 was still available in Nov ’25 having had its price dropped by 16 per cent to £75k, but you could argue that that one was overpriced to start with.
Only two of the cars we saw on PH classifieds had more than 8,000 miles on them. As mentioned at the beginning of this story, the odd car will come up at £45k. The lowest-priced new-gen Plus Four we found for sale in the UK in November 2025 was this 2,400-mile 2021 manual at £44,995, which is about £5k below the average starting price for one of these. That was a VAT-qualifying car too, so if you were registered for VAT you could reclaim it.
A £50k budget will give you a wider choice and a better chance to get into the kind of car you might have specced for yourself. Here’s a ’21 manual in red with 8,000 miles at £49,950. For just £45 more than that you could be in this very nice black ’22 automatic with just 725 miles, tan leather seats and £20k worth of options. Set that £50k against the £70k being asked for a brand new Plus Four manual and you can see that depreciation isn’t really an issue. Indeed, you might well think that £75k is quite cheap for a brand new, coachbuilt, high-character vehicle with modern mechanicals and your very own unique combination of paint, leather and weather protection, safe in the knowledge that any Morgan will always sell at good money as long as you’re not in a rush.
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