Anyone who has visited the old Aston Martin factory at Newport Pagnell can tell you that it was something out of Dickens: A grimy old place with wizened panel beaters and pale young apprentices, all wearing leather aprons, pounding out aluminum body panels on filthy old shot bags with 100-year-old hammers, with just enough light to work by, coming in through the wavy glass windows and the smell of cigarette smoke everywhere. Nonetheless, they made beautiful cars this way for eight decades.
It has taken nearly 15 years of hard work on both sides of the Atlantic, but now it looks like Ford Motor Company and its luxury sports car subsidiary, Aston Martin, are finally on the same page. With the introduction of the new DB9 coupe, the company that used to beat and shape and hammer aluminum fenders and door skins and roof panels into proper British sports cars has been dragged into the 21st century to stay.
This is the first Aston Martin in history to be designed, engineered, proved out and virtually crash-tested using the latest in computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing, and computational fluid dynamics software and work stations (although both tape drawings and clay models were used by the design department). In the real world, a handful of very expensive prototypes went to northern Sweden, to the Ford test track at Lommel, Belgium, to California's Death Valley, to Ford's Desert Proving Ground in Yucca, Ariz., to Las Vegas, and to the UK industry proving ground at Millbrook, in every environment from -30C to +48C, from 0- to 100% humidity, on every known type of road surface.
This new 2+2 will be built in a completely new, ultramodern 467,000 sq-ft assembly plant in Gaydon, Warwickshire, in the British Midlands, not far from Ford's Jaguar and Land Rover operations, and its V12 engines, with castings by Cosworth, will come back to England assembled from a separate engine plant in Cologne, Germany, Ford's European headquarters.
The strikingly beautiful DB9, designed by Danish design whiz Henrik Fisker to have as few cutlines and openings as possible, will be 185 in. long, on a 107.8-in. wheelbase, some 5.8 in. longer than a DB7's, for more interior room and more stable handling. At 73.8 in., it's almost 2 in. wider than a DB7, for more shoulder- and hiproom.
It will be built like no other mass-produced sports car before it, using a combination of aluminum stampings, aluminum extrusions, aluminum castings and magnesium castings, affording it one of the lightest curb weights in its small class. It will not be welded together in the traditional way of auto body welding, but rather it will be welded, bonded and riveted and bolted together into a gorgeous whole of a sports car for the discriminating few. All of the frame's internal spaces are filled with foam to increase rigidity and control noise.
Aston Martin's German managing director, ex-Porsche engineer Dr. Ulrich Bez, said that the DB9 is the key to the company's future expansion: "A sports car with GT levels of comfort and cruising ability, a car you can drive from London to the south of France." He said, "We are the smallest of the small car companies. We have made a key step into the future, and we will continue to be the most prestigious sports car brand in the world."