FIRST DRIVES
Can a performance SUV ever justify its billing? A drive of Aston Martin’s DBX prototype suggests this one could
028 ASTON MARTIN DBX 032 TATA NEXON EV 036 KIA CARNIVAL 042 VOLVO XC40 T4
IN EVO’S WORLD, THE performance SUV is an oxymoron. A car that weighs the wrong side of two thousand kilos, has a footprint on par with a limo’s and a centre of gravity closer to a minivan than an Elise’s is not a sports car in our eyes. No matter their supercar power outputs and Nürburgring lap times, SUVs masquerading as sports cars and claiming to be driver’s cars have never sat comfortably with us. Nor with you, which is why we’ve wound back the column inches given to such vehicles.
This may have you questioning why you are looking at an image of and have started reading the 1600 accompanying words describing a 2245kg, near five-metre-long vehicle that looks like and claims to be a performance SUV. A performance SUV by a manufacturer that also does a fine line in sports, GT and supercars, and on top of that is working on a new line-up of mid-engined supercars and a hypercar. A manufacturer that so happens to be one of the UK’s most famous sports car makers. So why are we here, in the heat of the Oman desert, driving Aston Martin’s first SUV? Because it could well be the first of its ilk to be genuinely considered a credible performance car. I know, that sentence took me by surprise, too.
This DBX isn’t a production car. Far from it. It is one of chief engineer Matt Becker’s 1PT (prototype one) vehicles and there are two further stages of development to go before the first production example – ‘job one’ – leaves Aston’s all-new production facility in St Athan, Wales, in April. This car is Becker’s Trojan DBX. When he finished this ten-day test cycle in Oman five days before Christmas, the car was then shipped to the Arctic Circle via Gaydon in January for its final round of cold weather testing. During those ten days in the Middle East, Becker would be evaluating the most technically advanced series production Aston Martin he or anyone associated with the company has worked on, sending live feedback and queries to his engineering team via their WhatsApp group.
Our time with the DBX and Becker is short, but like the contents of the half-dozen bags of Haribo stored in the glovebox, it’s rather sweet. Ahead is a 300km route of quick-flowing, well-surfaced roads and, as it transpires, quick-flowing gravel tracks that would rip the diffuser from an RS6.
The first part of our journey starts in the rear of the DBX, with Becker driving, and before we leave the hotel complex he’s already demonstrating the latest exhaust and engine pops and crackles. ‘I’m a child at heart,’ says Becker. ‘The day spent setting the pops and bangs was like standing at the pick-and-mix with an unlimited budget.’ He adds: ‘We’ve got some final calibration to do on the noise when you upshift. It needs to sound authentic.’ Today it sounds a little too AMG GT R Pro and not what you’d expect an Aston to sound like.
While the exhaust gases of the AMGsupplied 4-litre hot-V twin-turbo V8 resonate off the surrounding rock faces, the DBX serves up its first ace. Granted, it has no impact on the driving experience, but the rear-seat
comfort – space, headroom, visibility – puts every SUV bar a full-fat Range Rover to shame, but even the Solihull classic can’t match the DBX for hip-point comfort. You don’t sit with your knees up your nose, basically.
Thirty minutes later Becker has moved to the passenger seat and is running through some technical details as I get comfortable behind the wheel. The suspension hardware is to the final specification, but the settings for the air springs and dampers aren’t. ‘We flew a new suspension module out 24 hours ago but the software wouldn’t talk to the car, so we hope to run that tomorrow,’ he explains. ‘Today we’re running really close to where we want to be in terms of ride comfort and body control, but we still have some adjustment available within the bandwidth. It’s that range we’re working on. It’s more than fine-tuning, but the adjustments we’re making are very small, although you should be able to detect the difference on the final cars.’
