You know how some production cars definitely don’t turn out like the concepts? Well, let’s take things back to 2019, with the Aston Martin AM-RB 003 prototype. Developed in collaboration with Red Bull, it was a mid-engined plug-in-hybrid V6 supercar with a clever rear wing integrated into the bodywork. Well, five years, an engine change, a restyling job, and an interior redesign later, the final design’s here. This is the production-spec Aston Martin Valhalla, and while it isn’t quite what everyone anticipated in 2019, it’s still a compelling hybrid hypercar.
Like many current Aston Martin models, you’ll find a four-liter twin-turbocharged V8 propelling the Valhalla, but this one in particular is a bit different, down to its dry sump and flat-plane crank. In essence, it’s a reworked version of the engine found in the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series, and thanks to components like new turbochargers and camshafts, it cranks out a serious 817 horsepower on its own. However, the V8 isn’t acting all on its own, because it has three little helpers.
Yep, the Valhalla’s a plug-in hybrid, and three electric motors including one in the eight-speed dual-clutch transaxle bump combined output up to 1,064 horsepower and 811 lb.-ft. of torque. Alright, so using both electric motors and a twin-turbocharged V8 to match the output of a Corvette ZR1 seems a little excessive, but this strategy does come with some benefits.
First off, two of the electric motors drive the front axle, one for each front wheel. This doesn’t just offer the advantage of through-the-road all-wheel-drive, it also means the Valhalla should benefit from real torque vectoring and be able to use its electric motors to torque-fill for any turbo lag. At the same time, a pure electric mode lets this plug-in hybrid supercar run in silence for 8.6 miles, up to a maximum speed of 80 mph. Imagine seeing one of these things with an HOV lane sticker.
Putting all of that into practice, Aston Martin claims zero-to-60 mph in 2.5 seconds and a top speed of 217 mph. Why not faster? Well, that’s because straight-line speed doesn’t seem to be the primary goal here, but carrying as much speed as possible through a corner is key. The Valhalla generates more than 1,322 pounds of downforce from 149 mph, and it manages that downforce all the way to top speed through some clever active aerodynamic measures. See, both the rear wing and a hidden front wing ahead of the front wheels decrease their angle of attack as speeds rise past 149 mph, effectively keeping downforce consistent all the way to 217 mph. That must be an interesting feeling to experience, especially if you’re used to fixed wings on high-downforce cars.
Even the suspension plays into the vehicle’s aerodynamics, because Aston Martin has gone with a Formula-style pushrod setup up front to move the dampers and springs out of the wheel wells, reducing clutter that can affect the evacuation of air. Out back, you’ll find a five-link suspension setup, while Bilstein DTX adaptive dampers put in work at all four corners.
So far, so cutting-edge, but how much does the Aston Martin Valhalla weigh? Well, it’s not exactly light full-stop, but for all the stuff aboard, it’s also really not that heavy. Aston Martin claims the Valhalla tips the scales at 3,649 pounds, thanks to a carbon fiber tub that only weighs 164 pounds on its own, aluminum subframes, carbon ceramic brakes, and available magnesium wheels.
Yep, the Valhalla is born to go fast, but you do get the sense that seeing one in its natural environment — on the race track — will be quite rare. Aston Martin is only building 999 of them, production is expected to finally start in the second half of 2025, and although the firm hasn’t disclosed pricing, expect this upper-echelon car to receive a price tag to match.
(Photo credits: Aston Martin)
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
The 214-MPH Aston Martin Vanquish Is A Love Letter To Front-Engined V12 GT Cars
-
The Aston Martin DBS 770 Ultimate Volante Is Really, Actually The Final Version Of Aston’s Top GT Car
-
The Aston Martin DBS 770 Ultimate Ends An Era By Cranking Things To 11
-
A James Bond-Associated Aston Martin Vanquish Is Going Up For Auction And It Should Only Cost As Much As A New Corvette
-
Updated: This 320,000-Mile Aston Martin Vantage Is More Proof That You Should Drive Your Exotics
Please send tips about cool car things to tips@theautopian.com. You could even win a prize!
