The Lagonda Vision Concept Previews An Indulgent Electric Future

Lagonda, the Aston Martin-owned luxury car brand, has been reborn as a high-end electric specialist, and this is its first vision of how the businessfolk of tomorrow might travel

Lagonda, a reborn brand now focused solely on luxury electric cars, has launched its vision for the future of serene executive motoring.

Recently rejuvenated by parent company Aston Martin, with a target of building a whole range of models during the 2020s, Lagonda’s opening gambit is this, the Vision Concept.

It is designed to test the water for public and media reaction ahead of a planned production start date in 2021. Built with battery packs low in the chassis, it’s designed to show what is possible – and likely – when you take away the need for a traditional car layout.

A large, airy passenger area with lots of glass sits behind a short, steeply-raked nose, which is there both for aerodynamic benefit and crash safety. Four tall adults would have enough room to kick back and stretch out, Lagonda says. The styling is “sculptural, shocking and challenging,” adds the firm’s Chief Creative Officer.

Designed from the inside out to be as people-friendly as possible, the Vision Concept has incredible ease of access. Rear-hinged back doors open outwards as normal, but the roof sections fold upwards at the same time, allowing passengers to simply stand up and walk out of the car.

It’s also penned with level four autonomous driving in mind. It should, we’re told, be capable of driving itself in all routine situations and on all ‘recognisable’ roads. The steering wheel can be moved to different sides of the car, or retracted completely to let the driver and front passenger armchairs swivel around to face the rear.

It’s Lagonda’s feeling that most of its customers will want to be driven, rather than do the driving themselves, but the Vision Concept should be able to cater for whatever they want. Driver involvement with this technology is an obvious hurdle that we’ll come to in a few years.

Range for the car depends on the batteries it eventually uses. Lagonda’s press release carefully uses the example of solid-state batteries, which are not ready for production on this scale yet. Thus equipped, the Vision Concept could just about eke out 400 miles per charge, says the firm.

Intelligent all-wheel drive can send up to 100 per cent of the available torque to any given wheel, suggesting that there’s either a motor at each corner or a twin-motor setup with one on each axle and the facility to fully torque-vector to one side or the other. What do you think of it?