300 miles by DBX
Aston’s SUV: the verdict
AMG’s eight is a brawny, raucous cad of a motor
Moment of clarity number one: if you were asked to create a luxury SUV that drove with the alacrity the Aston Martin name demands, you might seek to pull together a team and a parts toolkit not dissimilar to those behind this car, the most important Aston in the marque’s history.
The pandemic torpedoed Aston’s original DBX launch plans (set for the perfect light and wide open spaces of California), leaving ever so slightly less exotic Silverstone to host our first meeting with the car in finished, production-ready guise. Aston has an engineering centre on the Stowe circuit, nestled within the flat-out curves of the Grand Prix track, and I get a guided tour with chief vehicle attribute engineer Matt Becker. We head past banks of studious engineers at their desks, up the complex’s airfield-style control tower – ‘Imagine a couple of deck chairs on the roof for the British Grand Prix…’ – and on into the bustling pit-garage-style workshops.
We pause in the last of these garages, its space filled with dampers hung like Spanish hams and, between them, the equipment to strip and rebuild them. It’s here, where the DBX’s enormous air-sprung shocks dwarf those of the Aston sports car hung nearby, that the enormity of the project – ‘New platform, new factory, new everything,’ says Becker – becomes abundantly clear, as does Aston’s exciting combination of big OEM backing and passionate, small-volume agility.
Even my dog is well aware that Aston’s future depends on the success of this, its first SUV, but ponder for a moment all the really good stuff that’s gone into the DBX and you can’t help but feel optimistic – and a little sad that former CEO Andy Palmer, whose baby the DBX is, has left the building.
First up, the platform. Bespoke to the DBX, it is wrought in Aston’s beloved aluminium. It is also rigid, relatively light (the car’s kerb weight is 2245kg) and thrusts its vast wheels out to each corner in search of fine dynamics and handsome proportions. Now, dream powertrain? A twin-turbo, 4.0-litre AMG V8 of course, because Aston Martins demand special engines and AMG’s eight is a brawny, raucous, head-banging cad of a motor. For the rest of your all-important oily bits, how about a cherry-picked edit of big-ticket OEM stuff (the active centre transfer case, for example – to which Aston hooks up a carbonfibre propshaft! – is borrowed from the AMG E63 S courtesy of Aston’s Stuttgart connection; the electronics architecture and the infotainment also Mercedes-based) and the very best stuff from tier one suppliers, like ZF’s silken nine-speeder and roll-crushing electronic anti-roll bars?
Promising? You bet, but consider also that Aston’s cars, led by hands-on new CEO Tobias Moers, are engineered and calibrated by a motivated, empowered nucleus of talent pulling stuff apart in pit garages (in Northamptonshire, at the Nürburgring and elsewhere), driving constantly and endlessly tweaking its way toward brilliance. Because as good as your parts may be, they’re nothing without the right set-up and sign-off. ⊲
The DBX is a mighty GT when you want easy speed and absolute, hushed comfort
And so, with the DBX, you get stories of super-early prototypes being driven around a mocked-up toy town of junctions, mini-roundabouts and tra c lights on the St Athan site that would later house the DBX factory, to check the usability of the package; its sight lines and so on. (That work’s paid dividends – this vast SUV is as easy to place on the road as a Golf.) You also catch issues that could have damaged the car’s chances of success. For instance, when CAR drove a DBX prototype in Oman, the front suspension behaviour dented confidence on turn-in. Says Becker with disarming honesty: ‘We had two issues; too much compression damping, so the car was sitting nose-high, and an anomaly in the anti-roll control software, which hadn’t shown up in earlier tests but that became apparent as we got into that phase of pre-production testing.’ All the right parts, brought together by a team with the ambition and agility to push for perfection – this could be good.
Moment of clarity number two, five o’clock in the morning: the DBX is a mighty GT. When it’s so early it hurts and you need to do a two-and-a-half-hour journey in two hours, with scarcely any effort, you want easy speed and absolute, hushed comfort.
At the wheel of the Aston, blood-red sun rising in my mirrors, life is easy. The seat and driving position are almost as comfortable as my bed, and with a good deal more lateral support. Interior space is generous in the extreme – six-foot-tall second-rowers can sit comfortably behind six-foot-tall front-seat occupants. The quality of finish, from the brogued leatherwork to Aston’s new infotainment screen and steering wheel, is a cut or two above the Vantage and DB11. On the move, road noise – given that all DBXs roll on 22s – is well suppressed, the cabin eerily quiet apart from the whisper of wind around the wing mirrors and, under acceleration, the baritone efforts of the V8.
Miles simply melt. On a motorcycle magazine I once tried to prove there was no point buying a powerful superbike, my hypothesis being that, with tra c and speed limits, average journey times were barely affected by power. That, it turned out, was nonsense. Our Honda Fireblade (170bhp, less than 2.8sec 0-62mph, 185mph where, er, conditions permitted) stole an advantage over the lesser machinery absolutely everywhere; away from every junction, with every opportunistic overtake, out of every roundabout. The DBX does the same, your ETA on Waze (via CarPlay) tumbling as the car’s ample power, unreal corner speeds and mighty brakes do their thing.
