ASTON MARTIN DBX 707

Thorough engine and chassis upgrades make a fine SUV even more accomplished

- RICHARD LANE

This will sound like tone-deaf blasphemy but the towering, 2.2-tonne DBX 707 is the best car Aston Martin makes. Aston clearly knows this, and wants us to know it, too, which is why our first taste of this 697bhp crossover on British roads follows a substantial test in Sardinia and, before that, a Pirelli-smoking go behind the wheel of a validation prototype at Aston’s Stowe Circuit test track at Silverstone. In general, you don’t trail a duffer this assiduously.

Bluntly, neither can the 707 afford to be anything of that sort. Despite the £190,000 asking price, £18,000 more than the regular model, Aston hopes the car will make up as much as half of DBX sales. And because the DBX already accounts for roughly half of Aston’s total annual sales, the fiscal benefits of the 707 being not just good but brilliant – and an unambiguous sales success – are clear. Especially when you’re in quite a bit of debt.

But the car itself. Whether or not the beefed-up, hunkered-down aesthetic appeals to you will be personal, but in objective terms, the more you learn about the 707, the more reasonable the £18,000 premium seems. Perversely, the 707 even starts to look good value compared with the base DBX, because the changes Aston has made are not simply of a magnitude to what, say, Porsche achieves when it converts 911 GT3 into GT3 RS, but closer to what it achieves when transforming garden 911 Carrera into diamond-edged 911 GT3.