Aston boss doubles down on PHEVs amid EV slowdown
EV hype was 'politically driven' Stroll says; Aston will make combustion cars until legally told to stop
Back in February Aston Martin quietly announced it was set to delay the introduction of its range of EVs. Now the company’s executive chairman, Lawrence Stroll, has confirmed that the plan is to switch development spend to a new generation of plug-in hybrids instead – with these set to live all the way up to any ultimate ban on combustion engines.
“We planned to launch the first car next year in 2025,” Stroll told journalists during a conference at Aston’s Gaydon HQ yesterday, “we were ready to do so, but it seems there is a lot more hype in the EV market that was politically driven rather than by consumer demand. Particularly at an Aston Martin price point.”
Much of the heavy lifting on Aston’s fully electric range has already been done. Stroll confirmed that Aston has designed a platform that will form the basis of four separate vehicles, these being “a sports car, an SUV, a type of CUV and a halo hypercar. We have all those products designed and technically engineered, so that process is done.”
But what was missing was enthusiasm from the existing customer base. “We speak to our dealers, we speak to our customers, when you have a small network you can communicate easily,” Stroll said, “and everyone said we still want sound, we still want smell. Aston Martin sports cars are not the first car we drive every day.”
The result is a two-year delay, with the first EV now set to make its debut in 2027. Before then, Aston is shifting development effort into creating what will become a range of plug-in hybrids. The first of these will be the already-announced Valhalla supercar, with deliveries set to commence at the beginning of next year. But beyond that there will be front-engined PHEVs, with these being the next-generation successors to the company’s existing portfolio.
“We are going to invest much more heavily in our PHEV programme to be a bridge between full combustion and full electric,” Stroll said, “we think that for our customers and our market that’s going to play out and last quite a while.”
Stroll confirmed that the plan is for the PHEVs to continue to use V8 engines from the company’s existing technical partnership with AMG, but he refused to be drawn on where the electrical side of the powertrain will come from. So it could be Mercedes, or it could be from somewhere else. Stroll also suggested that we will ultimately see a hybridised Aston V12 as well, presumably giving the prospect of a power output somewhere north of 900hp.
“We see PHEVs going to the middle of the 2030s, we don’t believe demand will slow down at all,” Stroll said. And he also confirmed that Aston won’t stop making combustion cars until it has to: “for as long as we’re allowed to legally, we will keep making them. I believe there will always be a demand, although granted that demand will shrink.”
There will be more supercars, too. Aston officially cancelled the mid-engined Vanquish project last year – that being the car that was meant to slot below the Valhalla and be produced in bigger numbers. But now Stroll says he sees the Valhalla coupe as being the start of a series of models.
“We are going to have various versions, Valhalla is our mid-engined platform,” he said, “we have various concepts, some road versions, some track versions, for what’s going to happen and how Valhalla gets extended – also through to the mid-2030s.”
As always at Aston, interesting times.
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