Aston Martin has a plan – sell FEWER cars and become the ‘British Ferrari’

Aston Martin has plans to perform a turnaround with investment from Lawrence Stroll, including building fewer cars at higher margins.

As Aston Martin has once more reverted to selling beautiful cars unprofitably – the story of the last 60 years – along has come a ‘White Knight’ in the guise of Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll to inject money (£500 million and rising) and, it’s hoped, some business nous.

But, as things just started to look a bit more positive for AML, along came Covid-19 and jumped all over the positivity. But at least, in this case, AML are not alone.

To try and fine out how AML plan to turn a profit going forward, Autocar sat down with Aston’s CEO, Andy Palmer, to try and get an insight. And it seems the plan is to build fewer cars.

Palmer referenced Lawrence Stroll’s long-standing experience as a Ferrari importer, and said Aston Martin intends to be profitable by becoming the ‘British Ferrari’, and only building cars to order in future, instead of, as they do at the moment, building cars for stock.

Stroll said AML built 5,800 cars in 2019 and will do fewer this year (there’s a shock) and, reading between the lines, will have to take a hit on stock cars as it clears the inventory it’s sitting on. Although it seems the ‘fewer cars’ bit refers to sports cars and not the DBX, because AML really need to sell as many of the DBX SUV as they do sports cars to make it a profitable exercise.

We already know that AML aren’t going to deliver the electric Rapide E after all, and Lagonda plans have been put on hold for a few years at least, so we’re looking at a slimmer AML with a mid-engined range, a new V6 Hybrid engine, and some high-cost, short-run models to boost revenue and, fingers crossed, a bit of a cash cow in the DBX.

Or at least that’s the plan.