How Aston Martin went from basket case to billion-dollar industry
23-Feb-2008 • Bond News
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James Bond's Aston Martin DBS is fast. Properly, shockingly, terrifyingly fast â fast enough to dilate your pupils and send your heart rate rocketing.
I'm riding in one down a deserted, twisting rural road near Aston Martin's headquarters in Warwickshire.
As we round a bend, bodies pressed hard against the sides of the carbon-fibre race seats, I spot the next corner 50 yards away.
But in the instant it takes me to notice it, the car gets there. There's a deep, loud bellow from the 510bhp, 6.0-litre V12 engine hidden under the elegant bonnet that stretches away in front of us.
Suddenly, we are forced hard back, and nearly two tonnes of supercar and passengers lunge forward as if they were weightless.
Inside, it's pure Aston Martin.
There's original design, with carbon-and- Kevlar seats, while in no other car do you insert a crystal "emotion control unit" into the centre of the dashboard to start the engine.
But there's also age-old craftsmanship in the switches milled from thick nuggets of aluminium and the contrasting white hand stitching on the silken black leather that covers almost every surface.
Not to mention the hard, loud, metallic bark of the engine. The first non-Bond customers are about to take delivery of their new Aston Martin DBSs.
There will be no Walther PPK in the glovebox but otherwise their cars will be identical to the DBS Daniel Craig drove in Casino Royale and will drive again in Quantum of Solace.
The DBS is long, wide and costs £160,000 but my driver is utterly confident.
His line around each bend is inch perfect and like all skilled drivers he is either flat on the gas or hard on the Formula 1-style carbon-ceramic brakes. There are no half-measures.
He only lets up once, when I'm hanging, choking, from my seat belt after another vicious stab at the brakes. He looks over, pats my hand, and apologises.
"I'm sorry. Are you OK? I don't want to make you sick."
Then the engine issues another bellow as his right foot mashes the throttle and we're off again.
Most car companies hire hotshot racing drivers to demonstrate their machinery.
Not Aston Martin. My chauffeur is the iconic British carmaker's chairman, chief executive and in-house racing driver, Dr Ulrich Bez.
He drives the company as hard as he drives its cars.
When he took control in 2000, Aston Martin was a financial basket case.
He has masterminded a transformation unlike any the car industry has seen.
Production has increased tenfold, Aston is profitable for the first time in 40 years and in 2007 it beat the iPod and YouTube to the title of Britain's coolest brand.
The best James Bond in decades is driving its latest model and Bez has guided Aston to independence from former owner Ford in a near billion-dollar buy-out, making it the closest thing we've got to a major British car company.
Big money, fast cars and movie stars â everything seems to have gone right for Aston Martin in recent years.
The Anglophile German Bez has pulled off the business turnaround of the decade and given Britain's most glamorous, desirable but turbulent marque a future.
A dealership recently opened in China and there are plans to open another in Russia later this year.
Of course, there will always be the naysayers â such as the cynical motoring commentators who suggest Aston is devaluing the marque through over-production (last year it made 7,400 cars; in its worst year it made 46). Some are even asking if Aston could be a victim of its own success and whether its incredible growth can survive a global recession.
Most, however, can only take off their hats in admiration of what is surely the most remarkable reversal of fortune for any car manufacturer.
Aston Martin has had a long and chequered history.
Founded in 1912 by Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin (the Aston part of the name came after one of their cars won a hill-climb at Aston Hill in Hertfordshire), it has been in receivership seven times and has changed hands more often than an old fiver.
The Aston archive still holds letters from anxious post-war schoolboys who donated pocket money in an effort to keep the company afloat.
Aston achieved fame in the Fifties in long-distance sports-car racing, winning the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1959.
Legendary cars followed, among them the DB5 driven by Sean Connery's Bond in Goldfinger and the DB4GT, with a body designed by Italian coachbuilder Zagato.
Only 19 of these were made, and they now change hands for upwards of £1 million each.
Aston Martins were always seen as pure establishment; powerful, traditional, swathed in leather and walnut and hand built by highly skilled craftsmen.
But they were also bulky, far from sexy and often unreliable, with the technology underpinning them increasingly outdated.
In the Eighties the Prince of Wales was a famous customer, and since the Nineties the Sultan of Brunei has ordered special editions, including saloon and ultra-rare estate versions of Aston's two-door coupés, built to his own design.
Some were two-door coupés in the traditional Aston mould, but with unique twists: the AM3 featured a very un-Aston-like black plastic nosecone, bright red paintwork and hand-trimmed leather cockpit. Only three were built.
Any concerns Aston's senior brass had about the effect these cars would have on their discreet, aristocratic image would have been allayed by the fact that they soon disappeared into the Sultan's vast car collection, reported to number more than 5,000 vehicles.
