Plus 4, Plus 8, and Plus Six

Morgan Plus 4, Plus 8, and Plus Six

Few car companies have built the same basic recipe for as long as Morgan has: an ash-framed body over a hand-built two-seat roadster chassis. From its Malvern Link, Worcestershire factory, occupied since 1914, Morgan has kept using ash wood, hand-cut in its own woodshop from locally sourced timber, to frame the aluminium bodywork of its traditional models well into the 21st century, even as the chassis underneath moved from steel ladder-frame construction to bonded aluminium. It is a construction method more associated with pre-war coachbuilding than with a still-operating car manufacturer, and it is central to how Morgan has positioned itself against mass production for more than a century.

The Plus 4 is the clearest illustration of that continuity paired with real underlying change. Announced at the 1950 Earls Court Motor Show on a widened, lengthened version of the 4/4 chassis, it launched with a 2088cc Standard Vanguard engine. Morgan then followed Triumph's sports-car engine line closely: the TR2 unit from 1953, the TR3 from 1956, and the enlarged TR4 unit from 1962. When Triumph discontinued the relevant engine, Morgan had to find a new supplier. That pattern would recur throughout the Plus 4's life. The name was revived in 1985 with a Fiat twin-cam four (only 144 built in under three years), then carried Rover engines (M16, later T16) through the 1990s on a widened, Plus-8-derived chassis, before pausing again around 2000. It reappeared again in 2004-2005 with a Ford Duratec 2.0-litre four on the traditional steel/ash chassis, a configuration that lasted until 2020. Treated honestly, this is not one car but a series of genuinely distinct Plus 4 generations sharing a name and a silhouette.

The Plus 8, launched in 1968, was born from necessity: when Triumph's engine supply for the Plus 4 dried up, Morgan struck a deal with Rover for its newly developed, all-aluminium V8 (originally a Buick design) and built a wider, more powerful car around it. Over a production run that (with a pause) extended to 2004, the V8 grew from 3528cc to as much as 4555cc, and the Plus 8 became Morgan's signature fast car: reportedly the quickest-accelerating British production car at its 1968 debut. Published totals for the original run differ widely: conceptcarz gives roughly 3,500 cars (3,506), while a Classics World buyer's guide gives 6,000 units. The Plus 8 name returned a second time from 2012 to 2018, now on Morgan's modern bonded-and-riveted aluminium Aero-derived chassis with a BMW 4.8-litre V8, before bowing out again.

Morgan's cars have long been sold against famously long order queues, variously described as six months in easier periods and as long as ten years at points in the company's history. The queues were long enough that in the 1990s the Morgan family reportedly brought in the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones partly to help shorten the list and improve the business's profitability. That scarcity-by-craft image sat alongside a company that, until 2019, had never been owned by anyone outside the Morgan family. That changed when Investindustrial acquired a majority stake in March 2019, with the family retaining a minority holding and a stewardship role, and with management and staff also gaining a share in the business for the first time.

2019 was also the year Morgan reinvented its flagship two-seater. The Plus Six, revealed at the Geneva Motor Show, introduced the CX-Generation platform: an in-house-designed bonded-aluminium structure claimed to roughly double the torsional stiffness of the earlier Aero-era aluminium chassis while staying under 100kg, still clothed in the traditional ash-framed bodywork and swept-wing silhouette. It paired that new structure with Morgan's first-ever turbocharged engine and first six-cylinder engine, a BMW 3.0-litre B58 unit, giving the classic-looking roadster genuinely modern performance. The following year, the Plus 4 name returned once more (this time as 'Plus Four') on the same CX platform, with a BMW 2.0-litre turbo four replacing the outgoing Ford Duratec engine and steel chassis.

The wing-bodied V8/six-cylinder flagship lineage that began with the 1968 Plus 8 came to a close in early 2025, when Morgan ended Plus Six production with a 30-unit 'Plus Six Pinnacle' special edition, succeeding it with the Supersport: a related but visually distinct coupe-styled flagship built on an evolved version of the CX platform with a BMW turbocharged six. The Plus Four, on the four-cylinder CX platform, continues in production as Morgan's traditionally styled entry point.

Taken together, the Plus 4, Plus 8, and Plus Six trace three overlapping threads of the same idea: a hand-built, ash-framed two-seat roadster whose engine and chassis technology were repeatedly replaced. Engines came from Standard, Triumph, Fiat, Rover, Ford, and finally BMW, and steel ladder-frame chassis gave way to bonded aluminium. The silhouette, the woodshop, and the Malvern factory stayed recognizably the same.