Earlier this week, we learned that someone bought the design drawings and tooling for the Aston Martin Vanquish for $26 million, presumably with an idea to keep building cars based on it. That’s left me wondering what other cars I’d pay millions to start building again.
The Vanquish is an interesting choice for someone to base a car on, only because it felt like it was sort of around forever and that means it’s kind of old. I mean, it was introduced in 2001. Pierce Brosnan was still James Bond.
But it was enough of a car to be Aston Martin’s flagship for a decade and a half, and there’s plenty of people in the market for a large GT car weighed down with luxury that compensates with powerful engines. If someone is trying to sell expensive cars the easy way, buying the tooling for the Vanquish is a solid move.
But what other cars would we want someone to keep around? What other cars make a good base for a scrappy, questionable company to redesign into something inexplicable and from the automotive uncanny valley?
I like the idea of taking the modern Camaro and tweaking it to be a modernized Pontiac Trans Am, and the Camaro is a perfectly fine car to build something else on.
If it was me buying the design drawings and tooling so that I could turnaround and sell the car off as my own, I’d probably start building as many Hummers as possible to sell of to rich Texas people and not stop building them until the next inevitable economic bubble bursts.
I wonder if Mazda would sell you the RX-8's design and tooling? Now that’s an idea.