Few of his secret projects were ever made public and bespoke models such as these would have cost up to £500,000 each â crucial income when the standard cars weren't selling.
Poor sales, lack of proper investment and hostile market conditions brought about Aston's darkest period, in the Seventies and Eighties. But in 1987, when annual production was down to slightly more than 200 cars, the firm found a sugar-daddy in Ford.
The Americans bought 75 per cent of the company, then took full ownership in 1994. The launch that year of the DB7 model turned Aston's fortunes around completely.
Designed by Scotsman Ian Callum, now Jaguar's head of design, the DB7 is for many experts the most beautiful car in the world.
In 1995, its first full year of production, nearly 700 were made. Aston had been saved, but it was still far from profitable and the real transformation was yet to come.
Enter Ulrich Bez.
The charismatic engineer, businessman and racing driver arrived with a formidable reputation.
He'd created the Porsche 911 Turbo and the radical BMW Z1 sports car and had proved his business credentials by transforming the fortunes of struggling Korean car maker Daewoo.
Aston Martin's chief engineer, David King, insists that Bez's history didn't affect how he was received at Aston Martin.
"There were no issues with the fact that he was German or had worked at Porsche," says King.
"He obviously had a great track record with sports cars and his time in Korea showed he could adapt quickly to different cultures."
And there was plenty at Aston that was different. When King arrived at Newport Pagnell in 1995, where Aston had been for 40 years, he found conditions primitive.
"Everything was made from scratch using raw materials," he says.
"Sheets of steel would be cut, welded and beaten by hand to make a car. They were clinging on to a dying art."
Bez moved rapidly, making some decisions that might have caused a riot had he not won over the staff.
King had been leading a secret project to develop a new, mid-engined supercar to replace the DB7.
It had occupied Aston's handful of engineers for a year and cost millions of pounds of Ford's money.
Bez canned it almost immediately.
The original plan would have left Aston building mid-engined and front-engined supercars, needing two production lines and thereby doubling its development costs.
Bez had a better idea â use the same underlying structure for every car and produce a massively expanded range.
This would make individual models quicker and cheaper to develop and, therefore, more profitable.
"He was respectful but very clear," King says.
"He just said that there weren't enough of us to do two different types of car and that we should just do one brilliantly. It was pretty obvious when you put it like that."
Bez has a reputation for autocracy.
"He has the same design of glasses frames made in different colours," says one Aston insider.
"When he's wearing the red pair, it's not advisable to argue with him."
Every new Aston shares the same advanced, lightweight and rigid underlying structure made of aluminium and carbon fibre, known as the VH platform, to which all components and bodywork are attached.
It first appeared on the DB9 in 2004 and now underpins six coupés and cabriolets. The Vantage is Aston's "entry" car at £83,000, or £91,000 for the Roadster convertible (a powerful two-seater, which does 0â60mph in 4.9 seconds and can reach 175mph).
Later this year, Aston will cram a 600bhp racing version of its V12 engine under the bonnet to create the limited-edition Vantage RS, which will cost even more than the £160,000 DBS.
The VH platform also provides the chassis for Aston's Le Mans class-winning DBRS9 race car and for a new super-luxury saloon due out next year.
The £200,000 Rapide will be Aston's first four-door in decades and it is hoped its arrival will cause another growth spurt.
However, there have been criticisms of this strategy.
Doesn't the shared technology mean Bez's cars are too alike? "If you go to Gordon Ramsay you don't criticise him for making three different meals out of the same ingredients," he answers.
Arriving at the company's HQ in Gaydon, Warwickshire, a striking pale-stone building, Bez leaps out of the low DBS with more athleticism than the typical 64-year-old. In a well-cut suit, with a trim waistline and a heavy Jaeger-LeCoultre wristwatch, he looks at least ten years younger.
He acts it, too: in 2006, he raced a V8 Vantage at more than 150mph in the Nürburgring 24-hour race.
Visitors to Aston's previous premises in Newport Pagnell were ushered into a room in a rambling Victorian house and took tea at a table below a painting of Prince Charles.
Bez describes the new HQ as a "21st-century castle", complete with faux drawbridge-style entrance and gravel drive.
Inside, the assembly plant's layout was conceived using computer-aided design, though the cars are still largely hand-built.
At Newport Pagnell, completed engines had to be pushed across a busy road to the next stage. Inside the new facility, there's a degree of automation â although there's only one robot, nicknamed James Bonder, which applies adhesive to the body panels.
The modern, minimalist ethic extends to Aston's new studios, where design director Marek Reichman â dubbed Aston's "Q" for his work on the DBS â oversees a rapidly growing department.
