Aston Martin DBX
Can a performance SUV ever justify its billing? A drive of Aston Martin’s DBX prototype suggests this one could
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 a par with a limo’s and a centre of gravity that’s closer to a Transit’s 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 which claim 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 that’s being built 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 midengined 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