Aston Martin DBX

The SUV drops by its birthplace on a revealing drive to Wales

AMONG THE MANY ACCESSORIES offered for the DBX, you can get a roof-mounted bike rack. Why? First, there’s the aerodynamic drag. Second, if you’re less than 6ft you’ll need to carry your own steps, but trumping them both is the thought of losing hold of a muddy bike and it clattering down the side of your near-£200k car, metal pedals sticking out…

It’s a tow-bar-mounted bike rack for me every time. This requires a tow bar, of course. Our DBX had the coupling and the electrics socket but the actual tow bar was absent. Editor Gallagher discovered this when I asked to borrow the Aston for a mountain bike trip to the Afan Forest in south Wales, a trip that would take us irresistibly close to Aston Martin’s St Athan factory, the DBX’S birthplace (pictured above).

With the requisite tow bar bits acquired and fitted, and three bikes secured on the brilliant Thule rack I’ve had for 15 years, I had a couple of days to get to know the DBX better. It’s a bigger car than the pictures suggest, as I discovered at evo Car of the Year last year. When it’s not competing with conventional sports cars, you can better appreciate what a dynamic achievement it is. It feels like the DBX has been optimised for the scenarios that matter most, so while the ride can be busy at low speeds, at 50-60mph it’s remarkably good.

What really blew my socks off, though, was how astonishingly good it was down the kind of road on which you’d exercise a hot hatch. It’s not just that the air-sprung suspension and active anti-roll bars control the DBX’S considerable mass brilliantly, making some bumps disappear entirely, it’s that the steering is connected and precise while the DBX is stringing corners together with brilliant fluency and its twin-turbo V8 roars. Remarkable.

As we closed in on our Welsh hotel in the DBX, the roads got interesting. I guided the DBX into the bends calmly, knowing that it had the grip and precision to stay in its lane. At the hotel, the mate following in his Audi S5 said, ‘It made it look so easy I nearly crashed trying to keep up!’ It was a decadent way of getting three bikes and three blokes to Wales but first class travel is rarely cheap.

Date acquired April 2021 Total mileage 9189 Mileage this month 1466 Costs this month £0 mpg this month 16.9