Aston Martin has been trumpeting the One-77 for a long time, and we don’t mind. OK, the slow drip drip of information at the beginning was a bit maddening, but who would turn down hearing about the most outrageous Aston of them all?

Late last year the company announced that just 17 One-77s were left. That is out of a run of just 77 models, as its name implies.

Not bad sales figures for the world’s second-most expensive car in the world, just behind the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Gran Sport. With a 7.3-liter V-12 making 750 horsepower, it also stands as the world’s most powerful car with a naturally-aspirated engine.

Aston Martin has just commenced deliveries of the One-77, with the first one taking place in Monte Carlo, Monaco. The first production One-77 out in the wild was spotted by the website GTSpirit outside the Hotel De Paris, painted in black.

With production having been started, deliveries of the One-77 are set to take place through the end of the year. Now to see how long it takes for the company to announce that the remaining One-77s are sold.

Auto manufacturers are increasingly entering smaller and smaller segments as governmental regulations demand an increase in fuel efficiency and reductions in emissions.

For luxury performance and exotic manufacturers under a large corporate umbrella, other brands in the portfolio are able to produce smaller models.

Aston Martin is a standalone brand owned by a joint venture company headed by David Richards and co-owned by by equity companies, Investment Dar, Adeem Investment and English businessman John Sinders. As such, it doesn’t have the ability to do that – for now it has to be introduced under the Aston Martin brand name.

The Cygnet is a lightly-modified Toyota iQ with Aston Martin cues. This enabled the car to be introduced cheaply and quickly.

Since news of the car came out, Aston Martin has been positioning the car as sort of a “luxury tender” of sorts to its performance cars, similar to the tenders of a high-end luxury yacht.

The situation isn’t quite working out like that in the end however. For one, that would require existing customers to be the only ones able to buy the vehicle. That isn’t the case – anyone will be able to purchase an Aston Martin Cygnet.

The official pricetag for the car comes in tin at £30,995 (around $50K USD at current exchange rates) and can go up from there depending on options and personalization.

Production of the Cygnet begins in April 2011 and the car has currently gone on sale in Aston Martin’s European dealerships.

What are you hoping for this holiday season? Some Nürburgring lap passes?  A Garrett GT3076R?  A leather-wrapped 3 spoke Momo, some Sparco seats, and 5-point Sabelt harnesses?  Hey, I’m hoping for a MicroSD card for my Android, some floor mats for my Accord, and the ability to spend some time with my family without bickering or bustling.

What I’d really love is an Aston Martin V12 Vantage.  The smaller-chassis Vantage normally comes with a puny Jag-derived V8, but for the limited production V12 model, Aston’s artists shoehorn in a massive 6.0L 48v V12 under the hood with barely enough room for a dipstick.  Rutledge Wood from Top Gear USA (by far my favorite character on the show -- Rutledge is the man) drove one and was quite smitten.

And while I’m sure Aston Martin would love to give us all a V12 Vantage this holiday season, at $180,000+ USD a pop, I doubt they can afford to.  Hey, they’re not TVR -- they gotta keep the lights on, eh?  Still, as a merry Christmas-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa-Festivus present for all it’s fans, Aston gave us this video of it’s V12 Vantage road car and DBR1-2 LMP LeMans race car on a rain-slicked road together, a cacaphony of 24 hand-built cylinders wailing in sync -- to point out that even it’s race cars have bloodlines derived from it’s road cars.  Which is neat -- the DBR1-2′s motor is actually a derivative of a street motor.  You hear that, Audi and Peugeot?  We’ll be impressed when you sell us a 607 with a twin-turbo diesel V12, Peugeot.

God, the sound is incredible.  So hey, thanks for the Christmas present, Aston.  It’ll do.  And to all our readers -- regular posting will continue the day after Christmas, most likely.  Thanks for sticking around, commenting, reading, and being part of the CarThrottle experience.

Aston Martin has teased the One-77 endlessly, slowly releasing information and videos documenting the car, the most recent of which appeared in late September.

The One-77 stands as the world’s most powerful car with a naturally-aspirated engine, making 750 horsepower from its 7.3-liter V-12.

Lately though it appears most news from Aston Martin have been Cygnet-related, and we’re glad to shift gears. The One-77 is the fastest and most expensive Aston Martin ever, and it would have been the most expensive car if not for the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport.

