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DBX goes black tie with Q by Aston Martin

Aston Martin won't begin delivering its new DBX to customers in North America until the latter half of this year. Perhaps as a favor to DBX intenders that haven't placed orders yet, Q by Aston Martin has prepared a bespoke DBX for the Geneva Motor Show that presents a sliver of the creative possibilities unlocked by working with Q. The near infinite menu of choices has been broken down into two groups, Q by Aston Martin Commission and Q by Aston Martin Collection. Collection fits a range of predesigned accessories like carbon fiber paddle shifters or hood vent louvers for the DBS Superleggera. The Commission range encompasses all the imagination that a customer's bank account can fund. The Geneva show car wears Satin Xenon Grey paint from the Collection, as well as carbon fiber pieces around the lower exterior, black anodized tread plates and plaques on the sill. The 22-inch gloss black painted wheels come from the Commission department. The grand showcase comes inside the DBX vault. Yards of Obsidian Black Leather come from the SUV's standard options list. Commission stewards designed the satin chrome aluminum trim and jewelry as an entree, all milled from a solid ingot of the shiny stuff and finished with a special diamond pattern. They followed that up with a custom technique for the carbon fiber floating center console, door trim, and luggage floor. Craftsmen laid up 280 layers of carbon fiber, cured it for 12 hours, then put five-axis milling machines to work for 90 hours to create the necessary shapes. The finish on the cabin pieces reflects the strata of the hand-laid layers, while the span protecting the luggage floor comes from a single sheet of herringbone-pattered carbon fiber. Raised metal and rubber welts help protect the load floor finish and prevent cargo sliding to and fro.  The standard DBX starts at $192,986 after destination. A Q by Aston Martin DBX will, naturally, cost a touch more. Related Video:    

Aston Martin makes the DB11 and its configurator more powerful

Aston Martin sold 4,150 cars last year, but the luxury automaker said its configurator served up more than two million specification sessions. Going with the overwhelming numbers, for 2022 Aston Martin has focused on "the customer journey" for imminent and aspirational buyers by rolling out a new and highly featured configurator. At last, the firm greets potential customers and the merely curious with the kind of luxury one expects of the brand. This is especially important for a company working through its Project Horizon turnaround, and also because, as the official Safety Car and Medical Car sponsor of Formula 1, traffic to Aston Martin's web site spikes every time its Vantage and DBX are called out on track during races.   The configurator's been built using Epic Game's Unreal engine, a digital creation tool building portals for everything from real estate to fashion, supplemented by Nvidia GTX graphics. In the present Phase One, visitors can place their chosen model in studio or outdoor environments, with daytime or nighttime lighting, and get high-res, zoomed-in beauty shots of their their vehicle details. Yet while Aston Martin poured new features into the configurator, it has reorganized and simplified the site's use. For instance, individual elements such as exterior paint are broken into six color groupings like Blacks & Greys and Bronzes & Oranges, providing users a glimpse at the range of hues on offer without overwhelming them into analysis paralysis. The surfeit of choice carries on inside, naturally — there are eleven carpet colors on offer and 12 shades of headliner. The simplifying rationalization carries on in the cabin, too, with three themes available to establish a quick baseline for personalization. The starter theme is called Create, showcasing ornate stitching on the seat bolsters, perforated, patterned seatbacks, door cards, and arm rest. Next up is Accelerate, which "will appeal to customers who wish for a more focused interior." This one puts Alcantara all over, notably on the entire seat faces and bolsters, with leather trimming the seat sides and headrests. Create and Accelerate can be had in ten colors in monotone and duotone arrangements. Inspire, the topmost theme and "the epitome of luxury," can be had in 38 colors and in monotone, duotone, and light duotone.

Mercedes to offer SL, GL platforms to Aston Martin?

The agonizingly slow courtship between Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz has been a regular topic of conversation ever since the 2009 Lagonda Concept debuted, riding on a Mercedes GL chassis. Beyond that one polarizing concept, though, nearly every other attempt to pair the two brands up in a major way has fallen through. Only the technical partnership between Mercedes and Aston for certain components from AMG, which was negotiated back in July, has held up so far.
That may finally be set to change, according to an excellent profile of the two brands' relationship from Automobile, which claims that two platforms will unite the Germans and Brits. The first tie up is, not surprisingly, a sports car.
As Aston Martin's VH platform - which underpins every car that comes out of Gaydon - continues to age, the pressure will well and truly be on Aston to find a next-gen replacement to underpin the successors to the Vantage, Vanquish, DB9 and Rapide. Automobile claims Mercedes has just such an architecture, in the form its new modular sports car platform. This new platform is slated for the next-generation SLK and SL and is still in its design infancy.