NorthGeek

Presenting the Aston Martin BALLS.

Presenting the Aston Martin BALLS.

Not really. This is, of course, the Aston Martin Lagonda. The weirdest, rarest, most obscure, and first 4-door super-car.

I adore this car. It is beautiful in the same, contrarian way that Gina Gershon is beautiful – fish-lips and all. Whenever I see pictures of the Lagonda, I am reminded of the sheer audacity; the chutzpah; the absolute BALLS, really, Aston Martin was walking around with that would have prompted them to produce this car back in the 1970’s.

I’m talking about this car because last night’s episode of Top Gear on BBC Canada aired a quick segment on the Lagonda, but I felt they didn’t really hammer home what a unique-looking beast this thing really is.

With more right-angles than a Frank Lloyd Wright abode, this thing cackled at wind tunnels, and would make a T-square blush. I only wish Aston – or anyone – still had the cojones to build another one now. The closest anyone has come to contrarian excellence in automotive design has been the Pontiac Aztek – and there really is nothing excellent about that rolling (and I will steal from the hilarious Patton Oswalt here) failure pile.

Sure, every modern Aston built since 2005 has been consistently, stunningly, tear-jerkingly gorgeous, from the V8 Vantage to the race-ready DBS, to the upcoming Rapide and the economically illogical One-77 – but they all look exactly the same. Seriously, Aston effectively stopped designing cars in 2005.

Not so with the Lagonda. It simply looks like no other car. The first time I ever saw one was actually in the flesh – a friend of my father’s, who has since passed away, was a big car guy and owned a British racing green example, which sounded even better than it looked. When I first laid eyes on it, I remember thinking, “that’s not an Aston Martin, that just looks like a flattened, 1970’s Detroit gas guzzler.” Indeed, the car was stupendously long, wide, and angular, but when my dad’s friend revved the big V12 engine and peeled out, I was immediately sold on it as a supercar.

But I really can’t blame Aston for not building another curve-less flagship. The fact is, whether it was due to poor reliability or the jarring exterior design, Aston only sold 600 or so Lagondas, a tiny fraction of how many DB9’s they’ve sold.

And the Lagonda was far from perfect. It – like most high-end British cars, if we’re honest – was woefully unreliable. The all-digital, light-up dash was incredibly cool in it’s day – it was dubbed the “Star Wars dashboard” when it first came out – certainly worthy of NorthGeek mention, but if the electrics decided to take the night off, which was often, you had absolutely no instruments, and were flying blind. Try that at 150mph. Not cool, then.

Having said all that, if I had the means, I would still park one in my garage, even if I knew that oil leaks and electrical gremlins would never allow it to leave. All the better, really.