Aston Martin DBX gets a dedicated factory in Wales

Aston Martin will be building a dedicated factory for the Aston Martin DBX crossover. The site, situated at St Athan, Wales, will be the sole production facility (apart from Gaydon) for the DBX and is part of the company’s £200 million (RM1.18 billion) investment in new products and facilities.

The facility, which is currently in use by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, measures about 90 acres. It will see three existing ‘super-hangers’ transformed and repurposed. Construction work is slated to commence in 2017, while full vehicle production is scheduled to begin in the year 2020. It is expected that over 90% of the production from St Athan will be exported outside the UK.

“Through a detailed evaluation of over 20 potential global locations for this new manufacturing facility, we were consistently impressed with the focus on quality, cost and speed from the Welsh government team. As a great British company, we look forward to St Athan joining Gaydon as our second centre of hand-crafted manufacturing excellence,” said Andrew Palmer, CEO of Aston Martin.

Similarly, Palmer told Autocar UK, “in terms of timing, it had a lot going for it because St Athan is an existing facility and we don’t have to the level the buildings and start from scratch. The crossover will take us into a new market segment, and the benefit of not having to build a new facility from the ground up cannot be underestimated – it is one less thing to think about.”

The DBX Concept, which was first unveiled last year in Geneva, came in the form of an all-electric, all-wheel drive GT. The production version of the DBX meanwhile, will sit on a new platform, an aluminium-bonded structure. Instead of the all-electric powertrain, it will probably feature a conventional combustion engine supported by a hybrid setup.

GALLERY: Aston Martin DBX Concept at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show

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