Aston Martin V8 Assemblage

Which part of a car is the most expensive? Most of you will claim the engine to be the costier - then maybe you just read too much F1 magazines. The smart ones will talk about safety tests and chassis stifness. The smartest of them all will reveal the secret - it's the marketing and advertising budget to blame. They're nearly correct, but all completely wrong. The most price-rising part of a car is a side view mirror. It's so expensive, that no car manufacturer can afford that. Even when making a luxury, high-priced sportscar, you can't make a mirror on your own. You must buy them from some Hyundai, who makes it a lot and can dump this cost. The perfect example of this multidollar horror is the fresh and sexy Aston Martin V8 Vantage. It costs so, so much, but it's still impossible to get a proper Aston-branded mirrors or keys for this money. All these small parts come from Volvo, which is a disgrace. It's an important question - what should be a proper price for an Aston, if you want a real one, not an ikea-mobil? Two, five times as much as now - or maybe about 15 pounds? Are british mirrors worth it, then? It's a question, which puts the rich men of our times in a necessity of making their own car or tuner brands. Which is not bad, except for the Mansory farce. However, correcting the AM managers is not what I'm here for. I'd rather have an extra gift for them. Apart from money problems (I do think that a Tesco mirrors are the sign of them) they suffer from the lack of car names. Look at it - nearly all of Astons repeat one of two name schemes - DB-X or VantageWhatever. They run nowadays a DB9 and a V8 Vantage (or Vantage V8, who knows) - and it was always like that. They didn't change engines (same V8 for 42 years!), didn't change factory (which is nice), and car names are still the same. While the Aston is not so Aston anymore, it's high time to give a Volvo/Ford its credit, and baptize a new AM after the modern art trend, which glues different things togehter and sells them for millions in Sotheby's. Isn't it just what AM do? Volvo mirrors, ford plastics, keys and so on - it's a real, quite expensive assemblage of motoring and should be named properly. Virage, Vantage, Assemblage - welcome in a new world!