History
Aston Martin was facing severe financial pressure in the mid-1970s and needed something to bring in some much-needed funds. Traditionally, Aston Martin had worked on 2+2 sports cars, but the Lagonda was a four-door saloon. As soon as it was introduced, it drew in hundreds of deposits from potential customers, helping Aston Martin's cash reserves.
The car was designed by William Towns in an extreme interpretation of the classic 1970s "folded paper" style. It was as unconventional a design then as it is now. Car enthusiasts are fiercely divided on the car's aesthetic value. The Lagonda combined striking styling with opulent, club-like leather interior, and then-state-of-the-art instrumentation. Coupled to a Chrysler 3-speed "TorqueFlite" automatic transmission its 4-cam carbureted V8 provided poor, often single-digit miles-per-gallon, little improved by the change to fuel-injection in the Series 3.
Throughout the history of the marque, these hand-built Lagondas were amongst the most expensive saloons in the world. The only other "production" cars to approach its lofty price tag were the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit/Silver Spur and Bentley Mulsanne.
The Lagonda was the first production car in the world to use computer management and a digital instrument panel, although the computers in many of the original cars are failure-prone. The development cost for the electronics alone on the Lagonda came to four times as much as the budget for the whole car. The Series 3 used cathode ray tubes for the instrumentation, which proved even less reliable than the original model's light-emitting diode (LED) display.
It was named by Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the 50 ugliest cars of the last 50 years and Time Magazine included it in its "50 Worst Cars of All Time", describing it as a mechanical "catastrophe" with electronics that would be very impressive if they ever worked.
Read more about this topic: Aston Martin Lagonda
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“There is no example in history of a revolutionary movement involving such gigantic masses being so bloodless.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)