Aston Martin is 102 years old. For a carmaker, this is remarkable. Only a few badges have outlived the British firm, and most are household names. Rolls-Royce dates to 1906. The Ford Motor Company, 1903. And the grandaddy, Mercedes-Benz, has roots in a company founded in 1883.
Unlike those companies, however, Aston is on loose ground. Last week, the struggling brand announced it's getting $307 million from investors to fuel a new line of cars, including an all-new plug-in hybrid crossover. Combined with other recent cash influxes, the new funds give the company around $1.5 billion to play with. There's also a new British CEO, Andy Palmer, arrived from Nissan to lead the charge.
The company is a small-volume player, and small doesn't work in the modern car industry. So it's going bigger. It's not ideal, but it's better than death.
This is a massive change for Aston Martin, which has always focused on niche performance machinery. It is necessary, because Aston's internally derivative line of performance cars has grown stale. The company's four models are spread across sixteen variations; each is based on the same basic platform, the roots of which are over ten years old. Sales are in the toilet.
And finally, it echoes what happened to Porsche over a decade ago, when the legendary German firm moved from near-insolvency and building only sports cars to a more mass-market lineup, including two SUVs.
People continue to decry Porsche's choices (and not without merit), but the brand has never been larger or more financially successful, or more focused on motorsport, its ostensible reason for being. Its machines are some of the best in the world, and the best of them—the low-margin 918 Spyder and 911 GT3 RS—could not exist without the profit generated by the brand's more attainable models. Aston's management undoubtedly hopes to follow in some of the German company's footsteps, leveraging history to broaden appeal. And survive.
This is a slippery slope, but it reflects a truism of the modern car industry: Save a few glorious, inexplicable anachronisms, small car companies no longer exist. Building automobiless to meet regulatory and mass-market demand has become so expensive, carmakers either become huge in order to properly fund the process, or they die. Aston Martin, too small to get by on the old ways, is at that fork in the road. And unlike most other small brands, it isn't part of a larger manufacturer. It cannot lean on the development resources and cost structures of a larger firm.
Why should you care? If you've never driven an Aston, trust me: The brand is worth saving. Like Rolls-Royce, Astons sell on exclusivity: They are costly and uncommon, and they ooze class. Unlike Rollers, however, Astons aren't the most obviously expensive or appealing thing on the market, so there's no obvious reason for new-money twits and rock stars to buy one. You only buy one if you---for lack of a better term---get it.
The cheapest Aston Martin, for example, is the V8 Vantage. It costs $123,695. That money gets you a heartbreakingly beautiful shape and a quietly classy interior, but you may lose a few stoplight drags to a guy in a new Porsche 911. For $123,695, you could have bought a new 911. The difference is in the Vantage's details: a leather interior that looks like it was sewn by magic elves, a crystal starter button, a level of finish that oozes the handiwork of humans, not robots. An engine that sounds like a cross between a crackling fire and a battery of machine guns. Instruments that make fine watches look like flea-market garbage. Pick up a new Rolls Ghost or a 911, you could be landed gentry or any old gauche jerk with money. Buy an Aston, you probably have taste. (Also maybe some castles.)
Still, with luxury cars, subtlety is a niche. Aston moved just 4,000 sports cars and sedans worldwide in 2014. For perspective, Ferrari (no giant) sells 7,000 of its hyper-focused exotics annually and has long voluntarily capped sales. Ferrari has managed its growth for years in order to maintain brand health in the long term. Contrast this with Porsche, where SUVs now account for more than half of the firm's 189,000-vehicle global volume. The German company's sports cars have never moved in greater numbers. Twenty years ago, before Porsche diversified its offerings and rethought its production methods, its sales were barely above where Aston Martin is now.1
Aston, by contrast, has spent the past century managing a kind of manic depression, jumping from success to failure and back in an agonizing sine wave. (The two brands admittedly have vastly different histories and emotional resonance, but you get the point.) This is not an exaggeration. The marque's history, if you can stomach the back-and-forth Wiki entry, reads like a soap opera: multiple owners (five since World War II), last-minute economic heart attacks, and private money repeatedly swooping in to save the day. The only constant is the enthusiasm of the swoopers. The likes of David Brown, Victor Gauntlett, David Richards, and even the Ford company have believed in Aston Martin so much, they staked millions to keep it afloat when others would've pulled the plug. In a way, each failed because they kept Aston inside its comfort zone.
In many ways, Aston's continued survival is more shocking than its near-death moments. The past century is littered with dead car companies, from recognizable names like DeLorean to also-rans like White and Vector. James Bond has long favored Astons, and the marque has a storied history at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, but neither is enough to keep a company afloat.
Palmer has promised a turnaround. I hope he'll get one. I've driven vintage Astons, and I've driven modern ones. The guts and heart on display in the finest of both rattle around in my head to this day. I've also talked to Palmer, when he worked at Nissan, about what makes for good engineering. He is what this industry calls a "product guy," the rare engineer who gets how companies work. He spent his time at Nissan pushing to make that brand's cars drive better than they had to. He was partly responsible for the continual improvement of the firm's epic GTR, but he also had his hands in a host of other things. He understands what it takes to make good cars that sell.
I know analysts who are worried about Aston Martin's health. Some of them think Porsche made the right choice over a decade ago. Some don't, citing everything from lesser build quality and the terrible resale of a used Cayenne to a dumbing-down of the brand's sports cars. Many would rather see Aston go down the drain swinging and small instead of alive, large, and diluted.
Personally, I believe that a solvent Porsche is better than a bankrupt and nonexistent one. With Aston, there may not be reason to have faith---not yet---but the signs aren't terrible. Growth, like a company, isn't inherently good or bad. It's the choices you make in the process that matter.
1Post updated to properly reflect Porsche's 1990s sales; the link references North American volume only.