This is the Jaguar, few, I had a horrible pink nightmare.
I could’ve sworn they said this was cancelled.
Shouldn’t take long for some wanker to drop the hammer and spin one out, sending him (or her) self to Valhalla…
I don’t see many of these being driven. They will probably sit in fancy climate controlled garages and slowly degrade.
Lance Stroll will probably have one. You won’t have to wait long.
somehow that dash already looks dated. The “tablet lodged in the dash” feels so old. And even more so by the end of next year.
Seems the current trend is the wraparound where the driver and center stack are all one screen and, to me, looks so much more thoughtful and integrated and elegant.
Interesting observation…When infotainment systems were just getting started, I observed that domestic (the old Big 3) manufacturers seemed to have an advantage on integrated touchscreens. Japanese and Korean makers were all about the tablet.
Recently it seems there are more “tablet lodged in dash” designs. I believe these were inspired by Tesla. Not sure which manufacturers have gone back to integrated designs. Will have to keep an eye out when I go to the auto show this year.
Personally, I like the big tablet, but that’s probably because my old car had an integrated dash and new one has a big tablet. I like what I paid for!
Check out the Lyriq dash. It’s still sort of floating, but looks much more integrated and less like an afterthought. BMW 3, Lincoln, others have similar ones as well but I think the Lyriq is the most polished feeling. That’s the sort of thing I would expect in a high-end car. Especially an Austin Martin.
Tesla never seemed to be about elegance or taste. They were only called “luxury” because they said so and they were priced that way. So that tablet thing fits fine for that consumer.
Looks like a Lotus.
I will be placing mine in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble inside an undisclosed temperature controlled cargo bay. I assume the other 998 will likewise be stored the same way.
I’m assuming at least half of them never get built.
ok
Another billionaire’s codpiece. My field of fucks to give is completely barren. Any idiot can make a 1000hp+ multi-million dollar car if they can get the funding, wake me up when somebody makes something as clever and fun as the original Mini that a working dude can afford to buy.
I agree – maybe design a modern age DB5 or 6. The current obsession with tax-dodge fake LM vehicles is a bit tedious.
No profit in that, I’m afraid, unless you want it to come from China, but we’ve made sure it can’t. However, might you be interested in a 10 year loan on a $70,000 big truck?
There isn’t much profit to be made on this either, in the grand scheme of things. Even if they do manage to sell 1000 of them – that feels like that is nowhere near exclusive enough for them to sell that many at the likely price.
Only idiot Americans buy $70K pickup trucks. But there are so, so, so many of us.
And automakers are increasingly disinterested in even attempting to sell anything else
Again, only in America to idiot Americans. Though the rise of the CUV in Europe is saddening.
And we’ve fixed it so nobody can break the trend. Closing the door to new foreign entrants
Not really, they just have to build them *here*. That was fixed many decades ago with the “Chicken Tax”. Tariffs DO actually work sometimes when implemented carefully and thoughtfully.
“Thoughtfully” and “Donald Trump” have never been used in the same sentence unironically, however.
Building them here involves a massive, additional capital investment to duplicate facilities that were already built and paid for elsewhere and automatically adds additional per-unit costs, in addition to the US being a higher cost country to do business in general
You’d have to be highly confident of achieving enormous sales volumes immediately out of the gate to even contemplate doing that, no importing 50,000 units the first year to test the waters and ramping up gradually. The gate is effectively shut as far as the entry level end of the market is concerned, the barriers to entry are high enough that it makes little difference that there are still technically some small doors in the barriers that can be passed through
Meh – it also insulates you from exchange-rate issues. And shipping cars across oceans is not cheap either. If you build that factory in the non-union South, suddenly the US becomes a LOW cost builder compared to Japan and Germany. And even Korea evidently. The Chinese and Vietnamese build cheap – but look at what you are buying… VinFast “quality” or Tofu Dregs.
