Now’s Your Chance To Own A V8 Aston Martin Cygnet

Remember the Aston Martin Cygnet? A bizarre rebadge conceived to help bring Aston’s fleet emissions standards down, it was essentially a Toyota iQ with some Aston-ish bits grafted onto the outside and the inside filled with leather.

Produced between 2011 and 2013, the Cygnet was far from an enormous sales success. We pretty quickly forgot about it following the odd appearance on various ‘WTF were they thinking’ listicles, but we were all reminded of it again in 2018 when an Aston customer decided they wanted a Cygnet with more oomph.

They got in touch with Aston’s Q bespoke division who, presumably with the help of lots of butter and some enormous shoehorns, managed to cram the 4.7-litre, 430bhp V8 and the seven-speed Sportshift gearbox from an old Vantage S into the Cygnet’s bodyshell.

While it was genuinely created using a 1.3-litre, 97bhp Cygnet as its base, the V8 Cygnet did away with much of the standard car’s fundamentals. Its engine was sandwiched somewhere between the cabin and the front axle, and it featured a custom transmission tunnel to allow a teeny tiny propshaft to send power to the rear wheels.

It was also massively widened, with its newly flared bodywork accommodating a set of 19-inch forged wheels – up from 16 inches on the regular Cygnet. Aston reckoned it would hit 60mph in 4.2 seconds and manage 170mph flat-out, which would probably require several brave pills to achieve in a car that was nearly as wide as it was long.

After offering some comic relief at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed, the Cygnet V8 disappeared into the private collection of whichever, erm, bold individual had commissioned it. Now, though, around 2900 miles later, it’s back in the public eye, and up for sale.

It’s offered by UK Aston specialist Nicholas Mee, and advertised as POA. Astonishingly, though, you’ll do well to find even a regular Cygnet for under £30,000 these days, so we suspect the asking price for this one will be even higher. Probably more, in fact, than a really nice V8 Vantage S with the same engine. Then again, is a Vantage as easy as this to parallel park? We think not.