With the UK’s Ministry of Defence handing over the St Athan, Wales site to Aston Martin, the luxury carmaker is to build a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and is on target to commence DBX production in 2019.
06 Apr 2017 | 2622 Views | By Jimi Beckwith and Andrew Frankel, Autocar UK
Work on British luxury carmaker Aston Martin’s St Athan, Wales plant is now officially underway, as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) handed over the site to the brand today.
The St Athan site will build the DBX SUV, first seen at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show, from 2019 onwards, as
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Work on British luxury carmaker Aston Martin’s St Athan, Wales plant is now officially underway, as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) handed over the site to the brand today.
The St Athan site will build the DBX SUV, first seen at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show, from 2019 onwards, as Aston’s seven planned new models come to the fore.
Like Aston Martin’s Gaydon headquarters, the St Athan site was formerly occupied by the Royal Air Force (RAF), and 750 workers will be employed there, who were selected from 3,000 applicants at a recruitment event last year. "Production versions of the DBX will start coming off the line in late 2019 but we should be producing the first development prototypes towards the end of next year." said CEO Andy Palmer.
"There will be some [overlap between the two sites]. If we’re already making components in Gaydon that are needed in St Athan there seems little point tooling up all over again. Likewise work done in St Athan, particularly in areas such as electrification will clearly have its applications in Gaydon. But in principle I like the idea of having two competing plants, particularly as one is in England and the other in Wales. It promotes healthy competition and each will drag the other up.
"We will have an engineering centre here, it is also likely to be where we do the bulk of our electrification work. Also, we will have our cyber security department here. All the talk these days is of autonomous drive but very few people are talking about how to make sure these cars cannot be hacked, and in many ways that’s a more difficult challenge than autonomy. But until the cars are secure, they cannot be autonomous."
Certain areas of the plant have already been built; the customer and staff reception areas, as well as administration and management offices and employee restaurant; for which Aston Martin was given access to the site to build. The three hangars from the RAF's occupation of the site will be repurposed into the manufacturing plant, though. Palmer said: "We are hosting the Aston Martin Owners Club concours over the weekend, then we start work on the concrete floor first thing on Monday morning."
Some of the future employees at the site are currently being trained at Aston’s Gaydon plant while working on the DB11, while another 250 jobs are being created at Gaydon; Aston claims that 1000 jobs in total are being created from its current expansion plan.
Palmer said: “Due to its sheer size and scale, the St Athan Super Hangars represented an excellent opportunity for us to build our second manufacturing facility, within the envelope of an existing structure. It is perhaps fitting that St Athan is, like our headquarters and sports car factory at Gaydon, a former RAF base. We have three hangars, one of which will handle house the body in white, one will be the paint shop and one will look after trim and final assembly."
The plant's role in Aston's growth plan is pivotal, as the brand chases six more model lines in the next five years; the new Vantage in 2017, Vanquish in 2018, DBX in 2019, a mid-engined sports car in 2020 and then Lagondas in 2021 and 2022.