Aston Martin could have sold six times as many Valkyries as the 150 they’ve already planned.
It’s tough making a hypercar. On the one hand, you want to make as much money as possible, which for cars usually means making and selling as many vehicles as you can. But in the world of hypercars, the number of customers is much smaller and the old economic forces of supply and demand are a lot harder to predict.
Aston Martin is obviously aiming for the top 1% of earners with their $4.5 million hypercar, but just how many one-percenters out there want to own a 1,000-horsepower Aston? That was the problem that Aston CEO Andy Palmer was faced with at the dawn of the Valkyrie’s inception.
"When we started discussing Valkyrie volumes we thought we might do 24 or 59. Then we said, OK, maybe we'll sell 100, well let's try for 150," Palmer said in an interview with Australian car site CarSales.com. That final number may have come back to bite Palmer as he says he now knows he could have sold far more Valkyries than he’d initially planned.
"It's then I realized I could have sold that car five or six times over and you kick yourself,” Palmer said. "And it is really painful, sometimes and one of the things I keep promising myself is that we say we're going to do 150 and we don't do 151 – I think it's really important that when you make a promise, you keep it. When people are writing a big check you have to live up to it."
So it seems there are at least 900 billionaires out there that would really like a 1,000-hp Aston Martin, but Palmer insists he’s sticking with the initial 150. And there won’t be too many derivatives either, with CarSales stating the likeliest alternative version to be a convertible, but that’s it.
Interestingly, roughly half of reservations for the Valkyrie are completely new to the brand, bringing a unique challenge for brand retention. Aston Martin has always sold luxury-performance vehicles, but never a hypercar only affordable to the richest humans on Earth.
We’ll see how well Aston Martin does when the Valkyrie starts arriving later this year.