Overtaking opportunities are rare on the B-roads that wend their way through the Wye Valley. Here on the border between England and Wales, a region that literally prompted the very first use of the word “picturesque,” finding a straight with sufficient visibility and length to safely pass a car ahead requires patience.

Since collecting this Morgan Plus Six from the factory, its BMW TwinPower engine has barely been tempted above tickover. The eight-speed automatic upshifts to the highest gear appropriate to road speed as I meander through the country lanes. Even so, I find myself catching up to a couple of cars that are nowhere near troubling the speed limit.

A press of the Sport + button immediately adds an eagerness to the throttle, and I slot the gear selector over to allow the use of the paddle shifters in anticipation of a possible passing shot. It comes as I round a right-hander, so I nudge the left paddle down a couple of clicks and floor it.

What follows is quite the surprise. For me—and the two dawdlers that I fly past. The acceleration is, frankly, brutal and really quite incongruous with the Morgan’s outward appearance. Then there’s the noise. A whoosh of turbos spooling up, a pop from the exhaust between upshifts, and a crackle on the overrun as I back off.

I’d experienced some of this in the Plus Four last year, but in the Six everything is cranked up above and beyond any expectation you might have from looking at it.

The styling is as traditional as ever. The flowing curves are hand-formed over an ash frame, using tools that haven’t changed for 70 years. It’s 4 inches wider than the Plus Four, to accommodate a greater track and bigger 18-inch standard alloy wheels, or 19-inch optional rims (the Plus Four runs 15-inchers). The Six also has a pair of extra driving lamps and is yet to benefit from the latest tweaks to the Four, which house indicators within the main lamp units and simplify the rear end with two instead of four taillights.

The cabin is pleasingly minimalist, with a flat painted dash, a lovely wooden center console, hand-trimmed leather, and deep wool carpets. A small digital screen is a little out of place, but the other analog instruments are spot on. Morgan’s own aluminum buttons look great, but the BMW parts are a bit of a letdown. It’s a necessary evil, of course, but the shiny gear selector, column stalks, and fixed paddles distract from an otherwise wonderfully hand-made feel.

On the plus (sorry) side, the BMW powertrain is a belter. With an extra two cylinders and 80 more horses over the Plus Four (for a total of 330) the Plus Six shaves a full second off the 0–62 mph acceleration time, bringing it down to just 4.2 seconds. Top speed increases from 149 mph to 166.

The truth is it feels even faster than that. The Plus Four I drove in the mountains of Switzerland was on winter tires, which squirmed under full load, while the Six is shod with sticky Continentals and never seems to struggle to put its power down, or trouble the now-standard ESC system.

The AP Racing brakes are superb, and so is the way the car whips through winding roads on revised bushes and dampers. Even with the heft of the bigger engine, the Plus Six only weighs 2456 pounds dry, and that gives it impressive agility through rapid direction changes. The steering is quick and decently feelsome too, loading up appropriately as the cornering forces increase.

Specs: 2024 Morgan Plus Six

• Price: £93,603 ($119,361)
• Powertrain: 3.0-liter fuel-injected, BMW TwinPower six-cylinder; 8-speed automatic transmission
• Output: 330 hp @ 6500 rpm; 369 lb-ft
• Layout: Rear-wheel-drive, two-door, two-passenger convertible
• Fuel Economy: 38 mpg (U.K.) 31.6 mpg (U.S.)
• Competitors: none

It’s a far cry from the last big-motor Morgan I drove. That was a Plus Eight, equipped with a 3.9-liter Rover V-8, and despite having only around 200 horsepower it was a wildly different ride, lacking the braking or cornering ability to match its straight-line speed. There was scuttle shake, a shocking ride quality, and attempting to drive it quickly was a white-knuckled, sweaty-palmed experience.

Some 30 years later, it’s only to be expected that the Plus Six is a marked improvement, but still its dynamic ability and outright performance are remarkable. Underneath that timeless body truly sits a modern sports car.

There is some bad news, however. Morgan has no current plans to bring the Plus Six to America. Instead, just 325 Plus Fours are to be imported each year under the Replica Bill approval process, and the Plus Six will remain forbidden fruit.