While most would think that with a difficult economy a $1.87 million supercar would be a tough sell, Aston has announced the One-77 is doing quite well for itself.

17 models are still available – 60 models of the 77 unit run have already been sold and this is before deliveries have started. Pretty impressive numbers! Remember the part about shifting gears from the Cygnet though? Not quite;.Aston Martin has been busy pitching the car to One-77 buyers. Buyers seem to be responding too – Aston says most One-77 buyers have already agreed to or showed serious interest in the minicar to accompany their One-77.

You got to remember the kinds of numbers we’re dealing with here. When you’re spending $1.87 million, $30,000 on a hip $30,000 is nothing. The One-77, which has gone to over 220 mph in testing, is slated to be delivered to the first customers next year.

Today’s global luxury market is in the millions of units. Many have often equated size with luxury – as in, the bigger the better.

What is different than size though is compromising brand values – and many have decided Aston Martin has done so with the Cygnet minicar. Regardless, it is a go for production.

It is unclear what the exact motivation is behind the car – most likely governmental fuel economy regulations. Selling a few hundred of these a year with high MPG numbers should help things out significantly. There is also likely a high profit margin on each car, depending on the asking price.  What is still unclear is the plan for sales of the new Cygnet. Will it be available to current Aston Martin customers only? Will it be priced like an exclusive luxury item?

The smart money would be to make it available to existing Aston Martin customers only, and at a high cost. In this way it would be positioned as true luxury item sold in limited quantities.

Aston Martin has spoken of this sales method before, being the automotive equivalent of a luxury tender to a yacht. The worst thing for the Aston Martin brand name would be to have the Cygnet available to anyone, with a price tag that is attainable.

Kit cars, on the other hand, mostly aim to look like the real thing but for a whole lot less. EDO Competition is straddling that line with its new effort, turning the five-year old DBS into a DB9.

Interestingly, the car was commissioned by its owner. How about just buying a new DBS for is almost certainly a whole lot less money? Beats us.

This obviously isn’t your standard conversion job. EDO Competition replaced the metal body panels of the DB9 into the carbon fiber panels that are used on the actual DB9.

The interior was also upgraded as well, with different materials like leather, alcantara, carbon fiber and metal to make it look exactly like the real thing. All this money spent and it isn’t even real though. We are left scratching our heads on this one.

The DB9′s 5.9-liter V12 has also been upgraded from 470 horsepower to 550 hp, taking it beyond the 510 hp output of the factory-built DBS. A car that goes faster needs to be able to stop as well, so the binders have been enlarged, though Edo oddly stuck with steel brakes instead of upgrading them to carbon.

No cost has been disclosed for the conversion, but we can’t help but wonder whether the net expenditure was greater than the cost of a new car minus the trade-in.

While the Rapide is (and I think will be) considered a classical beauty, the previous Aston sedan was a bit more… divisive.  Polemic.  Opinion-splitting.  Some people might say ugly. But it’s something you have to look a little deeper than the surface to really get a handle on.  Meet the original four-door Aston Martin, the Lagonda.

The Lagonda was a futuristic, techy flight of fancy that came about at an unusual time for Aston.  What Aston spend most of the 1970′s doing was going bankrupt multiple times under multiple owners; the fact that they survived is amazing enough, but the fact that the Lagonda was their “rescue” product is even stranger.  Not exactly a blue chip investment, but sometimes you can’t go anywhere without taking a risk.

The Lagonda was “styled” by designer William Towns, but I use “style” as a loose term here.  What he really did was make a car out of origami, all folds and creases like a tightly pleated suit.  Of course, it was dramatic -- it had to be, it was an Aston. For instance, it’s rumored that he worked tirelessly to get the angle of the bonnet as low as possible, actually restarting the design with different wheelbases multiple times to just to get the lowest possible hood under which to mount Aston’s V8 motor.  The end result may not be elegant (at least in my eyes) but it sure is attention-getting.

The Lagonda was meant to be a statement both about Aston Martin and about the future.  So it’s pretty hilarious when you consider that they sourced the “futuristic” electronic dashboard out to Lucas, who was definitely the electronics supplier of the future.  Anyway, for the late 70′s it was very chic, although perhaps it was more… sheik.

