Aston Martin’s front-engined sports cars – the Vantage, DB11 and DBS – will be so heavily updated in 2023 that company chairman Lawrence Stroll said they will be more like “all-new cars”. Chief among the upgrades for each will be revamps for the suspension system, engines and gearboxes, and crucially, completely overhauled interiors.
- Aston Martin to update the Vantage, DB11 and DBS
- DBS to continue with the 5.2-litre V12 engine
- Carmaker only building cars to order since last April
“Finally, Aston Martin gets touchscreens,” said Stroll, confirming that the cars will do away with the ageing Mercedes-Benz-derived trackpad system they have used since launch. Under the terms of an earlier agreement with Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin could only deploy technology in its own cars that had been used in Mercedes models for three years.
Revamped tech
“How can you have an Aston Martin that sells for £1,50,000 (over Rs 1.5 crore) with three-year-old technology? It is a silly thing the previous management agreed to,” said Stroll.
He added that while the systems will be introduced with the latest technology on the market, Aston will differentiate its platform from that of Mercedes’ with “our own faces, our own voices – a proper English accent”.
It is all part of a move to ramp up sales of its front-engined sports cars to 4,000 units per year, Stroll explained. “That is the true consumer demand,” he said.
An early stage of Stroll’s turnaround plan for Aston Martin centred around reducing the company’s output to meet demand, rather than building for wholesale. He said the company has only built cars to order since April 2021, and sold 400 more cars to retail customers than it did to wholesale last year.
Hinting at how radically evolved the new cars will be, Stroll told reporters, “You’ll be very impressed with the all-new front-engines next year. There’s no similarity at all to the current cars,” he said, but added that there will be “some carry-over” at the rear end. The updated trio, Stroll said, will be “what those cars should have always felt like”.
Importantly, he confirmed that engine changes won’t extend to the removal of the DBS’ 5.2-litre V12. The Vantage and DB11’s twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 is likely to be uprated in line with AMG’s most recent offerings.
A reveal is expected around the end of the year, although it remains unclear whether Aston will roll out all three models at once.
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