Aston Martin has now begun to fire up the production line of their brand new manufacturing plant in St Athan, Wales, the second location apart from Gaydon where the British marque has planted its flag. Apart from giving them much greater headroom to increase production across all their cars, the new facility was primarily built to cater to the upcoming DBX and the volume that would entail.
It’s only fitting, then, that Aston take the opportunity to show off its latest prototype of the sporty SUV before a finalised version emerges for the worldwide at the end 2019. Sure, it is wrapped in a fashion typical to pre-production mules, but the apart from being able to inspect every zoomed-in detail, we are still able to garner a good amount of information from it.
The wheels, for example, are likely to be the same set fitted as standard as opposed to the black examples seen on the previous set of preview testing images and videos released. They’re shod in Pirelli rubber, as you might have guessed given its prominent logo placement.
Elsewhere, we do get a good idea of what sort of proportions and size the customer-ready DBX will inhabit. However, a puzzling element to all of this is the TAG Heuer connection. Given the watchmaker’s logo on the bonnet, one might assume the DBX could feature a bespoke analogue timepiece, say, on the centre console.
Back to the St Athan plant, at 90-acres, Aston Martin has since 2016 basically transformed an RAF military airfield into one of the largest automotive manufacturing facilities in the UK. On the grounds, the three Super Hangars have been extensively refashion and equipped to handle modern manufacturing and to facilitate hand-built components.
Aston Martin also detailed their plans to make St Athan the centralised hub of their electrification efforts which will find their way into their cars bearing the Lagonda name. In all, they expect the community to benefit from a further 3,000 job vacancies over the 200 already created so far.
Aston Martin Lagonda President and Group Chief Executive Officer, Andy Palmer said: “This is an exciting time for Aston Martin Lagonda. Our second luxury manufacturing facility is now producing cars and is ready to go into full production in H1 2020. Our facilities and manufacturing teams, led by VP and Chief Manufacturing Operations Officer Keith Stanton have done an outstanding job in getting the factory ready almost a year before full production starts, on time and on budget.“
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