Which Car Surprised You Most When You Saw It For The First Time?

When I first saw the press release for the new Aston Martin Vulcan last night, I remember the first two words that popped into my head. The first word was ‘holy’ and the second word rhymed with the name of a bird that you often eat in a Chinese restaurant with hoisin sauce and pancakes.

I mean, look at that face. The nose is pinched, the headlights are tiny and angular and it’s got the mouth of a bottom-feeder. No way is this an Aston Martin, I thought. But, low and behold, this really was a new Aston, albeit a track-only special with 800hp+, limited availability and a price tag in excess of £1.5m.

This is by far the most surprising car I’ve seen in recent times. Sure, I already knew there’d be a big wing, sexy new angles and massive power, but for a company like Aston to deviate so far from its design language was a huge shock. I mean, we haven’t really seen a truly new Aston (except for the One-77 hypercar) in years, just rehashes of existing cars with the letter ‘S’ added.

Looking at the comments in the Vulcan news story, some of you are already trying to fix the supercar’s front-end with brilliantly amateur Photoshop efforts (I mean that in the nicest possible way). This tells me that you’re all probably as shocked as I was.

But is it the car that surprised you most (like it did me) when you saw it for the first time, or is there another car that deserves that title?