The gate is in no way shut. Reality is NOBODY wants to buy new, hairshirt cars anymore even if you are willing to make very little money on them. Why would you buy the Econoshit 5000 when you can just buy a used Camry or Corolla for the same money? Assembly cost is just NOT a large component of the cost of a car today, given how automated car factories are and how “designed for cheap and easy assembly” they are. And the reality is that cars sold in the US really need to be tailored to the US more than most other markets, so you might as well build them here.
You cannot justify a factory unless you can be assured of six digit annual sales, at least. Transpacfic shipping is not altogether that expensive, even for a private individual, shipping one, single car can be under $2k, for a large company negotiating a charter of an entire ship on a multiyear contract, its vastly lower than that. If your expected sales are in the five figure range and you have excess capacity in existing factories, there’s absolutely no reason to duplicate facilities, far cheaper to sign a deal with a shipping company and lease a lot in a port than to spend many tens of millions and a couple of years building out a new factory, especially now that there’s a glut of capacity in the global shipping market and ship owners are motivated to fill it.
The Mitsubishi Mirage was outperforming the rest of the market when they discontinued it, didn’t seem to have much trouble selling those in a showroom otherwise packed with crossovers. Sales up 85% in the first six months of 2024 and 152% in the 3rd quarter, representing 25% of the brand’s total volume. And that’s a car that has minimal (nearly no) marketing support and is also 13 years old and in the process of being phased out of production without a replacement
And yet virtually every company with significant sales in the US builds cars here. Absent significant sales, there is no reason to sell here unless you are a luxury brand. The economics don’t work in a country as sprawling as the US. A few companies have tried to only sell in small volumes regionally – Daihatsu probably most famously. It never works.
What are you smoking? The Mitsubishi Mirage never sold more than 27K units in a year in it’s entire run in the US. That they had a large increase from almost no cars to 2X almost no cars means absolutely nothing in a market where Ford sells more than 10,000 F-150s per WEEK at prices that START at 2X+ what a Mirage costs. That is an absolute sales FAILURE in this market. And not profitable or sustainable, which is why the thing is being discontinued. Just like every other non-luxury no-volume econobox.
Mitsubishi itself is a sales failure in the US for what should be a mainstream non-luxury brand. They build dreck that (relatively speaking) nobody wants. Only the fact that they are a massive wealthy conglomerate that builds a few cars on the side of thier REAL businesses keeps them here. I suspect it’s a pride/face saving thing at this point.
Percentage increases out of context are absolutely meaningless. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”.
Percentage increases show an undeserved market that is being handled by limited offerings to the extent that they can make it to showrooms, indicating room for more competitors, and Mitsubishi is actually turning the corner and has had several respectable years in a row
Nobody that builds here did so out of the gate, Honda and Toyota didn’t build factories here in the 1950s and 60s, they did it in the 1980s AFTER THEY WERE ESTABLISHED IN THE MARKETPLACE AND HAD A HISTORY OF SALES DATA to prove that such investment was justifiable and that the new capacity was going to be utilized. You build yourself up to the point of needing domestic production, you don’t go all-in on it Day One as a brand new entrant, that is a ridiculous way to approach it and nobody successful has ever done it that way. The one that maybe came the closest was Volvo, they built a factory in Tennessee in the early 1980s and fully tooled it up to manufacture the 240, not because the existing plants in Canada and Sweden were having trouble, but because they expected US demand to increase over the course of the decade to where it would be needed. Except, they recalculated their numbers, realized it was a mistake, and never actually opened it even though it was finished and they just needed to flip a switch to have cars rolling out, they concluded the forecasts that justified it were unrealistic and remained an import-only operation until 2018, when the current plant in South Carolina was opened. The old one in Tennesee was just left in mothballs for a few years, then the new, unused tooling was scrapped and it was reconfigured as a parts warehouse and marine engine assembly plant for Volvo Penta
No, it is not an underserved market. It’s not a market at all in those numbers. It’s a dead cat bounce at most. They are never going to sell any significant number of those turdmobiles in the US. As I said, which you don’t seem to be hearing so I will say it louder – THERE IS NO POINT IN BUYING A MIRAGE WHEN YOU CAN GET A NEARLY NEW DECENT CAR LIKE A COROLLA, CAMRY, OR WHATNOT FOR THE SAME PRICE. Which is why those alternatives sell in the hundreds of thousands even in the CUV-obsessed 2020s, and Mitsubishi has to about give away small numbers of Mirages. I mean in an auto market of 16M or so most normal years, you can sell small numbers of anything if it’s cheap enough and your pockets are deep enough to take the losses.
