At the Paris Motor Show, we saw many car makers that are entering or continuing the race in electric car segment. Even Aston Martin decided not to participate they have great plans for EV segment with the introduction of the ultra-luxury model.
One of the problems, as Andy Palmer, chief executive of Aston Martin, stated is the fact that development and production of electric vehicles is expensive. This can be compensated with either higher price of the final product or with the money loss after the sale. Simple, if you decide to increase the price, you will face low sale figures, and if you offer your vehicles at a competitive price, you will lose money.
One of the solutions, and this is the plan of Aston Martin, is to provide ultra-luxury cars in this segment. You might consider Tesla Model S and Model X to be a luxury, and we tend to agree but they are comparable to Audi, BMW and similar, what British manufacturer is planning with Rapide is far above that level.
With this move, they will be able to offer a more expensive vehicle that as a result will give higher profit to the company. At this moment, their main rivals like Bentley, Ferrari and Rolls-Royce do not have anything with fully electric powertrain giving the chance to Aston Martin to bring something quite interesting.
image source: thecarconnection.comOne of the problems that the company is facing is the fact that they are losing money for quite a while. Development of new Aston Martin RapidE EV will be done in cooperation with LeEco, a Chinese company that is also poised to take on Tesla Motors with their future cars.
In the interview, Andy Palmer said that they will introduce their electric car to the market in 2018. At this point no specs were offered but for this one to be able to beat Tesla vehicles it will need to provide a lot more than we are getting from Model S. More range, incredible performances, fantastic quality and it could be a decent competitor to what we currently have.
