This is almost the most exclusive ashtray yet featured. It’s the very small and rather agricultural ashtray of the Aston Martin DB Mk 3 (1958).
This ashtray is centrally located which is good. The height above the gear-lever and relative to the driver’s hip is not so good. It’s not a very deep ashtray. If you think of Fitts´s Law you see that you have a small target and the car is moving too and therefore one’s hand and the target will be jostling. I imagine these cars were littered with debris from failed attempts to dispose of ash. Any decent half-corona is going to make a real mess of this.
To open the ashtray you push on one side of the Aston Martin emblem and the half-cylinder revolves. To close you push on the side of the ashtray. There are grooves to aid this action. A cursory examination indicated the ashtray is cast from metal and is not a pressing. Disappointing, overall. The casting is fine – it’s the overall effect of the arrangement that leaves one short-changed.
The car is on view at the Sommer´s Car Museum in Copenhagen. I will be writing more about this in the near future. That I have not done so far is because I know there is a lot to write.
Driven To Write 
This is the car that James Bond drove in the book of Goldfinger. Your description of the ashtray hardly suggests a suitable receptacle for the stubs of his handmade, gold-banded Morland cigarettes. Possibly Q Branch rigged up an alternative.
The swivelling ashtray is a clever enough piece of design in principle, but in practice a shallow half-cylinder isn’t up to the job. As a small child, I was fascinated by the plastic swivelling trays on my Mum’s Ford Prefect, though I remember they were rather insubstantial.
When I wrote this I expected Aston Martin fans who search the net ceaselessly for nuggets of new wisdom to fall on this like vultures. They haven’t. In the same whoever likes Lancia Trevis keep finding our articles on that car. Does that tell us anything?