In fact, you probably had to be an oil sheik to afford to keep gas in the thing.  Under the hood was Aston’s 5.3L dual-overhead-cam V8, which sucked in dead dinos through four Weber DC42′s.  Oh yes, four Webers on a quad-cam V8.  It delivered the goods, though, with 280bhp@5,000 rpm and a healthy 360 lb-ft of torque, making it one of the most powerful cars in the world at the time.  (Which is funny, because a modern Accord V6 makes more power.  But let’s ignore that and stay in historical perspective here!) Each engine block was cast off-site, but machined and assembled by a single employee over the course of about a week(!).  Thus each engine bears a unique plaque with the builder’s name etched into it -- a nice personal connection.

note: engine pictured is actually from a ’74 Aston Martin V8 Coupe, but they’re identical.

The Lagonda fed it’s burly V8 power through a Chrysler 3-speed automatic, which meant you were lucky to achieve double-digit fuel consumption.  But considering that the Lagonda had a price tag of £24,570 in 1977 -- about £114,000 in today’s money, which converted into US dollars is damn near a quarter of a million bucks -- it was unlikely owners were concerned with something as pedestrian as fuel economy.  Performance was rapid by late ’70′s standards, with 0-100km/h coming up under 9 seconds (impressive considering the antique transmission and 4,000+lb kerb weight) and a top speed somewhere north of 140mph.

But the Lagonda’s party trick wasn’t it’s engine -- grand tourers of the time like the Porsche 928 were considerably faster -- it was the interior appointments.  The Lagonda was one of the pioneers of the loved-and-hated digital dashboard that was so popular in the ’80′s.  The Lagonda’s dash had three five-inch CRT displays monitoring various parameters, and touch-button electronic controls for basically everything.  Of course, being made by Lucas Electronics, none of it ever really worked right, but who cares!  Look at that dashboard, and weep for joy.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that the Lagonda was never a really big seller; Toyota sells more Camrys in the US in a month than Aston sold total Lagondas over it’s 13-year production span covering three series and various derivatives in a number of markets.  With only 645 Lagondas made, it’s pretty clear you’re not going to be bumping into one at a stop-light any time soon.  Despite the tiny production numbers (18 made in the first two years), Aston saw fit to continually update the Lagonda throughout it’s lifetime to keep it fresh and somewhat up-to-date.  The car gained minor updates in 1982 for introduction to the US market (5mph bumpers, opening rear windows, etc).  The first real update was 1986 for the Series III cars, which received Weber-Marelli electronic fuel injection (driven by twin SU electronic fuel pumps) in place of the thirsty, finicky Weber carbs -- powered jumped to 300bhp and 320lb/ft with the new induction setup.  The CRT dash was replaced with a more modern vacuum-fluorescent tube setup, in addition to new wheels and other styling tweaks.  The final update was in late ’87 (Series IV) which kept the fuel-injected motor but received exterior styling tweaks.  The weird pop-up headlights hit the bin replaced by six fixed units, the edges were rounded off a bit, and it looked a tad-bit more modern.  Updated Series IV car pictured below.

Production of the Lagonda ended in late 1989 with the final Series IV cars being sold some time during 1990.  During it’s lifetime the Lagonda went from being merely expensive, to ridiculously expensive -- the last price listing I can find for the Lagonda indicates an MSRP of £76,254 in 1987 -- again, correcting for inflation, that’d be £161,000.  And that’s before VAT (Value-added Tax), which brought the price of the Lagonda up to £90,000 even in 1987 -- or, just to make your stomach turn, about £190,000 today.  Perhaps that’s why they only sold three digits worth in 13 years.

At any rate, despite the rarity and price, this didn’t keep companies from modifying Lagondas to fit specific purposes.  Coachbuilder and mod-shop Tickford did a number of Lagonda conversions, including a stretched-wheelbase limousine with some absolutely massive rear glass, pictured below.  Roos engineering did a 5-door shooting brake (that’s “wagon” to us Americans, eh) that looks like the most epic thing you could imagine.  The Aston factory in Newport Pagnell also did a short-wheelbase 2-door version called (ironically) the Rapide, which is almost too funny-looking to even post a picture of; use your imagination.  There were super-stretched 3-row limousines, too, but I can’t say I know the origins of them.

