Aston Martin boss: 'We need a manual transmission'
After a long stint at the helm of Bentley, Adrian Hallmark has been CEO of Aston Martin for a good five months. Now he reveals his plans for the ailing company to the media. Essentially, he sees Porsche as a good example of their extremely lucrative strategy of marketing various variants of a special model. And he wants Aston Martin to handle it very similarly. He also wants a manual transmission. Rejoice, enthusiasts.
"Back to the question, 'How do we develop each of these particular models? What direction are we taking with them?' Sportiness and a real purist sports car experience, that's why we need a manual transmission," Hallmark told journalists at a roundtable in New York. "We have one, but for that [he points to a Vantage standing nearby] it has to be different. But be prepared for something."
The manual transmission he refers to is the 6-speed gearbox used in the strictly limited Valour and Valiant models. Aston has not had a "real" production car with a manual gearbox since the Vantage AMR of 2019 and only 200 of them were built. However, the successes of a Porsche 911 GT3 (click here for a review of the new facelift version) or the 911 S/T clearly show that there is a real market for manual sports cars in the high-end segment of the performance car segment.
Hallmark wants more than just color or equipment packages. But there should also be these. They will come before there are models with greater mechanical differentiation. "The ones with the lighter changes will take one to one and a half years. There are some things we could do quickly, but they're more decorative than substantial," Hallmark said. "But even if things are a little off the shelf, you still have to certify, we're talking about a year. It's our turn."
He spoke of cars with adapted chassis and more power, even hinting at "putting an existing race car back on the road", but some variants could only be available in certain markets. As for the DBX, Hallmark thinks there's room for a version with a little more luxury. At low speeds, he says, the SUV is "less relaxing" than some competitors - but he doesn't want to be a Rolls-Royce Cullinan competitor either.
With the DB12, Vantage and Vanquish, he wants to go in the opposite direction, emphasizing their sporty characteristics. It will take some time to bring all these model variants to market, but he is not worried about it. All of these models - along with the lifted DBX - have only recently been launched, so they're fresh. The Vantage Roadster has just been introduced, is not yet really at the dealers and we have not yet seen an open Vanquish Volante.
Hybrids are also in the pipeline. The Valhalla hypercar is the first to do this, but Hallmark has confirmed that front-engined offerings will also be electrified.
"The great thing about these cars is that their body structure is not conventional. Well, for sports cars, it's conventional, but not for an ordinary vehicle," he said. "Basically, they are nodes, cast components that are connected by extrusion elements, and large subframes that bring a large part of the structure into these nodes, plus struts that run transversely. This actually gives us flexibility to lengthen or raise different aspects of the car's geometry and then put together the package we need."
Aston Martin has a partnership with Lucid for components of its upcoming electric vehicle, but is working on a different solution for its hybrid powertrain. One of the challenges is that the DB12, Vantage and Vanquish all use a rear-mounted transaxle transmission – and there's no simple plug-and-play solution on the market for this type of powertrain at the moment.
The electric vehicle is still in the pipeline, but like many other automakers, Aston Martin is scaling back its original electrification plans. "We're going to launch our first battery-electric vehicle later this decade, within the next five years, but instead of producing as many as we can in that period, it's going to be one for now," he said. Hallmark expects the EV to account for about 15% of sales by the end of the decade, while pure combustion and hybrid vehicles will account for the remaining 85%.
Beyond the actual model variants, Hallmark wants to expand Aston Martin's options list and offer customers more options for customization. Early in his tenure, he had a team compile the complete options lists of the competition and checked which of them could fit the Aston Martin brand. The expanded options list is expected to be available in the coming months.
However, Hallmark also looks at the big picture: "From a business perspective, this is a company with huge potential, and we need to turn it into a high-performance company – and I don't just mean the cars. Things like options, derivatives and all that contribute to the increase in sales, but at the same time we have to become much leaner and more productive as an organization."
Aston Martin will publish its 2024 financial results later this month, and Hallmark will then detail how it plans to make the company a "high-performance" organization. "My mission is to be the first CEO in 112 years to make the company sustainably profitable."
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