Our Cars: Aston Martin DB12 S

There’s the Aston Martin I read about in the financial press: this is a company with almost more CEOs than we’ve had Prime Ministers in recent years, all with a vision to right the ship, but so far without the results its fans, customers and shareholders have been looking for. Instead, they read stories of spiralling debt, re-financing, shares but a fraction of what they were worth at the time of the disastrous 2018 IPO while vast OEMs circle like vultures, waiting for the moment to swoop.

And then there’s the Aston Martin that makes this DB12 S. And the Vantage, Vanquish, DBX and Valhalla. I’m not going to dwell on them all because that is not the purpose of this story, but as someone who has driven at least one (and usually more) version of every major Aston Martin model produced since the DB2 went into production in 1950 with the sole exception of the 1970s Lagonda, I can tell you this: Aston Martin has never made better cars than it does right now. Every time I think of how stark is the contrast between the products it makes and the resources it has relative to rivals like Bentley with all the unimaginable financial and technological reserves of the Volkswagen Group behind it, not to mention the supply chain clout, I goggle anew. When I say I don’t know how they do it, I mean that in the most literal sense.

Take this DB12 S, which has just arrived for an extended stay. I have a friend who, shall we say, has a broad and deep knowledge of the modern cars that populate the supercar and GT space and was leant a non-S DB12 by a garage servicing one of his cars. A discerning cove to put it mildly, he couldn’t believe how good it was.

What I don’t know however, and what the next few months will be about, is how enduring those talents are? It turned up in the middle of one of myriad heatwaves, resplendent in Q Ion Blue paint, nicely run in but no more and without a mark on its gleaming flanks. All very lovely I am sure you will agree. But what will it be like six months from now, with quite a few thousand additional miles on the clock, when its eye-popping beauty is dulled not merely by the road grime it’s going to accumulate, but simply by the novelty of seeing it there has worn off?

I’ve only ever lived with one Aston Martin before, and that was a 1958 DB2/4 MkIII I owned 30 years ago and gorgeous though it was, its desperate unreliability was not a good advertisement for long-term tenure. When I could no longer afford the bills, I sold it to a lovely German chap who tried to drive it back home from my cottage in Wales and rang that evening chortling because he’d blown the engine to bits trying to see if it would do 200km/h on the autobahn which, I am proud to say, is precisely what it was doing when the motor decided to dismantle itself.

“You do approach these cars in a distinctly different way when it’s parked outside your house and likely to be around for at least a few months”

For now, however, all I can do is judge here today. To me it is the prettiest of all modern Aston Martins and I’ll say also I think there are few prettier in a company’s history more than usually blessed with gorgeous machines. A Series II DB4 before they changed the rear lights perhaps, Ian Callum’s Vanquish for sure but not many others.

This is a car I have already fully evaluated on road, so I’m not going to relitigate those arguments, not least because I’ve only driven it a few miles so far, but you do approach these cars in a distinctly different way when it’s parked outside your house and likely to be around for at least a few months compared to how you think about it on a launch when you tend to pile in and set off because you want as much wheel time as humanly possible.

So, I pored all over its bodywork and wheels and only spotted the tiny blemishes in the protection film because the chap who dropped it off was kind enough to point them out. Living down here in the wilds of the Wye Valley there’ll doubtless be a few more before it leaves, but that’s what paint protection film (PPF) is for.

“A titanium exhaust will save a few pounds and probably sound even more cool, allowing you to choose whether to have 4-litres of twin-turbo V8 pleasuring your ears or your upgraded Bowers & Wilkins audio system”

A game I like to play is to guess what bits of kit are standard, and which would cost an owner money and, of course, how much money. And with cars with price tags well into six figures, the trick, counter-intuitive as it may sound, is to expect, is to expect a car to have less, rather than more equipment included within its already eye-watering base price.

In the Aston’s case almost all the gadgetry – the seat heaters and coolers, CarPlay Ultra (in which CarPlay is fully integrated into the car’s systems rather than a standalone add on) and so on are, in fact standard. So, you get a well-equipped car for your, wait for it, £205,000 basic price. And so, you might rightly say, you should. But let’s say you want to prettify it even more with some carbon bits. So you add lower and upper body packages in gloss black tinted twill carbon, and a carbon roof. Inside you go for the interior carbon pack and add satin carbon fibre for the instrument pack inlay as well as a dark satin chrome interior pack. You want some tastefully wacky upholstery so that’s the tri-tone leather for you and for your seatbacks to match your door inserts because why wouldn’t you?

Heading back outside again you choose the option ‘Evo’ wheel even though it is the same size as the standard 21in rim and must of course match the colour of your brake calipers to your paintwork.

Now the thing is, I don’t know what any individual one of these options cost, because Aston Martin won’t share them with me, but I can tell you they all add up to an additional £85,000, a sum of money that would have bought an entire Aston Martin Vantage 20 years ago, and with a few quid left too. Or a Lotus Emira today…

It probably says more about me and how far from the Aston Martin target market I am but I rarely get pleasure from most of the options fitted to cars that come here for long-term assessment because I am so much more interested in the engineering than the addenda, but even I will concede the carbon roof and multi-coloured interior really do lift the car’s appearance, and the paint is gorgeous. But I’d rather a standard wheel rim, care not about caliper colour and could survive perfectly well without the rest of the carbon.

I’d need to listen to the standard audio to judge whether the upgrade was worth it – the system in the car is good but hardly exceptional – and the same with the titanium pipes. So and at a guess I could probably shave at least £40,000 off the bill, though that would still leave me trying to find a quarter of a million pounds down the back of the sofa.

Early impressions back up those found on the launch, which is not always the case. Well do I remember back in 2003 attending the launch of the DB9, not far at all from where we drove the DB12 S in the south of France, and thinking one thing about it, only for the car to come over here and for those who drove it on home territory thinking something rather different. Though whether that was down to the unique challenges of British road surfaces, rumoured far-from-standard dampers on the original launch cars, or some combination of the two, I cannot say.

What I can say is that it rides exceptionally. You might even say unreasonably well, for the kind of car that it is. And that its very trick, but entirely standard Bilstein DTX adaptive dampers are doing a magnificent job. But it does feel big, quite vast in fact on the little lanes around where I live, let alone on my drive. It might be a small observation, but in a story like this rather than a road test, it is important.

Were I in the market for such a car, the absolute certainty that sooner or later I would accidentally graze one or more of those alloys, up against a bit of granite in a hedgerow, or glance one off upon a piece of dislodged rock would certainly count among the reasons not to buy the car.

As it is, if it gets back to Gaydon in six months time with those huge wheels still unmolested, it will be a minor miracle. But all that’s for later. Right now I’m looking forward to settling in and starting to really live with the car. Not blasting it across deserted moorland, as we like to portray such machines in our imagery, but slogging up to Heathrow, which is in fact how I spend most of my time on the road these days.

A real world test, in other words. And one it must pass, if the promise of those sublime looks and all that power are to prove more than transiently meaningful