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Dany Bahar plans Aston Martin shooting brake at Modena-based tuner

You can't keep a good man down, or so the saying goes. The jury may still be out on whether Dany Bahar was a good thing for the automotive industry – with some portraying him as an overambitious opportunist and others pitting him as a genuine car guy against the bean-counters – but he's not about to stay down for long. Bahar, for those unfamiliar, was a top executive at Red Bull, serving as right-hand man to Dietrich Mateschitz right around the time that the energy drink company was getting into Formula One and NASCAR. He was then poached by Ferrari to serve as its commercial chief and brand director before taking up the reins as CEO of Lotus. Things didn't go quite so well for him there after new owners fired him, accused him of misappropriating company funds and canceling just about every one of his ambitious (or perhaps overambitious) projects to take Lotus into the modern age. But now he's back on his feet. According to Car and Driver, Bahar's new project is a tuning house and coachbuilder called Ares. Similar to an outfit like Mansory (with which Bahar, incidentally, fostered close ties while at Lotus), Ares is out to make high-end vehicles like the Range Rover Sport, Rolls-Royce Wraith and Lamborghini Huracan that much more unique. But the biggest project Ares is planning to undertake is to turn the Aston Martin Rapide S and Bentley Continental GT into shooting brakes for wealthy customers. Ares wouldn't be the first outfit to do so, Bertone having made a wagon version of the Rapide and Touring having offered an extended-roof Continental. But to show he's not messing around, Bahar has assembled a top team at Ares. Wolf Zimmermann, who worked for Mercedes-AMG before becoming Bahar's R&D chief at Lotus, is handling the technical aspects. 24-year-old Romanian designer Mihai Panaitescu, who is said to have worked on those aborted Lotus projects, is handling the style aspect. And the whole outfit is being based in Modena, Italy – the city that is home to outfits like Pagani, Maserati and nearby Ferrari. Predictably enough, Ares will launch initially in China, Russia and the Middle East, but reportedly plans to make it to the US sometime early next year. Featured Gallery 2014 Aston Martin Rapide S: First Drive View 32 Photos News Source: Car and DriverImage Credit: Copyright 2014 Drew Phillips / AOL Aftermarket Aston Martin dany bahar aston martin rapide s

Mercedes to offer SL, GL platforms to Aston Martin?

The agonizingly slow courtship between Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz has been a regular topic of conversation ever since the 2009 Lagonda Concept debuted, riding on a Mercedes GL chassis. Beyond that one polarizing concept, though, nearly every other attempt to pair the two brands up in a major way has fallen through. Only the technical partnership between Mercedes and Aston for certain components from AMG, which was negotiated back in July, has held up so far.
That may finally be set to change, according to an excellent profile of the two brands' relationship from Automobile, which claims that two platforms will unite the Germans and Brits. The first tie up is, not surprisingly, a sports car.
As Aston Martin's VH platform - which underpins every car that comes out of Gaydon - continues to age, the pressure will well and truly be on Aston to find a next-gen replacement to underpin the successors to the Vantage, Vanquish, DB9 and Rapide. Automobile claims Mercedes has just such an architecture, in the form its new modular sports car platform. This new platform is slated for the next-generation SLK and SL and is still in its design infancy.

UK car output falls 14% in March, may get worse with no-deal Brexit

LONDON — British car output fell for the 10th month in a row in March, hit by a slowdown in key foreign markets, and the sector stands to suffer a lot more if the country leaves the European Union without a deal, an industry body said on Tuesday. Output tumbled by an annual 14.4 percent to 126,195 cars in March, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said. Exports, which account for nearly four out of every five cars made in Britain, were down by 13.4 percent. The SMMT said analysis it had commissioned predicted output would fall this year to 1.36 million units from 1.52 million in 2018, assuming London can secure a transition deal with the EU. If Britain has to rely instead on World Trade Organization rules for its trade with the bloc, which include import tariffs, output is forecast to fall by around 30 percent to 1.07 million units in 2021, returning to mid-1980s levels, the SMMT said. The forecasts were produced for SMMT by AutoAnalysis, a consultancy. Prime Minister Theresa May has secured a delay to the Brexit deadline until Oct. 31, giving her more time to try to break an impasse in parliament over the terms of Britain's departure from the EU. Foreign minister Jeremy Hunt traveled to Japan earlier this month to try to persuade the Japanese government and Toyota, which has a big presence in Britain, that London was determined to avoid a no-deal Brexit. "Just a few years ago, industry was on track to produce 2 million cars by 2020 — a target now impossible with Britain's reputation as stable and attractive business environment undermined," SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said. "All parties must find a compromise urgently so we can set about repairing the damage and diverting energy and investment to the technological challenges that will define the future of the global industry." (Reporting by William Schomberg, editing by David Milliken)