Aston Martin chief executive Lawrence Stroll was in an upbeat mood at the Financial Times Future of the Car summit in London this week, officially announcing that the British carmaker will launch eight new cars over the next 24 months. The first, a replacement for the DB11 sports coupe, will be announced on May 24. However, not included in the new lineup is the mid-engined Aston Martin Vanquish, whose concept was shown at the 2019 Geneva Show.
The mid-engined Vanquish was designed by former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer to compete with mainstream mid-engined supercars from Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren. Unlike the stunning Valkyrie hypercar and the very similar Valhalla —which will share carbon fiber structural elements of the mid-engined Valkyrie and will have a 937-horsepower hybrid powertrain based on a version of Mercedes-AMG's mid-mounted flat-plane crank. 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8—the Vanquish was intended to be a continuous production car, not a limited-volume model.
The mid-engined Vanquish will therefore compete with Ferrari's 296GTB, Lamborghini's Huracan successor, and McLaren's new 750S, both in terms of performance and price. The Geneva concept, codenamed AM-RB 003, suggests that the car will have a unique bonded aluminum chassis and a hybrid powertrain built around a new 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6 designed in-house at Aston Martin.
The Vanquish looks good on paper. But after its disastrous 2018 IPO, Aston Martin was left in debt after major shareholders sold some of their shares and the share price plunged, mostly vaporware. The V-6 engine “was just a concept when I arrived,” said former AMG boss Tobias Moers, whom Stroll hired as CEO after a syndicate of investors he led took over nearly 17 percent of the company in early 2020. It would have cost tens of millions of dollars. “If the engine was ready, I would definitely ride it, but it wasn't.”
Moers, who left Aston a year ago, ditched the V-6 in favor of the proven and versatile AMG-sourced 4.0-liter V-8, but even packaged that engine in a bespoke new chassis to create a mid-engined Vanquish would have adverse effects. too detrimental for a company that lost the equivalent of $140 million—before taxes—in the first three months of 2022.
Stroll said Aston Martin would now focus on the front-engined sports cars that are the core of the brand, along with the addition of the DBX SUV variant, which he said now has a 25 percent share in the high-performance luxury SUV segment, and sales. of which rose 40 percent in the first quarter of this year. The performance and handling of front-engined cars will improve dramatically: "We've created a new sector, something superior to the GT," says Stroll - and the human-machine interface (HMI) infotainment on all new Astons will improve. significantly improved, both in terms of appearance and functionality.
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The Valhalla "will eventually come in many variants, not just the one we introduced," Stroll said and will be part of Aston Martin's lineup for several years to come, with a total volume of 999 cars. Aston would each year produce one or two special cars, in very limited volumes, 100 to 300 cars each, and each with a very high price tag. Stroll claims Aston has almost 900 orders, three times the production plan, for the $3 million Valkyrie.
