First Drive: 2006 Aston Martin DB9 Volante
The Hands-On Boss
"I accepted this not because it was a big job," says Dr. Ulrich Bez, the intense engineer who runs Aston Martin. "It's a small job, but one with a big opportunity." Aston Martin is an automotive minnow with an annual output that's less than three hours' production for General Motors and an annual turnover that probably wouldn't cover parent company Ford's phone bill. But Bez is right--after all, it's not often you get to completely reinvent a car company.
And make no mistake, that's precisely what Bez has done. Aston Martin has a new factory, a new product range, and a new attitude. It even has a new version of its famous winged badge, redesigned to Bez's personal specification. "I am hands-on with everything," he says.
Bez, whose CV includes the funky BMW Z1 roadster and the revered Type 993 version of Porsche's iconic 911, knows exactly what he wants in a sports car and, more important, how to get it. Shortly after taking over Aston in mid-2000, he had the balls to tell then Ford boss Jac Nasser the business model was all wrong and that the fix was not recycling Jaguar and Ford parts to cut costs, but to use the company's brainpower and purchasing muscle to find cost-effective ways of getting the no-compromise hardware needed to build no-compromise sports cars.
Bez's solution is the innovative and flexible VH platform, which can be easily built in a number of different sizes and is clad in non-load-bearing panels that allow inexpensive design changes. Combined with highly commonized component sets--suspension, brakes, transmission, electronic architecture--it's enabled him to create a three-model Aston range, the new DB9 and V8 Vantage, plus the next-generation Vanquish, at a relatively low cost.
Bez believes his VH platform (the "V" stands for its vertical integration up and down the Aston model range; the "H" stands for the horizontal integration of the platform's intellectual property across the Ford portfolio; Volvo's expertise was used to tune its crash performance, for example) gives Aston Martin a competitive advantage in terms of bringing new cars to market. "I can be very fast, faster than Ferrari. We can lead the market now, rather than follow it."