Aston Martin to Revive Lagonda Nameplate

After witnessing Mercedes-Benz struggle to make its ultra-premium Maybach brand a household name, even amongst the

world's wealthiest, some might think that reviving old marques might not be as hot a topic as it is. Just the same, only last month Jaguar's new owner, Tata, announced that it would turn its Daimler brand into a global Rolls-Royce and Bentley competitor, and more recently on September 1, Aston Martin, also under relatively new management, announced that it would soon bring back the Lagonda nameplate.

"The Lagonda brand would allow us to develop cars which can have a different character than a sports car," said CEO Ulrich Bez in a statement. "Lagonda will have its own niche with luxurious and truly versatile products suitable for both existing and emerging markets."

As Newport Pagnell sees it, Aston Martin's potential for growth is limited if it remains a sports car brand.

"Lagonda models would be vehicles that could be used all year round in markets such as Russia where specialized sports cars such as Aston Martins could only be used for three or four months each year", added Janette Green, Director, Brand Communications.

When Aston Martin announced that its four-door Rapide concept would go into production, speculation of a revived Lagonda nameplate followed quickly. It only makes sense, after all, that Aston Martin, which has sold its sedan models under the Lagonda badge since David Brown and company bought the company back in 1947, would continue this practice and allow Aston to remain purely a purveyor of sports cars.

Lagonda, prior to becoming part of Aston Martin, has a history all its own. Getting its name from a river close to Springfield, Ohio, the hometown of its American founder Wilbur Gunn, Lagonda's first factory was set up in Staines, Middlesex, England in 1906. Its first car was the Torpedo, which won the Moscow to

St. Petersburg Trial in 1910, resulting in strong sales in Russia, followed by a smaller car dubbed 11.1, powered by a 1000-cc motor set into a riveted monocoque body and featuring the world's first fly-off handbrake. Lagonda built artillery shells during WWI, after which Gunn died in 1920. The company, under new leadership, went on to produce numerous cars with names like Rapier and Rapide, one of which featured a highly complex 8-speed Maybach transmission called the Selector Special, before falling into troubled times in the mid-‘30s.

The company, which was just coming out of receivership under new management, actually lured away W.O. Bentley, founder of Bentley Motors, from Rolls-Royce, which was resuscitating his Bentley brand after the Depression, to design its next generation of cars. His pièce de resistance while

at Lagonda was a V12 that revved up to 5,000 rpm to produce 180-horsepower.

When David Brown bought Lagonda and joined it up with Aston Martin, which he only recently purchased before, the sports car marque benefitted from Lagonda's straight-six engine now fitted to its 1950 DB2 and DB3 models. The new company continued to build Lagondas until 1965, after which it was relegated to small runs of extremely unique models, such as the seven four-door examples built off of Aston Martin's V8 between 1974 and 1976.

Aston revived the Lagonda nameplate once again in 1976 for a radically stylized sedan that in many ways was a forerunner of today's four-door coupes, such as the Mercedes-Benz CLS and upcoming A7 from Audi, CS from BMW and Panamera from Porsche, plus of course, the Rapide. And like the Rapide and early ‘70s

era Lagondas already mentioned, the mid-to-late ‘70s and ‘80s era Lagondas were based on the backbone of Aston's then current coupe. Unlike today's car, however, which has received glowing reviews, the William Towns "folded paper" design was as controversial as cars come, loved by some and despised by others. Nevertheless it did what it needed to do, motivate some 200 prospective owners to lay down deposits and keep the financially teetering Newport Pagnell operation solvent. A total of 645 Aston Martin Lagondas were of produced, with an average selling price equaling ?150,000. Yes that was even more expensive then as it is now, with only a handful of cars in its league, such as the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit and Silver Spur, Bentley Mulsanne, and the Maserati Quattroporte of the era.

Of interest, the initial iteration of William Towns' Lagonda was the world's first production car to use computer engine management as well as digital instrumentation, although its CPU was extremely unreliable. It is said that the development cost for the electronics alone came to four times as much as the budget for the entire vehicle. The second series, which rounded off the car's edges

and deleted the troublesome pop-up headlights, incorporated cathode ray tubes for primary instrumentation, an even less reliable solution than the original car's LED gauge cluster.

Through the years, Aston made four versions of the car, including the “mainstream” four-door sedan, plus the low volume the Tickford limousine, an Estate (wagon) plus, ironically, a two-door model named Rapide.

Aston dabbled in the four-door genre during the ‘90s with a concept car called the Lagonda Vignale shown at the 1993 Geneva auto salon, and in 1994 a small number of four-door Lagonda sedans and shooting brakes (estate wagons) were produced off of  the Aston Martin Virage.

The revival of Lagonda in 2009 will mark what Aston Martin calls the brand's centennial anniversary, although it's expected the car that will reintroduce one of Lagonda's classic nameplates, Rapide, will not get the appropriate winged badge to go with it. Rather, Lagonda will most likely be placed higher in the automaker's pecking order, fighting it out with Bentley's top-line Arnage, Azure and Brooklands models, Rolls-Royce's Phantom and new Drophead Coupe, Maybach's 57 and 62, and possibly the remade Daimler brand from Jaguar. Then again, with Aston hoping to use Lagonda to expand it from 32 markets to more than 100, it's entirely possible the Rapide could eventually wear a Lagonda badge. It would certainly make sense if it did.

For the time being, however, Aston Martin is talking about a Lagonda concept car in 2009 with a production model to follow in 2012.