In many ways, the new Rapide is a lot more conventional design than the Lagonda.  The Rapide simply looks like a longer DB9, which is sort of what people would expect from an Aston sedan; whereas the Lagonda represented the spirit of Aston Martin distilled into a luxo four-door package, not  necessarily in a stylistic sense.  I can’t honestly say I think it’s the prettiest thing ever made, but you have to admit, the Lagonda has some serious presence and charisma -- it’s a car that stands out in traffic almost as much as, say, a Unimog.  Will the Rapide stand out in traffic today?  Sure, but that’s just because it’ll be in a sea of beige Camrys and blue Escapes.  Everything’s a matter of perspective.  Still, it’s hard to imagine a car like the Lagonda happening today.  It was a brave lateral move for Aston, and Aston “purists” mostly thought it was the work of the devil, but it gave Newport Pagnell the capital it needed to keep it’s factory running.  The parallel with the Cayenne/Panamera is hard to ignore here.  And in the end, if the Rapide can generate enough cash flow so that Aston can keep screwing together crazy shit like the V12 Vantage, then I’m 100% fine with it -- even it’s more of the same old Aston, rather than an alien UFO with a Tadek Marek V8 like the Lagonda was.

Top Gear’s James May explains the whole Lagonda phenomenon better than I can; so have a look at this clip from ’03 talking about the overall boldness of this car, it really puts it into perspective.

So, the question of the Lagonda’s relative relevance is still up in the air.  As a financial instrument for keeping Aston afloat -- well, they’re still here, aren’t they?  There wasn’t really a replacement for the Lagonda (as no-one bought them) and it would be quite a stretch to say the Rapide is taking it’s place.  What are your thoughts on this strangest of Aston creations?  Drop us a line in the comments box below.

There will be minimal changes in order to compete, with the Rapide race car being as close to production standard as possible. Aston says there will only be “essential race safety modifications” that include removing interior trim to reduce weight, a re-tuned suspension and tires designed for track use.

Ahead of that debut next month, Autoblog has obtained photos of the Rapide seen testing on the Nurburgring, caught with Perspex windows and wearing slick tires.

Aston Martin has won the SP8 category of the ADAC Nürburgring race (now in its 38th year) for the past two years running, with a lightly modified V-12 Vantage taking the class win.

This year, that car is being entered again, along with the Rapide. Could the Rapide take the win this year? Regardless, being out there and doing well counts for something.

The Rapide out there testing shows Aston Martin is taking this seriously – we’re excited to see how the Rapide fares in competition. Check out more images of the Rapide on the track over at Autoblog.

One of his creations, the Ugar Sahin Design Mallet ZO3 (based on a Corvette) is actually headed for a production run. Now he is unveiling his atest design, for a brand that is one of our favorites – Aston Martin.

With most companies, it is easy to produce dream car designs. Aston Martin isn’t one of those companies, because they are already dream car designs. We can’t think of any cars more beautiful on the market today.

He named his new project the Gauntlet – and it certainly has some good-looking design cues. Our favorite look would definitely have to be the rear end, which shows off a style similar to the range-topping One-77 supercar. We could see future Aston Martins going for a similar look in the back.

The overall styling seems is more curvaceous than recent Astons, lending it a Vanquish-like air. Better than the Vanquish? Yes, but our favorites would still have to be the production Aston Martins. Let us know your thoughts in the comments and check out more photos of the design at Ugar Sahin’s website.

Ironic then that lately, the Aston Martin (if you can call it that) we’ve been hearing about most is the Cygnet minicar, based on the Toyota iQ.

Its good to talk about real Aston Martins for a change – and the Rapide definitely qualifies as one. To prove its mettle, Aston Martin has announced the Rapide’s entrance into a 24-hour endurance race at the Nurburgring.

The Nurburgring is one of the world’s best and toughest tracks, where automakers go to hone their vehicles’ handling. An endurance race is quite a different thing however – and Aston Martin is no stranger to competing. Aston Martin has one the SP8 category of the ADAC Nürburgring race (in its 38th year) for the past two years running. with a lightly modified V-12 Vantage taking the class win.

This year, the Rapide will be competing – and will be similarly modified; in other words, not much at all. The Rapide race car will be very close to production standard with only “essential race safety modifications” that include removing interior trim to reduce weight, a re-tuned suspension and tires designed for track use.

As if it needed it, this will further prove the Rapide as a real Aston Martin – a four-door competing with racecars and supercars in a grueling endurance race. We look forward to seeing the rankings this year. Go Rapide!