Lagonda news - Lagonda's back - 2008

Lagonda is on its way back and there's a new badge to prove it. The badge will be stuck on the front of a prototype to be shown next March - the mothballed marque's centenary - in time for a launch of a real car in 2012.

Lagonda has been part of Aston Martin for longer than anyone here remembers, but hasn't built a car since the frankly bizarre 1984 Lagonda 'Bulldog', an exercise in futurology and geometry and catastrophic unreliability. Best forgotten.

Much better to remember the marque's original cars from the turn of the century, cars which were apparently exported to pre-Revolutionary Russia in their thousands.

That's according to Dr Ulrich Bez anyhow and the fact has not been lost on him.

"We're talking about a car that is robust and reliable and four-wheel drive," says the hyper-active CEO who has steered Aston Martin back from the brink with the DB9/DBS/DBRS/DBR and the V8 Vantages.

Aston, he reckons, with the four-door Rapide which goes in sale next year, has been taken about as far as it can on the sporty/luxurious axis... Lagonda will flip the offer to luxurious/sporty, adding in the aforementioned robustness etc for developing markets like Russia and China and India.

"Don't write that it's an SUV tho'" says Dr Bez. Right. We won't. Channel a hip Rolls Royce with an attitude problem we reckon.

Dr Bez appears to have an almost limitless capacity for work. Last month Aston announced its bespoke, million-pound supercar, the One-77, and next year will launch the Rapide, a sort of four door DB9 and then some.

Then there's the Aston Le Mans programme revealed in TG two months ago.

"Yes, yes... we just need the rules to become clear. And we need $30million to compete with Peugeot and Audi."

For the unstoppable Dr Bez, that shouldn't prove too much of a problem. Expect news any day now.

Michael Harvey

You can read a brief history of Lagonda here.