You seriously have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here. And I would love to see your source for that bit about Volvo intending to build 240s of all things here. I have owned *14* Volvos, been active in the Volvo Club of America since 1993, and I have never heard of such nonsense. They assembled small numbers of 240s from knock-down kits in Halifax Nova Scotia for some years, and that was it. And that was only because the Nova Scotia government gave them huge subsidies to do it as a jobs-creation program. Once that stopped, so did assembling Volvos in Canada.
The only truly successful brand-new carmaker in decades did in fact build a plant in the US and start that way – Tesla. Sure the building already existed, but it was nearly an empty shell. Tesla could just as easily have done the engineering in the US and built the cars overseas – but they didn’t. Why do you suppose that is? Certainly there were no wildly skilled and cheap to pay assembly plant workers in Freemont, CA, that plant was such a disaster that *Toyota* couldn’t make a go of it (I’d argue it still is under Tesla). Toyota!!!!! The absolute Zen Masters of automobile production. The only thing you are correct about is that yes, in general an already existing automaker is not going to build a plant in the US without already being established here. But other than the Chinese, there are no automakers who matter who don’t sell here already. And even the Chinese sort of do via Volvo and GM. In general, you build your big sellers in the market they are big sellers in. That is actually pretty universal across the planet in all of the major markets at this point. The Germans build SUVs here in the US and export them to the world. The Japanese build a million plus cars a year in very high cost Europe as another example.
The profit margin on a million dollar plus car has to be astronomical if you can sell 1,000 or so. (I know, that’s a billion…But there’s a lot of profit in that billion.) Ferrari is the king of these (LaFerrari, F80, SF 90), but McLaren, Lamborghini and Porsche (918) also play or dabble in the game.
The trick isn’t making the million dollar car. It’s making one that a gaggle of billionaires want to buy. These aren’t sports cars. You are right, they are billionaire’s codpiece(s). I’m not going to own one. Or even a “cheap” $300,000 exotic. But the market for these vehicles is fascinating. It says something about the world’s economies, people and cultures.
Also, if you watch Formula One, you are watching a game of Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday for million dollar cars. It’s interesting.
It’s boring. I just don’t care. I don’t care about these cars, and I don’t care about the cynical political nonsense game that is modern F1. Shark well and truly jumped.
The revolution against the oligarchs may have been started thanks to that kid from Maryland. Conspicuous consumption may not be so profitable going forward.
Its no bulldog.
Resurect that and use the ford 5.2 instead of amg 4l?
Hopefully it sounds better than the AMG GT Black Series
It’s got a flat plane crank, so it’ll sound like a pair of inline fours instead of a V8.
The AMG GT Black Series just sounded like a turbocharged dishwasher
So this will sound like a pair of turbocharged half-dishwashers.
Provided it’s a Bosch, I’m ok. My experience has been that they’re nice quiet dishwashers.
your wishdosher might need a service;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFJJnGIRlq4&t=16s
The AMG GT Black Series has the flat plane crank already, so…
Oh.
Gt350 says no.