Take a look inside Aston Martin’s shiny new factory

Blimey, Aston Martin has been busy. A mere 18 months since we helped them ‘settle in’ to their new second home in Wales - by skidding £65m of their back catalogue around several empty Ministry of Defense ‘Super Hangers’ - it’s released a first set of pictures of the nearly-finished factory… paint shop, production line, the lot. Even the chairs in the canteen.

Those tyre marks you can see on the polished concrete floor? Yep, that’s us, and you can watch the video in its slidey entirety here.    

First on St Athan’s itinerary, once fully commissioned in the first quarter of 2019, is production of “the next phase of prototypes” of the DBX – that’s Aston Martin’s first SUV, in case you’d forgotten. We’ll have to wait a bit for the full reveal of the DBX though, which is scheduled for the end of 2019.

Around 100 employees are already working on site – hence the well-stocked canteen – but that will grow to 200 early next year, and 700 by the start of 2020, when DBX production ramps up.

And there’s an exciting future for St Athan– it’s been earmarked as Aston’s “home of electrification”, which means both the Rapide E and a forthcoming family of electric Lagondas (as previewed by the avant-garde Lagonda Vision concept) will be built there. It also suggests that although the DBX will be offered with a combustion engine initially, an all-electric version will follow later in its life-span.

So what do we think? Does the idea of an all-electric Aston Martin SUV make you wince or applaud their bravery? Let us know, below.