The steering ratio is to production specification. It’s not as quick as a Porsche Cayenne’s, but it’s quicker than an Audi Q7/8 and Lamborghini Urus. ‘If the Cayenne is at one level and the Bentley Bentayga the other, we are somewhere in between,’ explains Becker. ‘I wanted a steering setup that was linear, so we have a lower steering ratio than the Porsche, but by using the systems available to us and tuning the four-wheel steering we’ve kept the linearity you’d expect from an Aston Martin and maintained the precision. With a car of this size that precision is key to make the driver feel comfortable using the performance.’
In developing the DBX, Aston Martin had no back catalogue to go on, although during his time at Lotus Becker had some experience via the consultancy arm of the firm. (‘But that was some time ago now!’) This meant starting from scratch and buying the biggest benchmark fleet in Aston’s history: ‘We’ve a BMW X6M, as the engine and gearbox characteristics were really good and the handling balance was perhaps the best we tried. The Cayenne [a previous-gen example] was a good all-rounder but not exciting enough, and I didn’t like the handling balance. Porsche made quite a few changes to the new car to rectify this. The Bentayga gave us the luxury benchmark and we used a Range Rover Sport SVR to benchmark against hard-point stiffness for road noise.’ You’ll notice there are no Mercedes-AMG SUVs on the list. ‘They were between model cycles,’ is all Becker will say.
This development car is running the larger optional 22-inch wheels and Pirelli Scorpion Zero all-season tyres. Heading out across Oman’s tarmac – beautifully smooth but under a layer of dust and sand that does nothing for grip levels – the DBX feels totally natural. It doesn’t feel like a Vantage, nor a DB11, rather a very well sorted car, and nothing like an SUV. There isn’t the disconnect between body and chassis that every other SUV suffers from, where despite the billions spent on developing their platforms they still feel like old-fashioned body-on-frame vehicles, especially when you begin using the performance they offer. The DBX, with its bespoke platform, is incredibly
It doesn’t feel like a Vantage, nor a DB11, rather a very well sorted car, and nothing like an SUV
fluid. Predictable. Natural. The only time you feel any deflection is when the Pirellis and air suspension are pushed close to their limits over surface imperfections. At the end of our first road section I make a telling note: ‘Feels more like an E63 and RS6 rival than a Cayenne and Q8 competitor.’
That linear steering Becker focused so much on pays dividends. Not only does it provide the DBX with an unexpected level of agility and rate of response, but it’s not at the cost of being hyper alert and sensitive to every grain of sand on the surface. It also masks the DBX’s considerable kerb weight, too. There’s work to be done on the steering feel, but on this experience it’s ahead of anything you will experience on any rival. ‘There are a few mechanical decisions we made, such as staggered tyre sizes front [285/40] and rear [325/35], that gave us what we were after,’ explains Becker, ‘but the electronic systems in this car have allowed us to develop it exactly how we needed it to be.’
The three-chamber air suspension system developed by Bilstein for Aston Martin is key to the body and chassis constantly working as one, while the ZF active anti-roll bars allow the same level of torque to be put through both front and rear where other systems have to reduce the rear load by as much as a third. Then there are the standard-fit P Zero tyres; Aston Martin pushed Pirelli’s development engineers until they provided near-Corsa levels of performance. And, like on a sports car, there are brakes you can modulate rather than activate and second guess at the retardation rate they’ll provide. All SUVs have gargantuan brakes and stop within impressively short distances, but few have any finesse engineered into the process.
Of course, being in an SUV, we are encouraged to head off-road, too. So we do, along gravel tracks rather than through bogs and up mountainsides where Defenders and G-Wagens hang out. And at 100kmph the DBX glides across the surface, sometimes requiring a little corrective lock as you go. And if this wasn’t a prototype that CEO Andy Palmer had written a seven-figure cheque of shareholders’ money to build, it feels like it could go much quicker on the rough stuff. Put it this way, I doubt a DBX will embarrass itself on a shoot in the countryside.
These attributes all combine to create an SUV that feels as much a genuine performance car as the best fast estate cars do. Unless something goes horribly wrong with the DBX’s final development between now and April, it will be the first and only performance SUV that lives up to such billing. ⌧