Aston Martin is a name associated with quality, not quantity, with hand built cars, engines with plates identifying the assembling technician by name, and with absolute peak of a certain form of British craftsmanship and style.
This car, posted on the Cohort by Dean Edwards, was introduced in 1988, and sold until 2000. It had a 5.3 litre (hand assembled, obviously) engine with round 330 bhp and 364 lbft of torque, and an aluminium hand shaped body. It cost around £125,000, before options and personalisation (not that we used that term then), or close of £300,000 in today’s money.
So, a car that cost as much as a house, sold at the rate of around 100 a year and was incredibly labour intensive to build.
Quite a surprise, then, to remember that this was a product of the Ford Motor Company.
Nice VW/Audi lights, front and back
Unreliable junk with killer warranty claims. I only ever saw one, waiting for recovery. Fords save the marque with the DB7. Still struggling today, the virus hasn’t helped. End of another British marque?.
All that money and exclusivity, yet at night people will think you’re driving a Mark II Scirocco, as you grip the same wheel as a 5.0 Mustang!
Certain brands look odd with certain period aesthetics, and Aston Martin in the 80s and early 90s is one of them. Bright reds, plasticy black trim, rectangular lights and angular bodies are just so grossly unsuited to a brand that I typically consider timeless in shape and somewhat old fashioned in trimmings(chrome accents and the like). The Virage isn’t a bad looking car, but it looks more like a TVR than an Aston Martin. The newest Vantage has the same brand disconnect to me
The funny thing is that around 1973, the Aston V8 looked like a Mustang. And that was prior to Ford purchasing them, which happened in 1991.
The design language changed, and it reflected a lot of different things over time. We tend to forget the ones we don’t see all the time, so we think of the James Bond DB as what an Aston Martin should look like, not a Lagonda from the 1980s.
That still has more of what defines Aston Martin to me, from the fender vents to the chrome around the glass, to the overall delicate and subdued shape, and even the color pallet these were most commonly seen in. I’m actually a big fan of the predecessor to that facelift, the DBS, it was a huge departure from the prototypical Bond DB5, and was clearly a product of the times, but it still had the presence of an Aston Martin.
The Virage and the Lagonda are like the car equivalent of looking back at yearbook photos of someone’s awkward desperately trying to fit in teen years.
Taken circa 1990 at Royston station, which isn’t too far from Newport Pagnell. With those personalized plates, any chance that it might be a company demo?
Neat to see it snuggled up to two Metro’s…Sad news.
Royston? My local station!
The same! I was based in Dry Drayton, so Cambridge was too crowded with no parking after 10am, so Royston was my best bet. I had to use St. Ives a few times before Royston expanded their parking lot. Easy in/out, and I could always raid the Royston Vauxhall dealer for brochures on my way in, and have a really nice drive back to Dry Drayton on my way back.
Sorry
St. Ives is the whisky shop, St Neots was the alternate train station. I was booked to be over there this week, before things fell apart in March.
Mornington Crescent!
(Did I do this right?)
Chevy cavalier hatchback coupe??
First thing I thought of, too.
This was a very traditional British car of the time in that it was a complete pars-bin special. The headlights were from an Audi 5000, the taillights were from a VW Scirocco, the optional (and most-often chosen) 3-speed automatic came from Chrysler, and various switchgear and interior hardware came from Ford, GM and Jaguar.
The most offensive piece had to be the steering wheel, for cars equipped with an airbag. It was the corporate Ford airbag steering wheel seen on various Fords, Lincolns and Mercurys (ies?). But rather than give the Aston Martin its own airbag cover with logo, the Powers That Be simply took the Ford variant and covered up the embossed logo with an oval-shaped Aston Martin sticker. (See picture).
FoMoCo would perform a similar mistake when it began equipping Aston Martins with leather-wrapped Volvo key fobs in the early 2000s, as the then-new Aston Martins used a Volvo electronics architecture.
The latest Aston Martins (the DB11, new Vantage and DBS Superleggera) use Mercedes-AMG electronics and interior modules…but they do a far better job of hiding it!
Not helped by the disconnected wood trim in the otherwise fairly typical for the era dashboard design. It reminds me of that tape-on aftermarket wood affixed to so many Thunderbird’s and Cougars of the era. I’m sure it’s “real” wood but does that matter if the look is so superficial?
That wasn’t the only PLC with that issue. The 1995-1999 Buick Riviera also fell victim to wood-stickerification. Of course, if GM had dressed up the interior more, people might not’ve resorted to such tackiness.
That steering wheel is one of those things that once you’ve seen you can’t unsee… it’s literally straight out of a crown Vic.
At the time, this car seemed rather bland but not egregiously ugly. With 30 years hindsight I’m not so charitable. Chevy Cavalier, Scirocco, Nissan 240SX … lots of hints of this and that, none of them worthy of Aston Martin. And I think that Lotus and other boutique British cars of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s hid their parts bin bumpers, lights etc a lot better than this one does. In 1990 a DB5 looked good, and still does. This one, not so much.
Phew, this looks awful! Like a development mule for the second generation Mitsubishi Eclipse, where they’d decided on the greenhouse but still had yet to style the front and were using Allanté parts in the meanwhile.
These Virages are the SN 95 Mustangs of the A.M. world. Quite underwhelming at introduction, and they maintain that position today. The preceding V8 models may have been big, rough, and a bit uncouth, but they had the macho swagger.
And ironically that front end looks like a classic Mustang!
I’m sorry but that doesnt look lik 300k quids worth of car to me other Aston models yes but not that one its got that body kit on an old Mustang look which can be got a whole lot cheaper.