Customer Care Announcement!
As you know we love our clients, and to that end, we want to make sure you are very aware of this issue. We are receiving too many phone calls from owners who have driven through water they thought was shallow enough. It wasn’t.
We’ve made a video on our Youtube channel to share look into Aston Martin water damage dangers further.
Deep water impact on your Aston Martin
Like many sports cars the design is about the chassis and engine. Where they are placed, the weight bias ensuring the performance the manufacturer wants to achieve. After those basics everything else is bolted on around it, I say this in the broadest possible sense of course. At the front of the engine it’s all about cooling and air direction. Engines have to breathe and the most obvious place on a front engine car is at the front. In the case of Aston Martins V12 engines there isn’t a lot of spare room and the air intakes are flanked bilaterally left and right. They sit low down behind the front valance hidden away, out of sight and thought and I want to take a minute to remind you of this.
In the Autumn and Winter months we have a great number of calls from distraught owners who have driven through water and suffered greatly because of it. Imagine your car parked in a puddle deep enough for the front apron to sit just above the water line. You wouldn’t want to step in a puddle that deep as it would ruin your shoes and make your socks wet yet we think nothing of driving through it. Now imagine the width of the front tyres on your Aston Martin DB9, Vanquish or Vantage. They are wide aren’t they!?
As you drive through water at that depth those tyres are so wide they will push the water away in front of them and in doing so the level will rise in front of the tyres like a bow wave. The water level at the front apron is no longer under the nose but above it. This is bad. Now a car is driving towards you and he too has a bow wave and the water level increases yet again. The two big air boxes will fill with water and your engine will suck the water from the airboxes into the engine, into the combustion chambers and create such great pressure that your engine will fail catastrophically. This is nothing short of disaster.
Your only option now is for engine replacement or repair. Either way the cost is huge and for some of the older cars it means the end of the road. We want your business but we would rather you saved your hard earned money for upgrading to your next Aston Martin and continuing your amazing automotive journey.
We hope this has been helpful to you.
Written & Reviewed by John McGurk, Director, in December 2023.