Before we knew the latest James Bond movie would be called No Time to Die, before we knew Rami Malek would be playing Daniel Craig’s last villain, word started spreading that Craig would be driving the Aston Martin Rapide E. In other words, for the first time, Bond would drive an electric vehicle.
Now, not only does it look like the Rapide E won’t appear in the film, but according to an anonymous source in Autocar, Aston Martin’s first all-electric vehicle won’t even be produced commercially.
Instead, the Rapide E will “become a research project used to further Aston’s broader electrification [program],” writes the British magazine.
The reason? As Autocar writes, the automaker is going into 2020 with one goal in mind: selling as many DBXs as it can, the company’s first SUV. While we haven’t been able to verify their source’s comments about the Rapide E, this new strategy has been confirmed elsewhere. Aston Martin had an abysmal 2019 in terms of profits, and as Bloomberg notes, the DBX has “turned into a make-or-break product for the company.”
Seemingly every other luxury automaker is doing gangbusters in the SUV department, at the expense of the future of humanity on this planet, and Aston Martin is going to try and follow that light out of the financial hole it finds itself in. If that means hitting pause on the electrification front, so be it.
Only 155 models of the Rapide E were planned, so this isn’t a huge blow to Aston Martin, even though the company might have already taken orders. And we’ll still have to wait and see if an official announcement follows these rumors.
More than anything, it’s disappointing to see automakers forced into the SUV field because it’s the only way they can turn a profit these days. If anything could have sparked more interest in EVs, it’s the tag team of Bond and Aston Martin. On that front, while the Rapide E reportedly won’t see production, pre-production models have been making the rounds. So we’ll hold out hope for a Bond in an EV until we see No Time to Die for ourselves.
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