The size of the Aston team working on future models has leapt from 30 to 300 in the Bez era. And the results of the investment are plain â new models and three years of profits.
Most analysts agree that Aston's spectacular growth came because it offered such a range of models.
It created a boom market for supercars, and isn't just the beneficiary of an â until now â buoyant economy.
"It's clear that there are lots of high net-worth individuals in the world," says Bez. "But there are a hundred times more who have the money but who do not yet buy a car like this.
"It's simple â you don't spend money on a product you don't like.
"Each new product has a different character, so the market grows when you offer a new model. What kind of customer do I have in mind?
"One for whom money does not matter."
Tom Hartley is Britain's best-known independent dealer in super-exotic cars. He says: "I've bought and sold Astons for 35 years, but now the company has become a genuine rival for Ferrari and Lamborghini and the average customer has got much younger.
"For two years, people were paying up to £25,000 over the list price just to jump the queue."
The transformation has been made complete by Bez's boldest move, which came last year.
In 2006, Ford, now losing £6 billion a year, decided to cash in on Aston's success and sell to shore up its finances.
Bez helped to broker a deal with the new owners, led by his friend David Richards, who founded motorsport company Prodrive and ran Jenson Button's BAR Formula 1 team.
His partners were Houston-based investment banker John Sinders and two Kuwaiti investment houses.
Together they bought 85 per cent of Aston Martin from Ford in a deal completed last March that valued it at £479 million. The deal was signed partly on the condition that Bez stayed for five more years.
Was this the ultimate vindication of Bez's strategy? Not all agree.
Many question whether Aston Martin can keep its cachet, and there is also a far bigger matter â can it survive without Ford bankrolling it?
"For once, Ford has got it right and sold at the top of the market," says analyst Jay Nagley of industry consultants Spyder Automotive. 'Aston's profits for the next three or four years will be very good, but the big question is how they finance and develop the next generation of cars when they're not part of a big group.
Producing a beautiful car with a big engine isn't hard, it's the boring stuff that's difficult, like making it meet safety and emission regulations. In the past they could just ring up someone at Ford."
A more immediate worry is whether Aston's growth is robust enough to withstand an economic downturn.
And there is the issue of exclusivity. Seeing an Aston Martin on the road was once a major event. Is there a danger that as they become more attainable, they also become less desirable?
"I think we've got it right," King insists.
"We have to grow the brand, but we haven't been greedy. We could have sold far more cars than we have."
But Nagley points out, "The problem isn't the people at the very top who can afford a new Aston.
"It's the used buyers that are the problem.
"They will be hit by a downturn, and if demand for used cars dries up and values fall, then those at the top won't buy new cars that they'll lose £50,000 or more on, even if they can afford it.
"And Aston's growth means that there will be a lot more used cars coming on to the market soon."
"It's already starting to happen," agrees Hartley.
"Six months ago a low-mileage Vantage coupé would have made £85,000. Now the same car will sell in the mid-sixties. Often owners have three or four models and now they're losing 20 or 30 grand on each in a year.
"Aston Martin will be hit if it gets greedy and builds too many vehicles."
The firm could be a victim of its own success in another way.
Demand for the new four-door Rapide is so high that Aston could outgrow its Gaydon HQ next year.
It has issued a secret request for tenders from independent, specialist coachbuilders in Europe to build the car.
How Aston's customers will react to the idea of an Aston Martin built outside Britain is unclear.
Bez has speculated publicly about outsourcing every aspect of Aston's operations apart from marketing, even paying Porsche to develop the car.
And he insists that it won't enter Formula 1, despite having David Richards as a major shareholder.
But otherwise he is tight-lipped about Aston's future.
Richards, Aston's new non-executive chairman and holder of an undisclosed stake in the company, remains optimistic.
"Can Aston Martin survive as an independent? Yes, 100 per cent.
"Of course, there are sceptics who think we're doomed to fail.
"But we're in a world of brands and Aston is probably one of the most valuable in the world."
Richards, who is so committed to the world of engineering he even uses the wing-tip of an old plane as his office desk, says he "reveres Aston Martin like no other company" as it "represents a new hi-tech Britishness."
He continues: "I feel very positive about the Britishness of today compared to 20 years ago."
The future is believed to include a new model, codenamed DBX, which will cost up to £500,000 when it goes on sale in 2012 and have a top speed well in excess of 200mph.
It would certainly be very suitable for Aston's most famous fictional customer, and on that subject Bez smiles and opens up a little.
"I don't think we need James Bond, just as James Bond doesn't need us, but we love each other.
"We have this natural fit. Daniel Craig has brought some credibility and honesty back.
"He's very authentic and so are the cars. I'm pretty sure he'll have Aston Martins in the future, too."
Thanks to `Q` for the alert.
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