Aston Martin’s chief creative officer has taken a swipe at rival automakers that employ “hand-me-down” platforms for their sporty SUVs, with the firm’s chief engineer adding they are working to make the upcoming DBX “dynamically better than a [Porsche] Cayenne”.
Marek Reichman made the initial comments while speaking to motoring.com.au about the new DBX, which will be the British firm’s first SUV when it is revealed towards the end of 2019.
“DBX is a real Aston because it uses all the same principles to design the car, but just has a different user packager,” Reichman told the Australian publication.
“What’s the start word? It’s ‘sports’. We make sports cars. We can do it because it’s our platform. I’m not constrained by having a grandfather or hand-me-down platform,” he said, seemingly referring to rival vehicles from the Volkswagen Group, including the Bentley Bentayga, Lamborghini Urus and Porsche Cayenne.
Interestingly, chief engineer Matt Becker suggested the DBX was being benchmarked against the Cayenne Turbo.
“The one we focussed heavily on is the Cayenne Turbo, and we want to be above that,” Becker said.
“We’ve gone for something that is dynamically better than a Cayenne; sounds better than a Cayenne. We need to make the car drive like it looks. We also had a BMW X6 M which we used for some handling targets,” he added.
