Aston Martin
The firm became associated with luxury grand touring cars in the 1950s and 1960s, and with the fictional character James Bond following his use of a DB5 model in the 1964 film Goldfinger.
The company has had a chequered financial history, including bankruptcy in the 1970s, but has also enjoyed long periods of success and stability, including under the ownership of David Brown, from 1947 to 1972 and of the Ford Motor Company from 1994 to 2007.
In March 2007, a consortium of investors, led by David Richards, purchased 92% of Aston Martin for £479 million, with Ford retaining a £40 million stake. David Richards became chairman of Aston Martin. In December 2012, the Italian private equity fund Investindustrial signed a deal to buy 37.5% of Aston Martin, investing £150 million as a capital increase.
Ford placed Aston in the Premier Automotive Group, invested in new manufacturing and ramped up production. In 1994, Ford opened a new factory at Banbury Road inBloxham. In 1995, the company produced a record 700 vehicles. Until the Ford era, cars had been produced by hand coachbuilding craft methods, such as the English wheel. In 1998 the 2,000th DB7 was built, and in 2002 the 6,000th, exceeding production of all previous DB models. The DB7 range was boosted by the addition of V12 Vantage models in 1999, and in 2001 the company introduced the V12-engined Aston Martin Vanquish.
In October 2004, the company set up the dedicated 12,500 square metres AMEP engine production plant within the Ford Germany Niehl, Cologne plant. With capacity to produce up to 5,000 engines a year by 100 specially trained personnel, like traditional Aston Martin engine production from Newport Pagnell, assembly of each unit is entrusted to a single technician from a pool of 30, with V8 and V12 variants assembled in under 20 hours. By bringing engine production back to within the company, the promise was that Aston Martin would be able to produce small runs of higher performance variants engines.This expanded engine capacity allowed in 2006, the V8 Vantage sports car to enter production at the Gaydon factory, joining the DB9 and DB9 Volante.
The first four-door Aston Martin Rapide sports cars rolled out of the Magna Steyr factory in Graz, Austria in 2010.The contract manufacturer provides dedicated facilities to ensure compliance with the exacting standards of Aston Martin and other marques, including Mercedes-Benz. Ulrich Bez has publicly speculated about outsourcing all of Aston Martin's operations with the exception of marketing. In September 2011 it was announced Rapide production would be returned to Gaydon in the second half of 2012, restoring all manufacture there.
In 2013 Aston Martin signed a deal with Daimler AG to supply new Mercedes-AMG power plants for the next generation line up. Daimler AG now owns 5% of Aston Martin.Mercedes-AMG will also supply Aston Martin with electrical systems. This technical partnership will support Aston Martin’s launch of a new generation of models that will incorporate new technology and V8s. The first model to sport Mercedes technology is the DB11, announced at the 2016 Geneva Motor, sporting Mercedes electronics for the entertainment, navigation and other systems.
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