► How to get Aston back on track
► We speak to new boss Adrian Hallmark
► The plan, analysed
Now some months into his new job, Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark has the confident air of a man who’s certain his plan is going to work.
‘How do you make a company successful? You’ve got to have a plan. That plan has got to be brawny and stable. You create excitement around it, but you don’t create excitement by ripping it up every five minutes,’ he says in a meeting room at Aston’s Gaydon HQ. ‘There’s enough excitement to the products and the design, the way we activate them in the marketplace. But in here, I want it to be quiet, calm, boring and successful. That’s the mission.’
Financial results and sales figures for 2024 are not yet available as we speak, but the former Bentley boss is bullish: ‘It’s an opportunity to make it, for the first time in 112 years, sustainably profitable.
‘The market has totally changed, as have the prospects for luxury car brands. In our price bracket, there are around four times more people, each with around four times more wealth, than there were 20 years ago.’
So how will Aston grab a bigger share of that lucrative market?
‘In the last four years we’ve gone through this almost frenzy of product development. Four cars launched in 18 months – I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost worked. Any difficulties we’ve had, it’s not been because of lack of money. We’re spending at a rate we’ve never done before. It’s similar to Bentley five years ago – for a company that’s less than half the size.
‘Every year there’s been something that’s just knocked us off achieveing the breakthrough. I’m not saying this year is going to be the [turning point]. We reset the business last year, and we’ve reset expectations for the next five years, and we’ve reset the sense of how we’re going to get there [profitability]. Volume is less of an interesting topic for us than value creation.’
The trick now is to slow down the rate of new-car launches and instead emulate rivals such as Porsche, Lamborghini, Ferrari and even Rolls-Royce, by offering customers a huge range of options and by frequently adding new variants of those cars. Hallmark notes that the Porsche 911 will be offered in around 15 flavours in a five-year period, whereas the habit at Aston has been to launch a coupe, follow it with a convertible, and then… nothing.
‘There’s got to be a reason to buy another, better Vantage, and two years after that, another, better Vantage. We’ve never had that intensity of lifecycle innovation. The competition are doing it and we’re not. We’ve never been as successful as we could be. We’ve put a lot of effort in the last few months into analysing ourselves and our competition, and developing a plan for each name plate.’
The profit to be had from options – different exhausts, audio upgrades, cosmetic changes – is ‘phenomenal’.
And doing a variant of an existing model is relatively straightforward. Hallmark’s fag-packet workings show that if an all-new car has 5000 component, 4900 of them will be new. With a derivative, only about 100 parts are new.
‘The level of complexity to have a sportier version with a bit more power, or a more luxurious version with a bit more glamour, is marginal.’
There’s also hay to be made from limited-edition cars with prices in seven figures, so long as it doesn’t distract from the core models.
‘Valiant was less than a year from concept to delivery. We need to slow it down a bit and get boring. We’re going to use Vanquish and Valhalla as the basis to do a couple of specials – not just a different roof but a completely different concept, using the core technology from those two cars.’
At the other extreme of the line-up, he acknowledges that the DBX hasn’t really achieved lift-off. Successful SUVs from Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce have transformed those companies’ business models. But his experience at Bentley, which now does very well with the Bentayga, gives him hope.
‘DBX has been in the market three and a half years, versus Bentayga nine years. In 2018 Bentayga was doing 3500-4000 a year, instead of nearly 8000 in 2023. What happened there was a facelift and a bit of commucation. DBX I still fundamentally believe in.’
And what about the territory beyond Valhalla? Will there be a successor to the extreme Valkyrie? Especially now that Adrian Newey, that car’s chief architect, is now working for Aston’s F1 team, it doesn’t seem too wild a leap.
Hallmark urges caution. ‘Not many car companies can afford, financially or emotionally, to do a car that’s so far ahead of themselves and everybody else every year. It would kill you. For Ferrari, even Porsche, it’s seven to 10 years between that kind of car.
‘Valhalla is somewhere between a regular supercar and a hypercar. We wouldn’t want to do a new one of those every year either. But Valkyrie is incredible. Everything on that car is absolutely unique, never done before.
‘Megacars – once a decade. Supercars – watch this space.’
The transition to electric has seemed to go on and off Aston’s priority list over the years. Hallmark is clear: ‘The general direction is still towards electrification. To get to net zero, we will add products in the hybrid space before we get to full electric. We will have our first electric car in this decade, but we will add hybrid derivatives as well through to 2035. We’re fully committed to BEV, but there’s no way we can go all-BEV overnight and sustain the company.
‘We’re not resisting. We’re trying to manage through a period of high risk. We can’t afford to do engines, hybrids and electric cars and just see which one’s working – every one’s got to be a winner.’
Colin is the managing editor of CAR magazine – and the man responsible for production and getting the words and pictures on to the page in an engaging, intelligent and high-quality fashion.
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