Nothing seems more British than Aston Martin, a luxury car brand well known for becoming the James Bond franchise automobile of choice.
Aston Martin’s 100-year+ history is full of ups and downs, but the past two years have been pretty eventful – in a good way. In 2016, it released its first all-new model in ten years, the DB11. On the heels of that commercial success, the company was able to turn a profit in 2017 after six straight years of losses.
Aston Martin also debuted two high-performance, mid-engine cars last year: the Valkyrie and Valkyrie AMR Pro, nicknamed – respectively – 001 and 002.
The $2.6 million Valkyrie hypercar is said to be tuned so precisely that custom sizing is required for each of its owners – none of whom will be you, since they’re making only 150 of these and they’re already spoken for.
But Aston Martin isn’t stopping there and the company is trying to make good on plans to produce a broader line, efforts in which it’s recently invested a quarter of a billion dollars in order to support. In alignment with this, the company is teasing another brand new model, this time code-named 003: a hybrid super car that should debut in 2021.
Bloomberg says details on 003 are “scant” but that the company has promised a few things: it will be lightweight, turbocharged, hybrid and street legal. They’re even including a small amount of space in the design for some luggage, suggesting this vehicle might be intended for at least some practical use. Or, as practical as you’d expect from any car that’s being made in a total production run of 500 vehicles.
But the other thing that Aston Martin is working overtime to produce right now is… buzz. The company has announced this week it will pursue an IPO, selling about 25 percent of its shares publicly at a valuation of about $6.7 billion. But some investors seem cautious of this “Ferrari multiple” being applied to a company that’s, quite frankly, seen a lot of red ink in the past decade.
So perhaps the 003 is the balm in an attempt to soften a valuation that Forbes is calling it a “tough sell.”
