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The Lagonda All-Terrain concept is Aston Martin’s far out vision for electric SUVs

The Lagonda All-Terrain concept is Aston Martin’s far out vision for electric SUVs

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Coming in 2022, with a... floating key?

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In case you missed it at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, Aston Martin resurrected luxury sub-brand Lagonda and announced it would become the automaker’s showcase for EVs going forward. It launched that vision with an opulent — and carpeted! — autonomous concept car. At this year’s show, though, Aston Martin is showing that the company’s vision is getting closer to reality with the Lagonda All-Terrain concept, an autonomous-ready electric SUV that will enter production in 2022.

Aston Martin didn’t release any specs at all for the Lagonda All-Terrain, which looks somewhat like a Jaguar I-Pace that’s been stretched from both ends. And while it more closely resembles a production car than last year’s concept, it’s still pretty far out.

It’s not as opulent as last year’s Lagonda concept, but it’s still not for you

The inside of the car features two screens, though none are on the dashboard. Instead, one sits in the middle of the steering wheel, while the other is embedded into the center console. There are no obvious air vents or speakers, either. Instead, Lagonda wants to use the lines and contours formed by the car’s luxurious materials to create a “Renaissance” perspective effect that draws passengers’ eyes to the windshield, the side windows, and up through the glass roof.

“This is a car that would be at home whisking someone straight from a glamorous red carpet event to a remote scientific research lab,” Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer said in an awfully specific statement.

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That’s not the only big idea Lagonda has for this car. The All-Terrain concept so “appeals to a pioneering spirit of adventure,” the company writes, that you could “just as easily imagine it roaming the surface of Mars as a mountain in Scotland.”

And where last year’s concept was partially inspired by the Concorde, according to Lagonda, this year’s has “taken some of its initial design language from the world of the super yacht.”

If you think this is all high-minded concept foolery, fear not, because Lagonda still considers practicality a virtue. Because, as the company writes, “while the technology exists in this day and age to allow the [car] key to be removed altogether, Lagonda believes that it remains an important point of contact between the driver and the vehicle.”

Yes, there’ll be no using a smartphone app to enter this futuristic super yacht SUV. Instead, you’ll still use a physical key. But when you sit down inside, you won’t place that key in an ignition. Don’t be silly! Instead, the key will be “celebrated and indeed elevated” — literally — because the car will use electromagnets to make the key hover between the front seats.

Let’s just hope they aren’t taking tips from any of these companies.