James May
James on Aston
The thing I used to like about Aston Martin was that they loomed large in the public conscience but not actually on the road.
Bond, obviously, had a lot to do with the former. Bond meant Astons were caddish and driven by chaps in well-cut suits packing a piece, which gave them a Savile-Row suavity absent from the offerings of Ferrari blah blah bloody blah. Aston Martin itself had a lot to do with the latter.
Up until the DB7, which was made abroad (ie in Bloxham, but that was the same thing as far as the old workforce was concerned), it was impossible to build Astons in any number. They were wrought from the earth with hammers by men in Newport Pagnell, which had been famous for several hundred years for building stage coaches.
The Aston factory was a fabulous experience for anyone interested in t'Victorian mill. It was a bit dark, a bit satanic, and a bit of a theme park. Men assembled whole engines by hand at a bench and then put their names on them. Other blokes then pushed completed engines across the main road on a trolley. The reception area and offices were a cronky old house with head-banging door lintels and wonky windows. Aston Martin was a cheerful great day out in history that just happened to produce a car now and then.
There was another reason for not seeing too many Astons before the late 1990s. With the best will in the world, they didn't always work that well, and it was generally accepted that the last few years of product development on any new model was a job for the customers. Legend has it that the first Lagonda didn't even make it down the road to Woburn Abbey, which is where all new Astons were officially photographed.
"Aston Martin was a cheerful great day out in history that just happened to produce a car now and then"
These days, though, Astons are built in a brand new, brightly lit modern factory (or ‘facility') at Gaydon, out of modern things and using modern methods, and it would be churlish of me to say that something, however, is now missing. Nobody really wants an Aston Martin to be outdated, temperamental and anachronistic.
Something, however, is missing.
I realised this as I drove off in the DBS. For a start, I was swerving through other Astons left right and centre, because every bugger's got one these days. I also couldn't shake off the impression that the DBS was somehow trying to be a bit of a Ferrari; that is, sophisticated, knowing and making an overt and readily understood performance statement. The Seventies Aston V8 was a singular car, a curious mix of bespoke British cottage industry methods and American muscle-car knuckle-headedness. You had to get it to want one.
So a big Aston is not as left-field as it once was, and neither is the DBS necessarily that great. It feels big and cumbersome where that Ferrari 612 felt surprisingly small, the interior lacks character, and that emotion control key thing is just bloody annoying. It does seem to be taking itself terribly seriously, which immediately demolishes any pretention of Britishness in my book. It looks good, if a little sentimental, but it somehow doesn't feel very special or, dare I say it, original.
But that may be a personal thing. I can't deny that it works extremely well as a supercar GT. The extra 40-odd bhp seem to make more difference than they should, and the DBS is at least like an old school big Aston in the way it thunders and brutalises the road. It feels like a car conceived by men who really wanted to build a locomotive.
Moreover, it doesn't feel anything like the DB9. The composites, the exotic metals, the ceramic brakes, all those tweaks and tucks - they've transformed the slightly tropid regular car into something much tougher and more plain-talking. This is quite Aston-like, too, and is a mirror of what happened when the original wishy washy V8 coupe was turned into the giant Doc Marten boot that was the V8 Vantage. ‘Bruiser' is the word that's usually employed here.
So I'm forced to return to the question that several other people have asked: why didn't they make the DB9 like this in the first place? Charging an extra £50,000 to get it right seems a bit rich to me, despite protestations that this is actually a completely different car.
It is, I'm afraid to say, another case of taste-the-difference-cheese. You're expected to believe that by paying more you are getting a better piece of cheddar, when really the regular cheddar is being downgraded and the proper stuff priced up. All cheese could be that good.
The real issue, though, is that I've come away wanting a pork pie.
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that should be james not fames
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i get it, tis clever
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He is James May, he cant talk about this, EI. he likes Fiat Panda's and Reaults.
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I admit, Jeremy is more funny. Hammond is out of the race because he can't write, and James, well he's in a different league: he's a shaman. That is, he sees and talks about the spirit of things, not just about the external, obvious, same blah-blah that most journalist talk about. Now if you don't understand James, read something else and stfu.
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I get what he's saying and I completely agree. To DBS-AstonMartin: The aston martin is the cheese but he doesn't want it. He's basically saying, that like taste the difference products e.g. cheese, they diliberatly make the other version not as good as it could be so you can make the better stuff more expensive. I think James May's funnier than Jeremy Clarkson but in a more sophisticated way. That's probably just me though. Just to make anyone who didn't get it feel stupid, I'm 14 and I understood it :P
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*deliberately
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Only James May could come up with something like this.
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I'm American and bloody get it. £50,000 is a lot more money, but in comparison with other super cars the DBS is pocket change for something that has a bit more appeal than its "brother" DB9, and can be parked on any corner in Monaco. Is £50,000 worth of carbon fiber and ceramic brake worth it? I'd say yes, but then again I have little affection for James' perfect vision of the world or the 612. To each his own...
