Aston Martin DBS

The modern Aston Martin DBS is a high performance sports car from the UK manufacturer Aston Martin. Aston has used the DBS name once before on their 1967-72 grand tourer coupe. The modern car replaces the Vanquish S as the flagship of the marque.

The DBS was first seen in the 2006 film Casino Royale. It was officially unveiled at the 2007 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance sporting a brand new exterior color, a graphite gray with a blue tint which has been dubbed 'Casino Ice'. The two seater coupé (as opposed to the 2+2 DB9 which the car is based on) has a bonded aluminium chassis made of lightweight magnesium alloy, carbon fibre composite and aluminium.

Power comes from the heavily revised hand made 6.0 V12 engine from the DBR9 racing car, tuned to deliver 510 bhp and help the DBS accelerate 0-100 km/h in 4.3 seconds and reach a top speed of 307 km/h. The car is expected to retail for approximately $265,000 USD. Sales are expected to start in spring of 2008.

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Aston Martin Rapide

The Aston Martin Rapide is a four-door, four-seat coupe, which British luxury marque Aston Martin plans to introduce in late 2007 to compete with the Porsche Panamera, Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class and Maserati Quattroporte. It was first presented under the form of a concept car at the North American International Auto Show in 2006. The Rapide name is a reference to the Lagonda Rapide, a sedan produced by Lagonda, now part of Aston Martin.

In February of 2006, AutoWeek reported that Aston Martin has prepared supplier contracts for a 2007 launch of the Rapide[1]. This means that the car will launch two years before the Panamera, its closest rival.

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Aston Martin Vantage

Aston Martin has used the Vantage name on a number of vehicles, normally indicating a high-performance version of another model. In one case, 1972–1973, the Vantage was a distinct model, being a straight-6 powered version of the (normally V8) DBS and successor to the DB-series.

Visual cues include a unique 2-headlight front clip with DB6-like grille. It was also the last Aston Martin to come equipped with wire wheels. Just 70 examples were built.

The Vantage was the last straight-6 Aston Martin until the 1993 DB7.

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Aston Martin Lagonda

The Aston Martin Lagonda was a luxury four-door sedan (saloon) built by Aston Martin of Newport Pagnell, England, between 1976 and 1989. Aston Martin produced 645 cars in these 12 years and if you wanted to buy one you would have to pay 150,000 pounds.

Aston Martin was about to go out of business in the mid-1970s and needed something to bring in some much-needed funds. Traditionally, Aston Martin had worked on 2+2 sports cars, but the Lagonda — the model being named after a grand sporting marque — was a four-door saloon car with a brand new Aston Martin V8 engine. As soon as it was introduced, it drew in hundreds of deposits from potential customers, helping Aston Martin's chances.

The car was designed by William Towns in an extreme interpretation of the classic 1970s "folded paper" style. It was as unconventional a design then as it is now. Car enthusiasts are fiercely divided on the car's æsthetic value.

Throughout the history of the marque, hand-built Lagondas were amongst the most expensive saloon cars in the world. The only other "production" cars to approach its lofty price tag were the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit/Silver Spur, Bentley Mulsanne, and Maserati Quattroporte.[citation needed]

A number of "series" were produced during the lifetime of the model, including a facelift in the 1980s which attempted to round off the car's razor-like lines and removed the troublesome pop-up headlights which had proved unreliable.

The Lagonda was the first production car in the world to use computer management and a digital instrument panel, although computers in many of the original cars are failure-prone. The development cost for the electronics alone on the Lagonda came to 4 times as much as the budget for the whole car. The second series used cathode ray tubes for the instrumentation, which proved even less reliable than the original model's LED display.

The Lagonda's striking design and opulent, club-like leather interior, together with its then state-of-the-art instrumentation, contrasted starkly with its decidedly "old world" 4-cam V-8 carbureted engine and Chrysler 3-speed "TorqueFlite" automatic transmission; the latter two combining to provide a dismal, often single-digit miles-per-gallon rating.

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Aston Martin V8

The Aston Martin V8 is a two-door saloon-type automobile manufactured in the United Kingdom from 1969 to 1990.

Aston Martin's customers had been clamouring for an eight-cylinder car for years, so Aston Martin designed a larger 2-door saloon for V8 applications. The engine was not ready, however, so in 1967 the company released the DBS with the straight-6 Vantage engine from the DB6. Two years later, Tadek Marek's V8 was ready, and Aston released the DBS V8. With the demise of the straight-6 Vantage in 1973, the DBS V8, now called simply the Aston Martin V8, became the company's mainstream car for two decades. It was retired in favour of the Virage in 1990.

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