Epic fail: the 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda

Just image the business launches that led to this. In the mid 1970s, Aston Martin was – even by Aston Martin’s stellar financial hole digging standards – in a proper financial hole.

To get the orders and cash rolling in, it needed a guaranteed hit. So company bosses looked at Aston’s reputation as a world leader in suave, elegant, sporty 2+2 coupes, and said “Yeah, but also what if we ignore all that and do a massive, pointy, 4dr über limo instead?”

And thus the Lagonda Series II was born: a wedge of utter period weirdness sporting many furlongs of ‘folded paper’ aesthetics (that’s one big piece of paper) and a price tag firmly in top-end Rolls-Royce territory.

In addition to stuffing the Lagonda with several petting zoos’ worth of lambswool and leather, Aston also chose to fill it with cutting-edge tech: digital dash (a production car first), cruise control, auto locking doors and some 40 touch sensitive buttons. The result was pure sci-fi. When the Lagonda was first shown at the 1976 London motor show, it’s reported the audience were stunned: whether by its space age technology or unmissable front end remains unclear.

One teensy, tiny, problem – none of it worked. After revealing the display car, the Aston engineers spent another three years – and four times the original development budget – trying to figure out how to make all that tech actually function. It broadly failed.

Early customers discovered the electronics on their long awaited Lagondas were less ‘unreliable’ and more ‘absent’, raising the interesting philosophical question of whether a digital dash is still a digital dash if it doesn’t switch on. The touch sensitive buttons... weren’t. The Lagonda’s own chief of engineering later described the tech development process as “an appalling mess”.

It’s good to aim high. But Aston maybe got a bit too high with this one.