Aston Martin to focus on hybrid and electric cars from 2026
Aston Martin plans to sell only electric or hybrid cars from 2026 and to phase out pure combustion engines by then. However, the British sports car brand is not yet giving any details on the degree of hybridisation and its end of sales.
“By 2026 we will be fully electrified,” Aston Martin boss Lawrence Stroll told the Financial Times. However, fully electrified only means that there are no more pure combustion engines in the range. For this statement to be true, a small electric motor is already sufficient – depending on the definition, even a 48-volt mild hybrid, which only supports the combustion engine but cannot drive the car purely electrically.
Unlike the British carmakers Bentley and Rolls-Royce, who want to sell only battery cars from 2030, Aston Martin has not yet set a concrete date for the complete phase-out of the combustion engine. Canadian billionaire Stroll justifies this by saying. “I can’t tell you that 100 per cent of Aston Martin customers want an electric vehicle,” Stroll said.
“People still want the smell, the noise [of combustion engine cars]. We’re gradually going to get to full EV, but we will continue offering both [electric and hybrids],” the FT quotes Stroll as saying. “There will still be an electrification component, but if someone wants an internal combustion engine in 2028, that will happen.”
From 2025, the first all-electric Aston Martin cars are expected to hit the market, according to earlier statements by the company. These are said to be the next generation of the front-engined DB11 sports car. However, details of the layout of the electric powertrain in the internal combustion vehicle are not yet known.
Stroll had brought Mercedes-AMG boss Tobias Moers to Gaydon as CEO after the takeover by a consortium he led. The strategy is to cooperate more closely with AMG on the technical side, but also to expand the model range. In addition to the classic front-engined Aston Martin models, mid-engined sports cars are also to be built; in the meantime, the brand also offers an SUV, the DBX.
Aston Martin plans to launch plug-in hybrid models first in two years and fully electric models from the middle of the decade. “By 2025 or 2026, even though we will have every model electrified, front engine, mid-engine, SUV, we will still continue to offer for sale, as long as there’s customer demand, hybrid versions,” Stroll said.
To meet customer demand, however, powerful internal combustion engines continue to play an important role: The Financial Times conducted the interview on the sidelines of the presentation of the DBX 707 – a version of the SUV model powered by a 520 kW starting (converted to the eponymous 707 hp) V8 engine – without a hybrid component.
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