DBX a great game Changer for AML7 Jul 2020 22:15
Aston Martin DBX
As I write this, we still haven’t driven a finished Aston Martin DBX. But we’ve spent enough time in late-stage prototypes, seen enough of its engineering and know the market sufficiently well to be confident this is a car capable of turning Aston Martin around. Even if it turns out to be a shed – and it isn’t – adding an SUV to the Aston Martin line-up should reverse the perennial problem. This is, as former CEO Andy Palmer once noted, that “Aston Martin has basically never made money”.
The DBX, production of which officially begins this month, is a car of no little ambition. It’s not just Aston Martin’s first SUV, but it’s also built on a new Aston platform – one compatible with electrification – and will be produced in an all-new factory. And it’s a car with really broad capabilities: not only does it have to be an Aston Martin, and therefore as engaging to drive as you can make any two-tonne passenger car, it will also have to pull a horse box across a wet field, power itself over a desert sand dune and sit all day on the motorway. And provide entertainment on a B-road.
Unfortunately for Palmer, the turnaround – and the DBX – didn’t arrive soon enough. Tobias Moers, formerly head of Mercedes-AMG, replaces him next month. Aston’s recent problems are well documented, and cash-flow crises, a drop-off in Chinese sales, dismal share performance after a premature IPO and then the coronavirus all conspired to seal Palmer’s departure.
Longer term, though, the range revival he instigated still has the potential to deliver. The breadth of it is promising: there are the front-engined GT cars, and mid-engined sports cars and luxury cars. There’s the new factory to give Aston the capacity it needs and it’s deep into the development of its own engine.
Among all this, Aston doesn’t need to take a huge slice of the global luxury 4x4 market to fund itself. With all this in the pipeline and a DBX about to arrive in showrooms, it looks like pretty shrewd time to become Aston’s CEO.
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