A while back, before Covid-19 was even heard of, I had the chance to hear Aston Martin’s Chief Creative Officer, Marek Reichman, give a talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It was part of a major automotive exhibition at the museum, something I sadly now won’t get to see.
Aston Martin is now 107 years old and is the only independent luxury car company left. In the entire lifetime of the company just 85,000 cars have been built. To put that into perspective, that’s around two normal days of production for Toyota.
That tiny output can partly be explained by the hand-built nature of the cars, which take between 200 and 2,000 hours to build. As a result, they are highly prized almost as works of art and 95% of all Aston Martins ever built survive still, a testament to their design and build quality.
The most expensive British car ever sold was an Aston Martin, a DBR1 going for $22.5 million. The DBR1 was their Le Mans racer from ‘59, a period which saw the firm dominate at Le Mans and major sports car races, effectively taking over from Bentley, who were dominant before World War II.
Overall, Marek Reichman is in charge of 100 designers across two separate design studios, collectively responsible for the styling of Aston Martin cars. Of course, Astons are synonymous with a certain secret agent and the DB10 was created specially for Spectre, released in 2015.
The first James Bond film featuring Daniel Craig, Casino Royale, introduced the DBS, a V12 based on the DB9. In one of the most famous film stunts ever filmed, a cannon built into the floor of the car was used to roll it over at speed. The car was only supposed to roll once, but somebody was a bit too generous with the explosive charge and it ended up rolling almost seven times, setting a new world record. The film was set in Montenegro, although the stunt was filmed at the less glamorous Millbrook proving ground in Bedfordshire.
Although Aston Martins are best known as luxury sports cars, changes are on the way to reflect the current interest in an all electric future. Lagonda is set to become their all-electric sub brand and there are plans to introduce an all electric Rapide E saloon, although since the talk, both of these projects have been delayed due to financial pressures. No doubt we’ll see an electric Aston Martin but exactly when is anyone’s guess.
DBX
In the meantime, the newly-launched DBX is their current nod to reality as it represents Aston Martin’s first SUV. They point out that 72% of their existing customers already own an SUV, so why shouldn’t that be an Aston. Slightly depressingly, Marek pointed out that to many of their customers, there’s no difference between an SUV and a car. In China, if you asked a child to draw a car, they would probably draw an SUV shape, such is their ubiquity.
The DBX uses a bespoke platform and careful proportions to preserve its ‘Astonness’ and early reviews of the car have been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, I’ve driven the DBX 707 since I wrote this article originally and it’s a really impressive piece of kit, with epic performance. It has off-road ability too, which is always useful. Production was set to start at the end of this month with first deliveries to customers in early May.
The future of the car industry will see massive change. Marek reckons there will be a movement away from cars with public transport and autonomous shared vehicles taking care of our A to B requirements. This will leave the way clear for performance cars to be kept for special occasions and solely for fun. This seems to be a common view, shared by Hermann Tilke, who has designed many Formula One circuits.
This will allow a future autonomous Lagonda to become even more luxurious, perhaps controlled by voice and gestures and become even more like a living room as we move away from driving when we just want to get to where we’re going in the simplest, most stress free manner possible.
Towards the end of his talk, Marek had some thoughts on the design process. Although most design is done by computer, character is vital for a car and the simplest and quickest way to impart that is to start with a hand-drawn sketch which will be more dynamic than anything produced by a computer.
One audience member came up with what he thought was a tricky question but it was handled beautifully. The question, smugly asked, was why initial sketches were always drawn with features including impossibly huge wheels with rubber band tyres that will never make production.
The answer was interesting and clever and it was simply that you have to start with an implausible dream. If you don’t, you’ll immediately get bogged down in practicalities and lose your entire vision for the car. If you start with something impossible, its initial impact should inspire all involved to produce their very best work. Starting from something more mundane, you’ll never get that first impetus or the final result that you want.
It was a clever answer to rather a stupid question. Good man Marek.
