What are Aston’s strengths?
Aston Martin is the most efficient company I ever saw in my life in bringing to life different body styles and creating a new platform on reasonable costs. This is where the company is really, really strong. Our company is not strong in electrical architecture. It’s not strong in making a new combustion engine. So you can add that to the Mercedes technology transfer. And everything we get from Mercedes is reasonably priced.
Is a derivative car line based on the DBX SUV the way to go to broaden the product line up?
Yes. but I don’t want to talk in detail because we still have competitors. Previously the company there was one variant of the DBX and probably a second one and that is it. We saw the Mercedes technology agreement as a way to have a much broader portfolio off the DBX.
How will you make Aston Martin’s two factories, Gaydon and St. Athan, more efficient?
One thing we are looking at is insourcing. For example, if the supplier asks too much money for seat trims, it could be more efficient to do that in-house. So we put commodities together and make sure that the plants are properly loaded, but in the most efficient way. Today we run sports cars on two assembly lines [at the Gaydon plant]. If you come to visit in two months, it will be just one. We changed everything, how we assemble cars, how we run logistics, how we paint cars, how we run our paint shops.
Do you think the luxury sports-car market’s center of gravity has shifted away from models such as the DB11?
I see it as balanced in future. That’s what I see in our order intake at the moment, the sports cars are doing better than I thought. It’s a proper mix between the DBX and sports cars. It’s a bit more DBX because of China, but we have a lot of variants of our sports cars coming to market.
The Vantage roadster is doing really well and we have another variant to come in the next two weeks.
The GT layout sports car segment for us is normally 3,500 to 4,000 cars and it has always been that size.
Even now?
Our cars are a bit aged so I do not expect that number [this year], but we will facelift the DB11 by the end of 2022/beginning of 2023 and then we will have a much broader line-up of sports cars. So I’m confident about that.
