Online sale sees Morgan’s Plus 8 taking the wrong line

How much for a two-owner, 6000-mile Morgan Plus 8? Considerably more than 21 grand is the answer. That’s how the market valued Brightwells’ lovely period brown Plus 8 with a warranted 6846 miles and 43 years with the last owner. Complete with the original 1978 selling invoice from Malvern Sports Cars, 18 old Mots and multiple servicing invoices, this was the sort of Morgan you dream about but never find. It sold for a premium-inclusive £21,392. I can remember a time when such a tiny-mileage, museum grade, Seventies Plus 8 would have been the talk of the market and sell for an easy £60k to £70k.

Don’t get me wrong, the Plus 8 has never been the bellwether of the classic car market, but when something so intrinsically perfect and desirable fails to make its money, you scratch your head. Last year, Historics sold the restored but unremarkable cream ’77 above, without that mouth-watering mileage, for £36,244, so Brightwells’ example was amazingly reasonable. This could have been a fluke – a Christmas, online, aberration – or a perhaps it’s a sign of a more serious demographic shift. We know Morgans have been coming off the boil for a while, but when you think about it, there can’t be many millennials or Gen Zs interested or connected to old school, trad Brit V8s like this one. If you fancy some proper tail-sliding mischief, then you’d go for an M3 or an AMG 6.3. You wouldn’t buy something with a ladder chassis and wooden body frame. That £21k may not become a new benchmark for the best Seventies Plus 8s, but it will certainly have put the cat among the pigeons.

VALUE 2016 £22.5k VALUE NOW £30k