Aston Martin DBX shot by Nathan Williams
Cohort Pic(k) of the Day: It’s A…A…A…An Aston Martin, Obviously!
– Posted on September 28, 2021
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Curbside Classics Archives
Aston Martin DBX shot by Nathan Williams
It looks like the rough draft/early concept drawing of what would become the latest Escape.
Another downside of the SUV trend – hard to tell this is anything special draped in its homogeneous SUV cloak. If the badging said Kia I’d believe ya, too. Sad.
Though if it keeps the lights on and money for the development of other cars is it such a high price to pay?
What are you talking about? It has an Aston Martin face and is therefore obviously a Ford.
I hate to think what they charge for these. Gimme a Mondeo Vignale estate.
The vehicle itself isn’t bad looking and I get that these things are needed for a brand to survive. But I felt that same way when I saw a Lamborghini Urus on the street; looks like a Nissan Murano.
“draped in its homogeneous SUV cloak”
Eh, no more or less homogeneous than any coupe or sedan.
All SUVs look the same today. At least sedans have some defining features yet…
Nice Ford!
I suspect that it if isn’t already, it’ll soon be AM’s best seller. The size looks right, the design cues (ok, the grille) are there, and it’s everyday usable. As much as we here like to think we’d all go for a DB11 or whatever, no, no we would not, our knees and back won’t let us. The market is far larger for this than anything else currently built at the factory and will allow those playthings to continue to trickle out. And while I don’t think Lawrence Stroll could actually fit in one of the sports cars, I’ve seen him exit one of these at least halfway gracefully. Good for AM, perhaps it can even tow a DB6 to Pebble Beach.
House of the Rising Sun” is an old song, and a guy whose name I forget came up with the arrangement and the riff with which we are all familiar. He played in some of the same NYC clubs as Bob Dylan, who shamelessly copied him, to the point that when he played it people would accuse him of ripping off Dylan. Years later Dylan complained that if he played it people said he was covering an Animals song.
In North America at least I wonder if people are going to pay $100k or whatever for a Ford Escape replica. They might prefer a Lincoln MKX, the Vanden Plas Allegro of the 21st century.
Dave Van Ronk…
Yes!
My office is around the corner from a dealer that sells these, so I will have to start paying attention.
It’s rather as if your favorite Single Malt Scotch distillery started selling a
Bourbonan American corn-based blended-whiskey (Can’t call it Bourbon if it’s not from Kentucky).It isn’t actually wrong for them to do so, I suppose, as long as the Scotch itself is unaffected, but it just doesn’t seem right somehow.
This is what Mr. Bond would drive if Goldfinger’s laser kept going a few more inches.
Ha!
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die of embarrassment!”
I just googled it, and in the publicity shots it looks very Tesla/Porsche/Jaguar SUV, but with the iconic face of the legendary Ford Focus.
And it’s $177k.
Perfect commentary on the styling!
Another mehmobile
I do realize that in a lot of cases once you get to this level of money spent a lot of it isn’t gonna show up in pics- the deepness of the paint, the fit and finish, “real” trim vs. plastic… but eh, this does look like any other anymore lux SUV here.
And it’s harder to style a big box as opposed to a sedan but a lot of the new luxury sedans are just as anonymous. I’d go so far to say that if you peeled the badges off the new Hyundai Genesis vehicles are better styled than this or the recent Jaguar sedans.
…the imaginary difference between Land o’ Lakes and store-brand butter. The reason to buy this car is to be seen to have bought it.
Amen.
Yep. The new Jags are rolling blocks of sadness. As soon as I saw them I thought “Kia”. And Ford copied their face on Lincolns. Or was it the other way round?
C’mon, guys–geez. You don’t see *anything* here that marks this as a step up from the mundane ? Isn’t that sculpting of the door panels just a little deeper, a little bolder yet sleeker than what the under-60-grand boys give us ? Is there a tail just like that anywhere else ? How about those giant exhaust surrounds ? Invisible door pulls (on a dark body color, anyway) don’t mean anything ?
If you don’t like it, fine . . . but it’s no Hyundai–is it ?
No, to me it looks the same as all the others of its blob-that’s-been-through-a-dinosaur’s-digestive-tract ilk. Perhaps next time it’s All New™, it’ll switch to the other ilk (alien insect with anger-management issues).
