Aston Martin are hoping to boost sales in North America by creating special editions of the V8 Vantage and the DB9, which will only be available in the North American market alone.
Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd., the British maker of the luxury sports cars driven by James Bond, is unveiling two special edition vehicles at the New York International Auto Show this week.
Aston Martin will debut a GT version of its V8 Vantage, starting at $99,900, and a carbon edition of its DB9, which begins at $199,995, according to an e-mailed statement. Both cars will go on sale in the third quarter, Julian Jenkins, Aston Martin’s president of the Americas, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
“We’d like to sell a few more cars and we believe this will offer an opportunity to broaden our appeal and bring a few more customers to the brand,” Jenkins said in the interview.
Aston Martin sold 4,200 cars last year, 11 percent more than in the prior year. North America represents about 30 percent of its sales.
The Vantage GT will come in either a coupe or a roadster body style with either a six-speed manual or seven-speed automatic transmission. Both powertrains will have a top speed of 190 miles per hour.
The Vantage GT automatic gets 16 mpg in combined driving. The carbon edition of the 12-cylinder DB9 starts at $199,995. Aston Martin doesn’t list the mileage for the DB9.
Aston Martin is the rare global luxury-automaker that doesn’t belong to a larger manufacturing group. The company said last year that Germany’s Daimler AG will own as much as 5 percent of Aston Martin as part of a deeper agreement to share technology with the British sports-car maker. Daimler is an investor in electric-car maker Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), which aims to begin deliveries in China this month.
Daimler’s Mercedes-AMG high-performance division will help develop V-8 engines for Aston Martin’s next-generation models. The Stuttgart, Germany-based maker of Mercedes-Benz vehicles will receive shares without voting rights in the non-cash deal.
In January 2013, Aston Martin said it planned to invest 500 million pounds ($819 million) over the following four years. The carmaker is backed by London-based Investindustrial, a private-equity fund whose previous assets include high-end motorcycle maker Ducati, which Volkswagen AG’s Audi bought in 2012