I’ve always been fond of the British-as-beans-in-a-teal-can cars made by Morgan, mostly because of their incredible ability to avoid real change. That’s not to say they don’t update their cars in a constant struggle to keep them just usable enough for modern standards—they absolutely do, which is what I’m going to tell you about now. But the Morgan Plus Four and Plus Six are still fundamentally glorious archaic designs, even if they do get some updates.
For the 2022 model year, Morgan has proudly issued a press release explaining the charmingly small and relatively mundane set of updates, but they are all useful things that will likely make their cars more comfortable and usable.
So, let’s see what we’ve got here!
First, Morgan’s developed a new hood! This is the British meaning of hood, so not the cover over the engine, but the folding roof over your head. There’s a new frame that eliminates the need for “hood rail fasteners,” whatever the hell those were. They sound like the kind of fussy little thing that would keep you from lowering or raising the roof, depending on what you did with it last.
They say everything is better sealed and the roof is more noise and weatherproof, and all of that seems like a pretty big deal, so, you know, good work, fellas.
Morgan also updated their badge, and this is the first time it’ll be actually used on a car. It’s a cleaner and updated take on their tradtional “wings” badge, and I think it looks quite nice.
There’s a new Active Sport Exhaust System, which basically means it’s got some valves to make it nice and loud and unrestricted on demand, but quieter when you’re trying to sneak back into your driveway without waking anyone up.
New seat designs have arrived, and it comes in two types that sound like cheap airline tickets: Comfort and Comfort Plus. I’ll let Morgan explain the new seats, mostly because I don’t feel like paraphrasing:
Inside the car, an all-new seat improves comfort, as well as driver confidence during dynamic driving. This has been achieved through reprofiled ergonomic seat padding in the base and backrest, as well as enhanced lateral and longitudinal support. It comes in two forms: the Comfort seat, which comes as standard on the Morgan Plus Four, and features adjustable lumbar support, and the Comfort Plus, which is fitted as standard to the Morgan Plus Six – and is available optionally on the Plus Four – and features increased elasticity in the seat base along with additional pneumatic adjustment to the side and thigh bolsters.
Yes, yes, increased elasticity, fantastic.
They’ve updated the lighting as well, inside and out. On the exterior, the old round sealed beams have long been replaced with units that incorporate LED DLRs, and now they have a “concierge” function, where they stay lit for 30 seconds after the car is off.
On the inside, they added some little LED lights to the rear wall of the little luggage well behind the back seats, in case you wanted to curl up and do some reading back there.
That luggage well is also the location of one of the bigger updates to the car: they’ve put what amounts to a big, lockable glove compartment back there, which is handy because there’s really no other lockable, enclosed storage on the car, so you can shove your non-bulky valuables in there.
They must have carved out the space for this area from some previously un-untilized volume of dead space, because Morgan says they didn’t steal any space from the luggage shelf to do this. I love intense space utilization, so I think this is a fantastic move. There’s no pictures of the inside of it, but if I had to estimate, I’d say it’s about the size of a large shoebox in there.
Morgan wraps up their charmingly modest set of updates with a dual USB jack, so now all passengers get five sweet, sweet volts to charge their stuff.
Way to listen to customers complain about little fussy problems and take care of them! I mean it, Morgan, I’m just glad to see updates to this incredibly long-running design.
Whatever it takes to keep some people willing to buy these. I get it.