The immaculately dressed man says “ I drive the Aston over there.” The lady he's trying to impress looks over her shoulder and says “What Aston? You mean that little Zebra stripped girly looking car over there?”.
Dialog like this wouldn't happen if the man was driving a DBS or a Vantage or a Rapide instead of the one in the picture above. Brand marketing and product placement has reached an all time great with the Cygnet. We had Aston Martin tee shirts, bicycles and now we have Aston Martin cars which are not really Aston Martins. Confusing isn't it.

The Aston Martin Cygnet as we are aware is based on the Toyota IQ, a microcar that started selling in Japan late 2008. The Japanese liked it so much till is was made Japanese Car of the Year 2008 and Aston Martin seemed to like it too as they decided to build its own version too. This microcar is expected to be sold only to current owners of an Aston Martin and is fully customizable. This means that like a Rolls Royce Phantom, Bentley Mulsanne or even a Bugatti, the tiny Cygnet can be customized to its owners liking. Bespoke colour for the exterior and bespoke interior leather trimming for something that was originally manufactured for the mass market is pretty hard to swallow. Especially when the original car sells for a maximum of £12,000 instead of the £30,000 Aston Martin wants to charge for the 1.3 liter Cygnet.


To show the level of personalization Aston Martin is willing to go with the Cygnet, it has released some pictures of the car in various funky paint jobs aside from the usual cream coloured pictures. Tiger stripes, army camouflage and zebra stripes are shown together with a pretty looking lady model in each picture. And no, you may be able to buy that Aston but I doubt they'll throw in the model with every purchase. Actually for the amount they charge for their small little Toyota, err.... Aston Martin, they should. What's a little more personalization anyways?

Anyway, aside from the brand marketing theory I have brought up, the real reason for this move is to allow Aston Martin to comply with the strict emissions rule by the European Union and with the fuel sipping Cygnet the CO2 emissions average of the total Aston Martin lineup drops by a whole lot. A 1.3 four cylinder will certainly have less CO2 emissions than all those V8s and V12s that normal Aston Martins have.

I'd like to see Mr. Bond drive one of these.




Aston Martin, Cygnet and 4 more...

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