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Well, I got it and thoroughly enjoyed the article. But then, I drive a Mini. :-D
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i absolutely love his analogy with " taste the difference cheese "
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Informed folks love buying & hate being sold to. Aston is using sales tactics to build cars. Bad idea at that price bracket.
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well, maybe james is rich so that he lives on a different planet and believes that all cheese shall be made to top quality. but the standard and basic series exist because there're demand for them and that not everyone can economically afford the very best. if everyone in the world drive the best, eat the best, then we are living in a communist novelty and certainly it doesn't exist. and to be honest, things like carbon ceramic brakes are largely unnecessary on an aston. i honestly believe that if you jam the ceramic brakes on a normal road: a. you'll be hit by whoever is behind you; and b. the brakes itself will catch fire. things like such are nice on the track, but largely deemed unnecessary when driving on normal road. it just cause you trouble and embarrassment when your aston's brakes catch fire while everyone's watching.
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I understand what James means, I was walking down High St Kensington the other day where there are more DB9's than Bendy buses when a DB6 rolled by. It attracted way more admiring glances than any modern Aston does. Don't get me wrong the DB9 is a beautiful car it just lacks that certain something.
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great article once again! Enjoyed it a lot. Agree. And you don't have to be rich to want things properly done. It is ethics, professional principal to get idea into the material world without any loss, transforming it maybe, but keeping it complete
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Very evocative - doesn't quite make sense though.
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I hear James May is going to play Miss Havisham in a London Theatre remake of Great Expectations.
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I like Mr. May's witty insight, it makes perfect sense to me. Vintage Mature Cheddar is just old Cheddar relabelled, so don't be fooled into spending more than you need to, go for a Melton Mowbray instead, you get more pork to the bite. ;)
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I Agree with James May. Aston Martin is dangerously heading towards being pretentious with its current image and products appearing contrived. Its recent products such as the DB9/DBS and V8 Vantage cannot come anywhere close to expressing the passion, character and inherent talent Ferrari products exude from its racing heritage and engineering expertise. The 'emotion control button' on the DBS, the loud but flat one dimensional bark of the V8, press releases loudly expressing 'passion, art, whatever' are just a few examples of this misdirection, as the cars are rated to be good, or at best very good and never outstanding or excellent. In the past it made flawed, but characterful and in its racing heyday, truly outstanding cars. It now seems to be focused too much on marketing and gimmicks, clearly appealing to a wider market and good for its business, but nevertheless disappointing.
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Great aricle Captain Slow. You know about your Aston Martins
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Brilliant!!! James... here is my thought: an automobile should be the singular vision of one great man-- Colin Chapman of Lotus, Ferdinand Porsche with his 356, Alec Issigonis with the Mini. When the company strays from that singular vision, then the marque loses its way, and becomes mediocre, or worse, "perfected" and soul-less. Along with this singular vision, an autocar should inspire passion... after all, passion is what makes "sports cars" so desirable (which explains why a mistress is far more interesting than a wife, though not as reliable).
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And what about Aston Martin? Those of us who love British cars desire a vehicle which has a soul-- it must "feel" British, as though it rose out of the hedgerows and the mist, formed by the same hands that built Stonehenge and Conwy and the Roman baths. For a sports car to be "British", it must epitomize the culture from whence it arose... so, the question is this: does Aston Martin feel like a British automobile, or mere like another cold, lifeless appliance? Because without passion, without spirit, without soul, a marque is nothing.
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Oh James. You're one of the only people who could go from talking about cars and ending it with talking about something as random as a pork pie anything else food related. Anyway someone told me one time that shops put their prices up and then put them down and say they're having a sale, when in reality they're actually charging the original price or slightly more than it. You'd think in this point of time with the financial issues and low amounts of jobs as well as the fact that the company itself has suffered, having to lay off some of their workforce they'd be thinking that less people can afford the extras and perhaps throw them in with the regular standard purchase. So James do you still think that Mr Bond would be better suited with a Ford Mondeo?
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Nobody can deny the point of view explained by James. But from my point of view (far far away from England)I accept de crticism about de managment of the company, buy I can't accept that Aston haven't that soul. Ferrari isn't God in car making and have lots of items to talk about (and not in a good way).
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To start with... Alicia166 is obviously a girl...and she got it. So all the men in here have really let the side down. What he was talking about what incredibly obvious. It is also why I don't like Aston Martin. Please don't confuse me... I like the cars, I just don't like the company. I think they play on the emotions of the patriotic British Citizen. And I am a migrant British Citizen saying this.
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I understand what James wrote, and he has a point. And I'm thinking of what Jeremy said about the sales number of that Mondeo ST 220, numbers which were lower than the DB9's, making that Mondeo more rare than an Aston...it's just not right that every footballer should have an Aston. Who knows, maybe in the future we'll have more accessible Astons like MPVs and 2 door hatchbacks :))
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Oh come on, it's really obvious what he's saying, the same point that he made about the F430 Scuderia; why pay loads extra to get what it should've been in the first place? [Instead of making crap cheese and then making decent cheese for more money, why not make the decent cheese to start with so that people are unaware of worse, cheaper cheese? Although, when you factor cars into this metaphor, the answer is that the worse one came out first by some margin, and is usually more comfortable - at least at Ferrari - than the "Tesco's Finest" version at the expense of ultimate performance.] But really, whilst his point is valid, it's all Aston Martin's fault. They should've sold the DBS as a DB9 Vantage and priced it about £25k-30k cheaper than they ended up doing, because it's really just a DB9 that's a bit better, a bit faster, more of a Bruiser, like all Vantages.
