Our incessant clamoring for concept cars to become street legal and purchasable occasionally pays off. All the heavy panting for the Aston Marton V12 Zagato Concept has resulted in a production Aston Martin V12 Zagato. One question: did we piss it off somehow?
Italian design house Zagato built the one-off concept to honor the 50th anniversary of the Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato, which then morphed into a pair of endurance race cars, and finally the production car you see here.
It's definitely both a Zagato and an Aston Martin product. The most obvious and forceful Italian touch is the three-dimensional grille, which looks like dozens of zees embossed in a delicate metal. The giant carbon fiber taillight pods also scream Italian.
Also, the whole thing screams. It looks sort of pissed off, but in a good way, like a bella donna initially off put by your forwardness who will nevertheless reward your cheek with some cheek of her own.
The rest of the car is pure Aston Martin, if only exaggerated a bit. The overall line and fierce headlines follow form and the details are so clean and luxurious it wouldn't be a shock if they also dispensed truffle oil and the finest French performs.
Inside the car also follows Zagato's theme of angled zees with a hand-stitched quilting on the Seven Bridge of Weird hides, offset by dark piano black accents with satin touches.
Below Zagato's exciting body is the mechanical underpinnings of a V12 Vantage, including the 6.0-liter V12 producing 510 horsepower and 420 lb-ft of torque. A fine performer, surely, but that's not quite the point.
Pricing is a relatively reasonable $525,000 before taxes. Considering what insane luxury costs these days, that's more than 2,000 hours of hand-crafting for a limited edition Anglo-Italian piece of drivable history.
There are worse ways to spend half-a-million dollars. More details when we see it in Geneva.