beocool:
burantek:
Weren't they terribly unreliable? Nice to see the not well known Shooting Brake was on the site as well. It was for sale a few years back in Switzerland if I remember correctly.
actually no. quite the opposite, considering proper maintenance.
mechanically, they (astons in general) were always rather simple cars. my exposure and interest was mostly from the db5 thru the virage, they could literally be worked on with a set of hand tools. the 8's were rocks and these were automatics -so the trannies were chrysler torqueflites, again rocks. the coupes (had one of those, too) running manuals were zf's, as well as the automatics. they too were rock crushers, but could occasionally suffer from synchro issues. they required a firm but delicate throw, often a real challenge to drive quickly, lacking the gates like ferrari, lambo, etc... which i always felt to be utterly perfect.
electronically, and back to the lagondas, and where they really differed... was the instrumentation. while the primary controls were not really different than the coupes, the secondaries were. they had three different iterations of the instrumenation and really did not get it right until the end, when they had nearly come full circle again and really simplified them. the early models were LED and touch sensitive (similar to a bm2400), next they went to mini crt's from javelin (a us company) and push button controls (similar to a bm6000/8000), last was a backlit dash w/ heavy pushbuttons (similar to ferrari 3.2's of the era). most of the issues you would hear about, and to the point of your question, was always with the instrumention, and hence why there were so many radical revs to it.
the LED version had issues with the LED's and the touch panel going bad. the CRT version had issues with the tubes and had in production revs to them. they had a tendency to suffer from electronic interference (in my case, i had actually considered gutting the CRT's and replacing with a set of Smith's set in a turned aluminum panel, but never did it. it was sorted with a new set of shielded plug leads). i am not familiar with the backlit model, but have never heard anything bad.
it makes me wonder, with what i have learned here at beoworld (thinking about recent threads regarding the rebuild of 6000/8000 LED's) that the LED version was doomed from the get go, as i am sure the vibrations involved would have really caused problems. it also makes me think that "back to the future" it would have been neat if b&o had done their auto division earlier and had supplied the touch panels, they wouldn't have had any issues! ...oh well.
i'll close with a little bit of trivia... Lagonda, a british company, was actually founded by an american. the name was derived from an american indian name for a local creek near the founder's birthplace in Ohio. i seem to remember it translates to something like: "frothing water" or similar.