Aston Martin chief executive Andy Palmer says he wants to see the car manufacturer establish itself as the “British Ferrari.”
The company is in a tough spot at the moment and recently received a significant investment from Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll. With Stroll now acting as executive chairman, Aston Martin will change the way it does things and shift priorities to make fewer cars but ensure each car it does make is more profitable.
“Lawrence has been the Canadian Ferrari importer a long time so he understands the Ferrari model very well. We expect in future to make materially fewer sports cars, but to make every one of them solidly profitable. We built 5,800 sports cars for wholesale last year. We’ll do fewer in 2020,” Palmer told Autocar.
Read Also: Aston Martin Secures $660 Million Investment From Lawrence Stroll, Needs More Money
“We’ll have to swallow hard. And change what we do. It’s time for us to make good and try to become the British Ferrari, asking customers to spec their cars individually and wait for them to be built. The DBX is already showing how we mean to go on. We’re building those cars only for retail and our order book for 2020 is full,” the executive added.
Aston Martin’s immediate priorities for this year include balancing demand and supply and returning to building cars to order, Palmer said. The marque must also ensure the DBX is perfect for when deliveries commence. Moving forward, the company has put its electrification plans and aim to relaunch the Lagonda brand on the backburner. The brand believes it is crucially important to get its range of mid-engined supercars and hypercars on the market instead.
“We have to get to the mid-engined model bloodline – Valkyrie this year, Valhalla in 2022 and Vanquish in 2023 – and we have to bring our 3.0-litre V6 hybrid and plug-in powertrains into the whole model range as soon as possible, as a way of staying on the right side of clean air regulations,” Palmer said. The new powertrains will need to be in Aston Martin models by the mid-2020s, while the Lagonda project is expected to be back in the cards post-2024.
