Name: Aston Martin’s CEO Reveals The Secret To Its Turnaround
Uploaded: 2018-02-28
Duration: 4 min 2 s
Description: CEO Andy Palmer gets into the future of the luxury car maker.

You've talked about in reference to the DB11 Volante an archetype of customer called Charlotte. Yeah. And it's taking more of what Aston Martin can provide for the female customer. Yeah. Has Charlotte changed over the last year or so? Are there new archetypes that you're working with? She changes simply because she doesn't exist, and obviously the deeper you go into Defining your proxy customers, which is something that over the years in my career I've always found to be useful. Identify the clusters that you're looking at and identify somebody that's a proxy for the middle of that cluster. And we have archetypes all around as proxy customer all around us. So we have Richard that for example represents. The Sentras, the cluster for the next generation of vanquish. Felipe, French guy that's the center of the DB11 V12 and you're absolutely right. Charlotte, that represents one of our customers, she's 42 years old, she's a, she's an American living in California and she, she lives a certain lifestyle. As we understand her more We make decisions and function of what she would want not what I would want. The luxury SUV space has boomed in the last five years especially. Everyone of your competitors either has a SUV or is coming out with one. For us, we say we do everything for the love of beautiful So the challenge for us has been to make a beautiful SUV. Not easy because SUV typically is a box and that's not particularly beautiful. But I think we've nailed it. And what we're trying to do is redefine GT travel, Gran Turismo travel in an SUV. Other than SUVs, obviously a huge opportunity for any electric car maker is a full electric vehicle. Yep. You're developing an eletric Rapide? Yes we are. What's the progress of that, so far? Well, it'll be out in 2019. It'll be the first luxury electric vehicle, so it would sit at a customer group above premium. Premium is the Germans and Tesla. So it will sit above that. Just 155 customers, it'll be a limited edition car. And part of the deal will be You feed back to us, as a luxury customer, how this car fits in your lifestyle. Is the battery range enough? Do you want silence or do you want a noise? What are we missing? So we're looking at a new type of customer. Using that almost as a big fleet test, and that will tell us how to execute electric vehicles into the future. I'd like to talk a bit about New Vantage as well. I got a sneak peak of it a couple of months ago, it's now being fully unveiled. And is gonna be going out to customers this year. Mm- hm. Full redesign, the new one. Who's the, you know, your customer for that one? Really you are expecting this to be your top seller for now. The customer is younger than we've previously looked at. The proxy just for fun is a German guy called Marcus. And this is his Weekend warrior, basically maybe in the week he's using public transport, we can, he wants to go out and drive. And that's also the reason I think we'll be the only luxury manufacturer offering in a serious production of manual transmission And that, that again, that seems a very much US market, where if you have a sports car, then it really should be a stick shift. You know, you talk about brand, and then how the first 140's of the company establish a great brand. And you think of Aston Martin, you think of James Bond, you think of You know, classic core, the DB5 stands out. How do you retain that core DNA when you're rapidly developing new cars? And how much of that DNA that is so much espoused by those cars of the 50s and 60s is in a car like Valkyrie? Well you know we never designed an ugly car, fortunately. We never made a lot of cars. I mean in the lifetime of the company, 104 years, I think we've only made 85, 000 cars in Total, that's less than Toyota in two days. Right. So the cars are rare. The cars are beautiful. The cars are handmade. And the cars are made in the United Kingdom. I can apply that statment to a DB5 and I can apply that statement to a DB11 or even a [ UNKNOWN ]. They were always leading edge. When Bamford and Martin started out, they didn't start out thinking that we'll use old technology. They started out saying we want to be the quickest car up Aston Hill. So I think everything that we're doing is entirely consistent with the ethos of the company. Most of all, make the most beautiful cars in the world. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

CEO Andy Palmer gets into the future of the luxury car maker.