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@Mikeado: I assume you are not a member of the AM board - your understanding of supply and demand needs a re-think. Why on earth should AM charge less for a product for which there is a (long) waiting list? Arguably they should have charged £25k-£35k more, because people with more money than sense would still buy one because it's an Aston. Bottom line is they are trying to make money, not make people that can't afford their products sleep easily at night, and they are doing a MUCH better job of that now than they ever were in the bad old Newport Pagnell days. I agree with James about modern Astons - you can apply his comments equally to V8 Vantage, i.e. good, but not as good as it could have been. However, James I think you underestimate the extent to which people buy cars because of how they look - and how they think that car makes them look. Caster-wheeled, slab-sided 612 or DBS? Easy. And James, pork pies are really bad for you.
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JCW18, I actually meant they should've sold it as a 'DB9 Vantage' in the first place (so they'd've got all the Bond fans and style addicts, plus people like Mr. May and Fuhrer Clarkson who ended up being un-decided on a pricey DBS). But you make a valid point about image. The Peugeot 206 became Britain's best-selling hatchback a few years ago, purely because it looked cool and stylish for a small car (let's face it, why else would you buy one?). Btw, I hear the new 4.7 AMV8 is much improved over the original 4.3 (not that I'm on the AM board or anything ;-) ).
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Used to be you couldn't tell AM's apart because they only made one model: coupé, Volante or Vantage. Yet every one was bespoke. These days they make several that all look alike, and actually they're all pretty much off the peg. That smallish V8 for instance, designed to be better than a 911. Why? A true AM-client couldn't care less about Porsches, he could buy a dozen 911's at any moment. And I'm definitely not talking about Beckham there. If I had AM-money I'd want something handbuild and taylormade. And I'd be tiring of all the Porsches and Ferraris I already have. James, for pork pie go to Morgan and get a 4/4. Nothing else for it.
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Used to be: 'If one needs to ask for the purchase price of our sportscars, one cannot afford one. Engine power? Sufficient. Good day to you... sir'. Now they say: 'It's 50K more than the DB9 and you get 40hp extra for that. Good deal, eh? Blimey!'
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Does anyone else think that the '70's AM looked more than a bit like an expensive Mustang?
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I also get the funny feeling that AM have done the same thing with that One-77. Something tells me it will turn out not to be worth £1M. I would pick a Veyron any day.
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Agree completely on the emotion control thing. It's an Aston Martin, not a bloody health spa. Othewise, the DBS is quite frankly the mutt's proverbials and a modern British masterpiece to boot...James can take his fat ugly 612 and sod off! If you want something hand crafted from the 1970's, go and buy an Aeromax...your pork pie's right there.
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bla bla bla to slaw for that db9 we whant to see clarkson in it
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No seriously, I want to read James' words.Even the Stig will know this isn't James' words. James isn't that slow.
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i do like your's tv show but you May, are such a big jackass.don't make jokes about poor people because someday maybe you gone lose everything and then you'll see.bye
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Am I the only one who had a really bad craving for some Orange Juice after reading this??
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The aston may be a bit modern like the ferrari , but the navigation system is different , the shape is different , an aston would look HORRIBLE and SICK in red while ferrari looks good in red , and most importantly , the driving experience seems to be better in the astons . sure for onAGivenday , $50,000 is a lot of cash , but I am an indian , and the price of an audi is 50 lakhs which is $500,000 divided by 4 . TRY TO IMAGINE BUYING AN ASTON IN INDIA . I am in the emirates and a DBS is 1.2 million dirhams which that quantiy divided by 4 to get dollars
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Thats the problem with Aston now, they are owned by a mass producer. The AM range still looks good and reminds you of what they were about, but now they are just baubles they will polish up or dumb down just to make someone buy them instead of something else. These days I prefer the Jaguars. I'd take the XKS over a DB9 anyday - they are cheaper, look more or less the same and cost far less in maintenance, while delivering similar performance. Even if I could afford an Aston, I'd get the little V8 and take it to a man in a shed to make it better.
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A man who liked full fat cheese
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Goodness, this has povoked some mundane and dimwitted comments. James is, as ever, absolutely right. There's nothing to justify the DBS's premium over the DB9, and either way I'd still have the DB9. An Aston should be an elegant grand tourer, not a brutish muscle car. I would pay the extra for the cheese, though. And I want a pie too.
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Pardon me, that should be provoked.
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James, I registered just to tell you that I've always liked and appreciated your taste-the-difference cheese analogy. Cheers.
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James, I registered just to tell you that I've always liked and appreciated your taste-the-difference cheese analogy. Cheers.
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Open Car Bar
Clarksonious commented on this article
15 May 2009
this makes no sense........of course it fames may were talking about
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