Good point; those do mean something: when they fail, you won’t be getting into the car.
Or if you’re drunk you won’t be able to find them. Hang on, that could be seen as a safety feature.
Don’t forget those yellow brake calipers, that’s some exclusive stuff right there. Made my friends civic in high school a showstopper
The really interesting vehicle in the first shot is the one ahead of the Aston (which, whilst handsome in a generic way, has a surprisingly poorly resolved front end in person).
It’s an EV Taxi made by a Geely subsidiary. I was a passenger in one of these recently and what a difference to the old Diesel rattlers! Quiet, quick and comfortable (and nicely designed) – a huge improvement!
Forget the A-M, I want to know what those zig-zag pavement markings mean. I believe I’ve only seen them pictured in the UK.
They’re before and after a pedestrian crossing, and they mean no parking and no overtaking.
Thanks!
Not aggressive enough.
Put that “angry eyes” Jeep mod on it and then we’ll talk.
And a couple sets of “truck nuts”.
If I don’t tinkle myself when I see it coming, I get bored.
Okay, I give. It’s just a tarted-up Ford, really, as you say . . .
The one thing that does impress me about this design is how flush the side windows fit. There appears to be a seamless transition from roof to chrome surround to glass; they all appear as a single surface just differently coloured. That’s impressive. But everything else seems to have been done before.
Oh, stop it, the lot of you.
Look, the brand had pedigreed relevance from racing sometime not long after the defeat of Hitler, who’s so long ago plenty of young-uns don’t seem quite to know who he was.
The snooty marque was then saved from oblivion by a marketing masterstroke when a sleazy, violent, middle-aged near-rapist character from the brilliant pen of a bigoted old drunk called Ian Fleming took one as his choice of transport in some film or other. The rest is history – a history of unreliable cars, no racing, tiny sales, bankruptcies or near-enough, different owners, and a re-emergence as a fashion-one-up-[yours]man-ship snob-badge for the very well-off and frankly speaking, all up, who could really give a flying fuck about that?
Alright, alright, they produced some sublime lookers in their time, but really folks, if SUV’s is now what is bought, then I fail to see the problem. And anyway, as these things go, it is a very nice-looking vehicle, admittedly a bit unoriginal, but was any posh Aston ever really an innovation?
I don’t hate this, either. I like how in the first shot, there’s a first-generation Porsche Cayenne in a driveway, which so many people said was heresy at the time… before it became Porsche’s volume seller.
if SUV’s is now what is bought, then I fail to see the problem
Well plenty of people bought tickets to the sleazy, violent, middle-aged near-rapist character from the brilliant pen of a bigoted old drunk called Ian Fleming film franchise that’s been going for 60 years, so I too fail to see the problem.
Maybe if you don’t like the films you should watch something else, and if you don’t like stylish sports coupes don’t buy Aston Martin. Very simple. The whole point of both these novels/films as well as exotic cars is escapism from the mundanity of real life compromises, and a SUV Aston(or Mustang or Porsche or Lamborghini) is the embodiment of mundane compromise. May as well have the next exotic Bond locale be in the suburbs.
By the time the film makers decided to put 007 in an Aston Martin ( rather than the Blower Bentley that Fleming had written ) Aston Martin had already made their mark in sports car racing ( Le Mans win 1959 ish ) and missed the mark in Formula 1, with a front engined car that was obsolete before it ever raced.
So nice that Aston can now make a few 007 Replica DB5s that have all the bells and whistles and machine guns, and are presumably not road-legal.
But Mr Matt, I didn’t say i didn’t enjoy the films or escapism. My point, which I thought was fairly obviously expressed in caricature, is that the world moves on: in 60 plus years, it would want to have. The nastier aspects of Mr Bond, for example, are no longer part of the films, and nor should they be. The other point, perhaps too obliquely implied, is that the cars got really famous through fiction, no more real than are fairies. Aston Martin has been for a long time a fiction, an image, a brand in the same way, nowadays a trinket badge for the rich, as empty as an SUV.
Perhaps put it all this way: remember that the DB in the model names are the initials of David Brown, who once rescued Aston.
He made tractors.
As a comparison at a much lower price point: That looks as much like a real Aston DB “anything” as a new Mach E looks like a real Mustang. Chances are it will become their biggest seller. It will pay the bills.