1986 Aston Martin Lagonda Reviews

It’s not breaking news that Australians are buying cars in record numbers, but the kind of cars we’re buying may surprise you because it seems to suggest many of us have too much money.

Rumours of the demise of petrol engines may have been premature.Aston Martin is the latest brand to walk back its pure electric car range plans according to a report from Autocar.The swanky British brand’s boss Lawrence Stroll has pledged to keep selling petrol-powered cars for as long as he can.Stroll said the brand’s customers want “sounds and smells” from their vehicles and the preference was for internal-combustion power over electric only."For as long as we're allowed to make ICE cars, we'll make them. I think there will always be demand, even if it's small,” Stroll told Autocar.Aston Martin has put its plans to launch its first electric car on ice until 2025 and instead is pouring its resources into developing plug-in hybrids.Top-tier supercar makers such as Ferrari and McLaren are already selling plug-in hybrid machines.Those machines provide immense performance. The Ferrari 296 GTB and McLaren Artura make more than 500kW from their petrol-electric hardware and can sprint to 100km/h from a stand still in well under three seconds.Aston Martin had previously targeted 2030 for its range to go all electric but now it has no deadline to phase out petrol-propulsion.Stroll confirmed V8 grunt would live on, pairing it with plug-in hybrid tech and V12 engines were in for the same treatment.Plug-in hybrids haven’t found success in Australia with sales of the petrol-electric technology counting for a little more than one per cent of sales through the first three months of this year.Plug-in hybrid technology blends a petrol engine with an electric motor and a sizeable battery that can deliver a driving range of more than 50km.In theory it allows the car to run mostly on electric power around town and use the petrol engine for longer drives.Carmakers often claim plug-in hybrids use less than two litres per 100km of fuel, but recent findings out of Europe suggest they use about three and a half times more than the claimed figures.

While many new car interiors are becoming more screen-centric, and ANCAP is readying new test requirements around important function accessibility, some senior designers are pushing back on over-reliance on digital controls.

Sure, we all know things are tough, but clearly they’re less tough for some of us, because luxury car sales - and we mean genuinely luxury ones - have been on the rise over the past decade.

While the new version of the Aston Martin Vantage doesn’t look astronomically different from the one you may have already seen on the road in Australia, its power figures have been given a serious look over.

Ranking the best Formula 1 drivers across the championship’s 73 years is not a simple task. No matter which system we use, there will be upset, angst and lots and lots of discussion… and that’s great.

There are hundreds of cars revealed every year that we write about here, and only a handful elicit the kind of reaction the Ford Mustang GTD did when it was revealed recently.

Following the introduction of the Aston Martin DB12 in May, the inevitable Volante drop-top version has made its global debut.

Aston Martin’s most storied model line, the DB series, has a new member. The DB12 is, Aston Martin claims, the “world’s first super tourer” as opposed to a grand tourer sports car.

The Mercedes-AMG One hypercar reclaimed the Nurburgring Nordschleife lap record for production cars recently, lapping the 20km German circuit in 6:35.183 minutes.