This early stint is a journey of two halves, and after the good stuff comes the dual carriageway. The Mercedes electronics deployed here (a generation ahead of the gear in the DB11, but one behind Merc’s new MBUX stu¡) give the DBX tech such as adaptive cruise, autonomous emergency brake assist and, on the infotainment side, a bigger screen and Apple CarPlay connectivity. Adaptive cruise is handy (the little DB5 icons that flash up when you’re adjusting the gap to the car in front are a lovely touch), though lane-keep assist and lane departure warning don’t seem keen to help, and CarPlay is great news, even if the DBX’s main screen – which looks for all the world like a touchscreen – isn’t actually touch sensitive, meaning you must spin the rotary controller to navigate your way around CarPlay’s home screen. Nevertheless, as a car in which to simply dispense with journeys you’d really rather not be doing, the DBX is right up there, its sheer proficiency working with its undeniable charm (that engine; lovely interior, complete with brilliant pre-facelift Tesla Model S-style stuff space beneath the centre console; that badge) to make hundreds of pre-dawn miles entirely palatable.
Moment of clarity number three, in the Peak District: this is an off-road Aston (if you’re brave enough).
‘I’m guessing that if you’re taking that down there, the car isn’t yours… ?’ Spot on. Some 24 hours after taking ownership of ‘my’ DBX at Silverstone, we’re high in the Peaks, mixing it with the off-road motorbikes riding the trails that criss-cross the area’s very physical geography. Between the fast-moving clouds, patches of July sun streak across vast open hillsides, dense forests of light-blotting pine and steep-sided valleys so quiet that, engine off, you can hear the trickle of streams and ramblers’ hushed conversation.
Where we head off single-track tarmac and onto a forestry trail, some riders are taking a breather. Like everyone we’ve met so far they can’t disguise their fondness for Aston’s new SUV. (I sold the car the first time within moments of leaving Silverstone, to a gobsmacked BMW M5 Competition driver who just wanted to know how soon he could place an order.) As they look on, the DBX rises on its five-position air suspension and takes to the track like a (very large) duck to water. Ride ⊲
height is linked to drive mode, selected via up and down arrows on the centre console: push up to lift the car 20mm from default GT to Terrain, and up again for another 25mm to Terrain Plus; prod down to drop 15mm to Sport, down again to drop a further 15mm to Sport Plus. A mix-and-match Individual mode lurks between GT and Sport and, as with the Bentayga, switching drive modes does more than simply tweak the ride height and the stiffness of the anti-roll control, with the latter also tweaking the roll centres in the sportier modes for a keener, more tail-happy attitude in Sport Plus, for example, than you’ll find in easygoing GT.
My timid, low-speed off-road approach lasts all of 30 seconds. As on the road, the DBX’s high driving position and slim pillars make for excellent visibility, while the keen, direct steering (2.6 turns lock to lock) and rear-biased powertrain build driver confidence fast. The Aston relishes a bit of speed, rumbling over the rough ground and keying into turns with a keen nose. We pass a bemused excavator driver preparing the track for logging and manage a cheeky slide or two before hitting a series of steep climbs and descents – until now, we haven’t tackled anything you couldn’t in a DB11. Even on the steepest climb the DBX doesn’t flinch, powering up on a surge of easy traction and even easier torque, before hill descent control sees us safely back down the other side, the system selectively pinching brakes as it works to keep our speed at a walking pace, rather than the runaway train physics would suggest.
With a final flurry of flung mud (and an audible sigh of relief from Gaydon), the DBX pushes up one last fern-fringed climb to return to the tarmac, undamaged and irrepressible. And so to the fourth and final DBX moment of clarity, on one of those cross-country Peak District B-roads that makes you wish the World Rally Championship came here.
The first two or three corners, as the road twists back on itself to drop down a hillside in a flurry of tight, second-gear hairpins, don’t do the DBX any favours. I know from yesterday’s track laps that the Aston doesn’t easily wash into understeer but it does so here, my greedy speed and the sheer mass to be rotated conspiring to check my ambition and suggest a different approach.
But then the going opens up a little, the quicker corners punctuated by straights that never manage to ever actually run straight. In Sport Plus, working the column-mounted shift paddles manually (gears five to nine are there to tame the V8’s thirst; third and fourth will see you convincingly through almost every kind of corner), the Aston is simply breathtaking. The DBS is agile, able to hoard scarcely believable corner speed and, via the steering, the drive-shuing transfer case and active rear e-diff, capable of gliding through corners hard and fast and with an entirely unexpected tactility and interactivity, your right foot – working first the brakes and then the throttle – as involved as your hands, your brain and backside. Fun? Oh yes. Convincing as an Aston? More so than some of its predecessors, assisted of course by hardware they could only dream of.
No, ultimately, if Aston Martin joins the list of car makers who shone brightly in the automobile’s first century but couldn’t adapt to the challenges of its second, it won’t be because the DBX wasn’t good enough.