Adrian Hallmark has spent around 5 months as CEO of Aston Martin after a long spell running Bentley, and now, he’s telling the media about his plans for the brand. In essence, he sees Porsche as a good model for how it develops many variants on a single nameplate, and he wants Aston to do something similar. And in news that’ll surely please enthusiasts, he wants a manual transmission.
“Back to this question of ‘How do we develop each of the nameplates? Which direction do we take them?’ sportiness and real, purist sports-car experience, we need a manual,” Hallmark told journalists at a New York roundtable. “We have one, but for that [he nods towards a Vantage parked nearby], it needs to be different. But watch this space.”
The manual he’s referring to is the six-speed used in the limited-run Valour and Valiant. Aston Martin hasn’t had a regular-production manual car since the 2019 Vantage AMR, and the company only built 200 examples. But the likes of the 911 GT3 and S/T prove there is a real market for manual-transmission at the higher ends of the performance-car market.
Hallmark wants more than simple color and trim packages, though those will come, too. Sooner than models with more mechanical differentiation. “For the lighter touch ones, it will take 1 to 1.5 years. There’s a couple of things we’ve been able to do quickly but they are more decorative to substantive,” Hallmark said. “But even if stuff is kind of off-the-shelf, you still have to certify, so it’s a year. We’re on the case.”
He talked about cars with different suspension tunes and more power, even hinting at “bringing an existing racing car back to the road,” though some variants may only be available in certain markets. For the DBX, Hallmark thinks there’s room for something with a bit more luxury—he says at low speeds, the SUV is “less relaxing” than some competitors—but he doesn’t want to make a Rolls-Royce Cullinan rival either.
Photo by: Aston Martin
For the DB12, Vantage, and Vanquish, he wants to go in the other direction, ramping up their sporting credentials. But while it’ll take some time to get all of these model variants out, he’s not worried about it, since these cars—plus an updated DBX—all launched very recently, so they’re fresh. The Vantage Roadster isn’t even out on the market quite yet, and we haven’t yet seen an open-top Vanquish Volante.
Also in the pipeline are hybrids. The Valhalla hypercar is the first, but Hallmark confirmed that the company’s front-engine offerings will get electrified, too.
“The great thing about these cars, the body technology is not conventional. Well, it is conventional for sports cars, it’s not a conventional regular vehicle structure,” he said. “Basically, it’s nodal forms, castings, with extrusions that connect them together, and then big subframes that give a lot of the structure into those nodal joints, then braces that go across. So we’re actually flexible to elongate or raise different aspects of the geometry of the vehicle, then package what we need.”
Aston Martin has a partnership with Lucid for components for its upcoming EV, but it’s working out a different solution for its hybrid powertrain. One of the challenges is the fact that the DB12, Vantage, and Vanquish all use a rear-mounted transaxle, and there isn’t a simple plug-and-play solution for this type of drivetrain layout on the market today.
The EV is still in the pipeline, though like so many other automakers, Aston is scaling back its previous electrification plans. “We’ll still have the first battery-electric vehicle in this decade, in the next five years, but instead of trying to get as many as we can over the next five years, it’ll be one,” he said. Hallmark said he expects the EV to count for 15% of sales by the end of the decade, while pure-combustion and hybrid cars will account for the remaining 85%.
Photo by: Aston Martin
Beyond actual model variants, Hallmark wants to expand Aston Martin’s options list, giving customers more opportunity for personalization. Early on in his tenure, he had a team assemble complete options lists from competitors, and determined which could fit within the Aston Martin brand. The expanded options list should arrive in the coming months.
Hallmark is looking at the bigger picture, too. “From a business performance point of view, this is a super high potential company, and we need to turn it into a high-performance one, and I don’t just mean the cars. Things like the options, derivatives, and all this stuff all help drive the top line and the contribution, but we’ve also got to get a lot leaner and more productive as an organization.”
Aston will share its 2024 financial results at the end of this month, and Hallmark will go deeper into how he wants to turn the company into that “high-performance” organization. “My mission is to be the first CEO in 112 years to make it sustainably profitable.”
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