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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9vhsFsyGQ0 If you think that forklifting an Audi R8 onto the roof of Fullerton Hotel was impressive, wait till you hear this. Aston Martin, in celebration of its 100th year since inception, dropped in a Vanquish onto the helipad of Dubai's Buri Al Arab hotel before showing if off to a group of dignitaries. At 321m, the Buri Al Arab hotel is the fourth tallest hotel in the world. It stands on an artificial island 280m from Jumeirah beach and is connected to the mainland by a private curving bridge. Also as part of the British carmaker's 100th year celebration, the Vanquish, Rapide, V8 Vantage and DB9 will all be offered with a limited production Centenary Edition model with just 100 units. Since the star of this blog post is the Vanquish, its Centenary Edition comes with a special graduated paint finish, which adds 18 hours to the 50-hour paint process. Under the hood is a 6.0-litre V12 which makes 565bhp and 457Nm of torque. It sprints from 0 to 100km/h in just 4.1 seconds.

Recently British car company Aston Martin previewed their latest and greatest production car, the 2012 Aston Martin AM310 Vanquish. This car brings back the Vanquish moniker after an absence of about five years or so. One little bit of trivia is that the AM310 Vanquish will replace the Aston Martin DBS, the car that replaced the first Vanquish in 2007. So what can you tell from looking at the pictures? What I can tell is that it still looks like a DBS with a different bodykit (from a Japanese tuning house like Wald or Veilside) or it looks like a Virage or a V8 Vantage with a little more grunt and padding here and there. It may be said to have 75% new parts throughout the car but I doubt it that most buyers (or collectors) would actually bother. It is very clear to me that Aston Martin is in line to replace Porsche as the car industry's least inspired car designers and stylists. Of course, there is also the argument that if it isn't broke, why bother fixing it? Since people want Aston Martins to look like what they do, why rock the boat? This must be true as I'd like an Aston Martin looking like what it looks like these days. It also allows us to buy an Aston Martin half a decade old and still look good in it. So maybe its a good thing as resale value doesn't really suffer. But I suppose this would mainly apply in countries that have no COE that is.