ASTON Martin Lagonda has appointed former Ferrari chief executive Amedeo Felisa as its new CEO and taken on ex-Ferrari engineer Roberto Fedeli as its new chief technical officer.

Mr Felisa replaces Tobias Moers as CEO. Aston Martin said Mr Moers will leave its board with immediate effect but will support the new leadership team until the end of July.

Prior to his position as Ferrari CEO from 2008 to 2016, Mr Felisa ran the product development department at Alfa Romeo. He is currently a non-executive director of Aston Martin.

Aston Martin said Mr Fedeli will start as chief technical officer on July 1. The Italian national was Ferrari’s technical director from 2006 to 2014.

Mr Fedeli is considered the creator of the La Ferrari, the Italian company’s first hybrid hypercar, as well as some of its most iconic models, Aston Martin said.

He also worked for BMW where he launched the i8 plug-in hybrid roadster into production. He returned to Italy in 2016 as chief technical officer for Alfa Romeo and Maserati.

UK publication the Financial Times said Mr Moers was leaving Aston Martin after presiding over a collapse in morale at the automaker because of his “robust management style.”

Previously the head of the Mercedes-AMG performance division, Mr Moers was hired as Aston Martin’s CEO in 2020 by its billionaire chair, Lawrence Stroll, who led a bailout of Aston Martin and wanted the company to be more like Ferrari with more customised car orders.

Mr Stroll told Reuters that Mr Moers had stabilised the company when it “needed immediate manufacturing, operation attention” but now Aston Martin needed a CEO to “focus on the bigger picture”.

“Nobody knows how to make ultra-luxury performance cars better than Amedeo (Felisa),” said Mr Stroll in announcing the appointment.

“He saw the movie, he wrote the script.”

Aston Martin said Mr Felisa will focus on delivering the company’s continued strategic objectives, financial targets and roadmap toward electrification, including plans to have hybrid variants of all its models in the next two years, with the first fully electric cars by 2025.

The company has been struggling financially since it revealed in 2019 that it cost $A240 million to gain a stock market listing, pushing it to a $A120 million annual loss for 2019.

It announced last week a pre-tax loss for the first quarter of $A194 million, compared with a $A74 million loss in the previous corresponding period. Car sales were down 14 per cent year-on-year although its SUV, the DBX, saw a 60 per cent rise in orders.

The latest appointments come just months after chief financial officer Kenneth Gregor left the company, replaced with Doug Lafferty from fuel retailer Vivo Energy.

By Neil Dowling