Aston Martin to reveal new models, including EV, this summer

Aston Martin will reveal a future model line-up that includes a new full-electric car at a capital markets day for investors this summer, Chairman Lawrence Stroll said. 

The UK-based luxury brand is currently overhauling its three core front-engine sports cars – the DB11, the Vantage and the DBS -- with the first one to be delivered to customers this autumn, Stroll said on an earnings call with investors on Wednesday. 

Aston Martin has not said which of those three would reach buyers first, but the DB11 is the brand’s oldest model, having been launched in 2016. The automaker has not said whether the overhaul will be a facelift or more extensive.

The three cars are expected to be shown at the capital markets day, although Aston Martin has not announced a date for the event. 

"You will see the cars this summer that are going to take us through our combustion story, our hybrid story and take us through our plans for electrification," Stroll said on the call. "It will be a real clear vision of the journey I’ve been building for the last three years."

Stroll also hinted that Aston Martin would show a prototype of a mid-engine sports car that would sit below the Valhalla plug-in hybrid hypercar, which was unveiled in 2021 and is now expected in 2024 as a competitor to the 986-hp Ferrari Stradale SF90.

Under Andy Palmer, the CEO at the time, Aston Martin in 2019 announced plans to build a mid-engine car called the Vanquish that would be launched in 2022, but Stroll has not mentioned it since taking a majority stake in the struggling automaker in 2020.

An announcement of an EV at the capital markets day this summer would mark a revival of company’s electric program after Palmer’s plans to launch the Rapide E and revive Lagonda as an all-electric brand were scrapped as too costly after Stroll took over.

In 2021, Stroll announced that Aston Martin would begin building two full-electric models, a sports car and an SUV, in 2025 at its factories in Gaydon, England, and St. Athan, Wales. However, he has said little about those cars since.

Under Stroll, a Canadian billionaire who made his fortune in textiles, Aston Martin has launched the high-performance 707 variant of the V8-powered DBX SUV, which had a slow ramp-up in 2022 because of production and supplier issues.

Aston Martin has worked to solve those issues for the roll-out of the three front-engine sports cars. "The production phase of the new cars will be better than it was for the 707," Aston Martin CEO Amadeo Felisa said on the earnings call.

Aston Martin met with 40 of its biggest suppliers earlier in February in an effort to build better relations as it rolls out the new models over the next 18 months. "Seventy percent of the value is coming from outside [the company], so we have decided to have suppliers as partners, not only as suppliers," Felisa said.

Aston Martin posted a quarterly operating profit in the last three months of 6.6 million pounds ($7.9 million), giving investors hope that the company has turned a corner after a string of losses. 

The company on Wednesday forecast wholesale volumes of about 7,000 units for 2023, slightly below average market expectations of 7,134, but its outlook for an adjusted core profit margin of about 20 percent came in ahead of analysts' average view. The company was helped by the growth of its average selling price in 2022 by 18 percent to 177,000 pounds.

The DBX was Aston Martin's best-selling model in Europe in 2022, with 714 sales, according to figures from Dataforce. It was followed by the Vantage, with 683 sales, and the DB11, with 330 sales. Aston Martin sold 2,022 cars in Europe last year, according to Dataforce, a slight gain from 1,979 in 2021.