Saying goodbye to the Aston Martin DB9 - Autocar
Start at the Aston Martin monument near Aston Clinton, or go to that road in the film Skyfall, or something convoluted or tenuous like that. The Aston Martin DB9 is a car I’ve just always liked driving. And so to mark the fact that it’ll disappear from production next year, and that this model – the DB9 GT – is meant to be “the best a DB9 can be”, I’m just going to take it for a drive. The GT is the end of a 12-year journey for the DB9, the ultimate version in the only proper sense of the word. The DB9 itself could hardly be more significant to Aston. It’s the first of the VH architecture cars, the aluminium underpinnings whose metaphorically flexible ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ components mean Aston can make a car as long as it likes and fit whatever components it likes. It’s so versatile that Aston used to get a bit uppity if you called it a ‘platform’, because that suggests the platform is now 12 years old. Yet pull the skin off a DB9 now and from a 2004 model and they’d look different enough underneath. The DB9, Vantage , Vanquish and Rapide , as well as the shorter-lived Virage and DBS, have all been hung from versions of this same architecture. (“Aston has basically never made money,” says CEO Andy Palmer. Source: www.autocar.co.uk