***

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Take a walk through the 100-year-old brick sheds at Pickersleigh Road in Malvern, U.K., and, at first glance, little seems to have changed in a century of Morgan manufacturing. In the woodshop, planks of locally-sourced ash are hand cut to form the frames to support aluminum bodywork. Panels are beaten into shape, in the building next door, by chaps with hammers.

Look closer, though, and you’ll notice there’s been something of a technological coup.

As recently as 1990, the Morgan Motor Company didn’t even own a computer. The company was famously frightened of progress. At the time, father and son owners Peter and Charles Morgan invited industrialist Sir John Harvey Jones to help reduce their ten-year (!) waiting list and improve profitability. Closely documented by the crew of BBC documentary Troubleshooter, the Morgans rejected Jones’ advice so they could carry on as they always had.

Charles made piecemeal progress, to be fair, increasing production and overseeing the introduction of such marvelous Morgans as the 3 Wheeler and the Aero 8, before his departure from the company in 2013. However, it is only really since Italian investment group Investindustrial took majority ownership in 2019 that a quiet revolution has transformed the boutique British car maker.

This change is not, of course, about the way Morgan motor cars look. The styling of today’s Plus Four and Plus Six are as reassuringly familiar as always. In fact the rear wing frames are still formed in the same chunky wooden mould that’s been used for the last 70 years. The cars’ long and shapely hoods continue to be gently shaped by hand, and each body panel is applied to each car individually by one craftsman.

What has changed significantly is the chassis to which the bodies are mounted. Instead of the basic steel ladder frame which dated back to 1936 all Morgans are now built on a bonded aluminum tub that comes in as a complete unit from Superform in nearby Worcester. Superform also makes the front wings for four-wheelers and all the body panels for the new Super 3, the replacement for the 3 Wheeler.

Crucially, this means that the bodies can be built separately for the first time, explains PR Manager James Gilbert.

“The problem that we would come up against was that we’d build the platform, build the body on top of it and then go and paint the body,” says Gilbert. “When the body was being painted, you would just have platform sat around needlessly. What happens now is, your car will start in the woodshop where the wooden frame gets made, it then gets paneled, fitted up with its wings, and bonnet (hood).

“At the point when it goes to get painted we start building the chassis, so when the car has been painted, the chassis is built just in time for the marriage to happen. Before we could never build the body panels off the chassis, because each one was just so different, we had to build the car as a whole. We were used to it, but in modern manufacturing it’s just such an alien idea.”

It still takes around 150 hours to build each car, but the process is more efficient, and, of course, the car itself is far more sophisticated. Turbocharged BMW four- and six-cylinder engines are smooth, powerful, reliable, and automatic transmissions  with shift paddles are proving appealing, with 60 percent of buyers opting for two pedals rather than three.

Then there’s the new Super 3. With 500 of these new-era three-wheelers ordered before it had even been launched, the Super 3 is set to become Morgan’s best-selling model. And quite the game changer—it’s the first Morgan in more than a century to be built without an ash frame. The chassis and bodywork comes in from Superform and Morgan’s craftsmen assemble the Super 3s in one shed, each taking around a week to build. Sounds of sawing and hammering are nowhere to be heard.

Morgan says it will be able to build 400 Super 3s per year in this fashion, compared to 350 Plus Fours and 250 Plus Sixes with its traditional body-on-frame designs—which, don’t worry,  will remain a staple for four-wheeled Morgans long into the future.

“The frames are designed in CAD, but they’re still made by hand. You’ve got this wonderful mix of craftsmanship and technology, using the same processes that the generations have used before,” adds Gilbert.

It’s no secret that Morgan will soon be electrifying its line-up. The wonderful, steampunk-styled EV3 concept demonstrated the company’s vision for a three-wheeled electric sportster. It came close to production but was ultimately shelved. The Super 3 has been designed from the outset to take an electric powertrain, but, says Gilbert, we may see a different Morgan EV before that arrives. He doesn’t give anything else away.

In the meantime we can expect more special projects as Morgan works closely with customers to create short-run and one-off models such as the off-road CX-T, the LM62 or the Plus 8 GTR.

Skunkworks aside, the Morgan factory is open to the public. Some 30,000 people take tours every year, guided by former workers or enthusiastic owners. There’s a wonderful museum inside that charts over a century of history, plus a café that hosts regular cars-and-coffee events.

For a company that once seemed willfully stuck in the past, Morgan is welcoming the future. In its own way, of course. Here’s to another 100 years.

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