Aston Martin
Swan doors and a bonded aluminum structure with narrow, model-specific jacking pads make this the marque where a wrong lift point damages the chassis, not the paint.
1913 · Gaydon, England
Carrying a Aston Martin
The bonded and riveted aluminum structure governs everything else. VH-era and current cars present a central lift point with roughly three-quarters of an inch of usable frame before a jack fouls the plastic sill cover, and the sill wraps underneath, so a standard round lift pad crushes it. Model-specific pads travel with the car; the points differ between Vantage, DB12 and Vanquish and are not interchangeable. A mis-set pad distorts a chassis that is bonded rather than welded, and a bonded structure does not get pulled straight afterwards.
Swan doors open upward at about twelve degrees before swinging out, which clears a curb and does nothing at all for lateral clearance inside a trailer. The loading sequence puts the driver out of the car before it enters the box. Front splitters on DBS Superleggera, Vanquish and DBX S sit low enough that ramp break-over matters more than static clearance, and Valkyrie and Valour load on a flat deck as standard practice rather than as an exception.
Cars from this marque regularly arrive with film on the nose, sills and A-pillars, and the deep clearcoats mark under anything but soft contact. Strapping is soft loop over the tire at four points, with no chassis, sill or suspension contact. Pre-1990 DB-series cars travel with the battery isolated and on a conditioner, and are moved by hand or winch rather than under their own unassisted brakes.
In the current range
- Vantage and Vantage Roadster
- DB12 and DB12 Volante
- Vanquish and Vanquish Volante
- DBX707 and DBX S
- Valhalla
Collected
- DB4 GT Zagato
- DB5
- DB6 Vantage
- V8 Vantage (1977–1989)
- V600 Vantage
- One-77
- Vulcan
- Valkyrie
- Victor
The cars themselves
The marque
Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford began building cars in London in 1913, taking the name from the Aston Hill hillclimb. The company went bankrupt seven times in its first century and built fewer than 70,000 cars in the hundred years to 2013 — scarcity is the marque's default state.
Production moved to Gaydon in 2003, and the bonded-aluminum VH architecture arrived with the DB9 a year later. Sports cars are still built at Gaydon; the DBX is built at St Athan in Wales.
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