Aston Martin Vows to go Fully Hybrid-Electric by the mid-2020s

The coolest car ever is about to go fully hybrid.

The Lamborghini might cut a sharper profile and Ferrari might be the more accomplished racing team, but only one luxury sports car counts a suave British secret agent amongst its fictional aficionados. If it’s good enough for the king of cool, it’s good enough for me (in my dreams where I had $200K to spend on a car, but I digress).

And now Aston Martin is set to abandon the purely internal combustion engine. “We will be 100 per cent hybrid by the middle of the 2020s,” chief executive Andy Palmer told the Financial Times. And the influx of battery systems could be a boon for the British automotive market.

“You need to keep core technology inside the company,” said Mr Palmer. “That’s why we make our own V12 engine. We believe that EVs [electric vehicles] are a core technology, and therefore we want to do them ourselves.”

It now appears that Aston Martin, like James Bond at the Poker table, is all-in – following the announcement of the company’s first fully electric vehicle, the Rapid-e saloon, set to debut in 2019, they’ve decided to do away entirely with the purely gas-powered engine.

And the British automaker won’t be alone. The famed London Taxi Company hopes to produce a hybrid version of its famed black cabs by early 2018, while Volvo has pledged to sell only hybrid- and pure-electric vehicles by 2019. Even Volkswagon’s iconic hippe-bus is getting electrified.

Meanwhile, Britain plans to outlaw non-hybrid vehicles by 2040, while France is doing away with the internal combustion engine, altogether, by the same year. So, like I mentioned in my piece about the black cabs, this move by Aston Martin is more pragmatic than progressive.

Still, the coolest car of all time is undergoing a radical transformation, and 007 will need to pinpoint his closest charging stations.