What is Q Branch?

If you want to go for a bespoke seatbelt colour, it’s about £50,000,” says Simon Lane, Aston Martin’s director of Q and special projects. “We’re asked about it all the time, but a new seatbelt colour has to be fully homologated, including crash testing.” Wondering how car companies justify the seemingly extortionate prices of one-offs? Well, here you go. “We had a request recently from a Middle Eastern customer for a full vegan interior, which means the adhesives as well as the materials, and as soon as you do that you’re into airbag deployment tests and so on. It starts to get very expensive. By the time we’d costed this out for his DBS it was seven figures.” The customer declined, but Aston is now looking into the feasibility.

Q is not all about DB5s with pop-out machine guns. The name, cheekily borrowed from Bond, came along in 2012, but it was merely formalising a role that had been there since Aston Martin was founded back in 1913: it exists to keep customers happy. “We can look at doing anything, but it’s best to think of Q as a pyramid. At the bottom we have Q Collection, which is options we’ve designed and engineered as an introduction to bespoke. Then there’s Q Commission, ‘there’s nothing on the menu I want’, so you’re talking bespoke colour and trim, or parts for the car. And the engineering costs need to be borne by the customer. At the top we have Q Advanced Operations, complete bespoke cars such as the V8 Cygnet, the V600 Vantage or the GT12 roadster. We built 100 GT12s, but we had one customer in Switzerland who wanted a roadster, so he has the only one. We don’t disclose prices, but each car has to be put through our rigorous development and durability tests and again costs are footed by the customer.”

It’s a big growth area for all luxury car brands – 10 years ago the bespoke department at Aston Martin had just nine permanent employees, now it’s over 200. Ideas don’t only come from customers, recently dealers have got involved. Aston did a pastel model range for an LA showroom, in the UK the Bristol dealership commissioned a Concorde tie-up (which included sourcing the original aircraft’s carpet), in 2019 Cambridge did a 24-car DBS run to celebrate 60 years since Aston’s only Le Mans victory. That car includes a specially commissioned artwork for the rooflining.

All good business, we can assume. But nothing new. Upmarket brands with customers who want to go one step beyond have been forced to create these departments simply because bespoke builds aren’t possible within the normal bounds of the car making process. Assembly lines, safety tests, suppliers and R&D are, even for a relatively small company like Aston Martin, geared around mass market production. Doing one-offs is challenging and expensive.

But back when Aston was young, car builders typically supplied a chassis and engine, which went to a separate coachbuilder. Although processes developed over time, creating one-offs has always been there: from the 1923 three-seat Cloverleaf, through to the single customer who kept the firm afloat in the difficult mid-Nineties. “He asked for ideas for cars,” company historian Steve Waddingham tells me, “so we sent three proposals, expecting him to choose one, but he came back and said ‘I’ll have all three, and three of each, black, silver and red’.” The same customer wanted more power, and funded development of the twin supercharged 600bhp V8 that went on to be used in production models. A literal lifesaver. Aston won’t name him, but we will: it was the Sultan of Brunei.

And what of Q’s latest, the Victor? Here’s Simon Lane: “It was our idea. We had a single One-77 prototype left, we couldn’t sell it as there were already 77 out there, it had done 4,000 miles, so we thought of stripping the car back entirely, rebuilding and rebodying to create a homage to cars from Victor Gauntlett’s era with that V8 Vantage muscle car look.” Successful? Let’s have a closer look...