It was fun to laugh at while it lasted. But reports from Autocar and others reveal the most ridiculous city car you could buy in the UK, the Aston Martin Cygnet, is no more.
Which means it's now the most fantastic small car out there and you should all buy one some day.
Aston Martin introduced the Cygnet back in 2009 by pretty much buying Scion iQs from Toyota and sticking a grille inspired by a DB9 and some quilted leather seats and plush fabrics inside and charging buyers roughly three times what an iQ would cost. They wanted to sell 2,000 of them a year, but Autocar says only 143 are on British roads now. Clearly, they missed the target.
Everyone laughed at the Cygnet the whole time it was alive. It was a fair point. What was a company like Aston Martin doing by marketing a woefully overpriced Toyota? Why should we care about a thing that's only alive to lower a company's emissions average?
The Cygnet is now the most awesome buy out there. Sir Stirling Moss bought one (shown at the top), so it gets a little street cred there. It's a totally obscure piece of automotive history – so obscure that even Aston Martin has completely hidden reference to it from their website. Jalops like an underdog and a forgotten stepchild when it comes to cars. Yes, it only has a 1.3-liter four-pot that makes 94 sad horses in the iQ, but it's more of a laugh than any other Aston Martin ever made. Except for a Lagonda, perhaps.
A quick search of eBay Motors' UK site pulled up three Cygnets for sale, ranging from roughly £21-30,000. Still pricey, but a bargain for something this rare. The fact it wasn't really made by Aston Martin might add some confidence to long-term reliability prospects, too.
Cygnet, we hardly knew you, but you made us laugh.
Photo: Flickr/Paul Robertson