By Mike Duff / Wednesday, June 12, 2024 / Loading Comments
SUVs with premium functionality get a lot of criticism, and any PH reviews are likely to get criticism in the comments. Still, there are some things that those stylish and well-loved truckers are smart about. Aston’s invitation to drive the slightly revised DBX707 It involved picking it up at the company’s headquarters in Gaydon and delivering it to central Edinburgh later that day – a 350-mile adventure that reconnected with its key talents.
The most important is the long-legged driving capability that arises from the combination of effortless functionality and a flexible chassis. The evolution that led to the more powerful variant of the 707, which will be the only DBX in the long run, didn’t get things done. difficult. Low-speed ride quality over urban bumps is a little more advantageous than in the stock version, which isn’t unexpected given the 22-inch wheels of the control car, but even in its elevated form, the DBX is still a car. able to reduce in a long journey. better than almost everything else. Only the 98-octane thirst of the 4. 0-litre AMG V8 and the corresponding desire to briefly escape the intimate embrace of the sports seats prevented a continuous race north.
This is a quality that Aston’s inferior and more classic Grand Tourers have, of course, possessed for a long time. But in fact, there’s something about the ting above and above the fray that relaxes things even more, especially when it comes to more intermittent traffic on the M6 north of Birmingham. If there’s a better way to get out of a bind, I find it hard to think about.
But the DBX707’s other superpower is less well known and only appeared after it left the motorway and crossed the Scottish borders. Normally, you would take the A701 from Moffat to Edinburgh Broughton, one of the most beautiful roads in the world. But for the DBX707, I combined it with a long journey that started on the A708 from Moffat to St. Petersburg. John’s. Mary’s Loch. Il is another spectacular stretch of asphalt, but also very bumpy, with the first dozens of miles a brutal suspension compliance check over wild ridges and valleys. I know from experience that anything short and sporty is vulnerable to snagging and crashing if driven at a speed that isn’t very cautious.
But the DBX707 is almost insensitive to topography. Its combination of generous wheel travel, comfortable air springs, and comfortable adaptive dampers made it possible to get in the car on the roller coaster without breaking a sweat. This is a car that doesn’t try to fight on a road, but rolls with its punches. – but not in its corners. The 48-volt anti-roll formula is another kind of black magic, minimizing frame tilt even as the suspension struggles with ups and downs. The forces involved will have to be huge, according to Aston’s figures. the DBX707 weighs as much as two MX-5s, but it makes it seem like everything is a lot less difficult than it probably is.
In the smoother GT mode, there’s a little extra movement to feel it at top speeds. This is not a lack of discipline, but rather the feeling that the DBX707’s frame continues to move for a longer period of time than strictly necessary from an inception or even from a comfort standpoint. But putting the adaptive dampers in Sport mode slows it down more without making it difficult, even when digesting nutrition made up entirely of forage. Few DBX707 buyers are likely to throw their car on a sand dune or a Baja trail, even though the anti-gravity print is reminiscent of the Ford F-150 Raptor R I drove in United States last year.
I’ve never ridden a pre-facelift DBX707 on the A708, but I’m sure it would have looked more or less the same. That’s because the mechanical tweaks are less than Rishi Sunak’s chances of popping champagne corks on election night. In record mode, the guide calibration is now lighter in GT mode, the exhaust sound has been revised to give a more muscular noise when delivering maximum torque at low revs, and the active systems have been tuned, specifically to make the intervention earlier. and more subtly. .
But the fundamental experience remains fundamentally unchanged. The V8 sounds wild and angry when extended, moody, and rich in low-intensity bass. Torque is huge across the board, with more than enough to make up for the occasional hesitation at the start as the gearbox tries to determine which of its nine gears to choose. There is also a very slight feeling of overvoltage when moving away from rest, probably caused by the car’s use of AMG’s rain clutch formula instead of the torque converter of the removed model. But the fundamentals are still relevant, with the exact steering, strong grip and incredibly solid feel at top speeds of the DBX707. The gigantic carbon ceramic brakes, as standard, bite hard and are easy to modulate. Yes, the DBX habit is clearly explained largely by its length and weight, especially when introduced into tighter turns. But despite the all-wheel drive, the balance of handling can still be reversed with the throttle. He is a playful elephant.
So, with more than one part of the review covering what hasn’t changed, you’ll probably turn to what Aston spent its progression money on: the DBX707’s new interior. When Chief Lawrence Stroll spoke to reporters earlier this year, he admitted that the outgoing DBX cockpit, and specifically its bulky and replaced UI formula, was the leading cause of court cases from buyers and (more importantly) potential buyers. That’s why a lot of effort has been put into translating it into the new Aston Martin UX formula that we’ve already noticed on the DB12 and Vantage.
And it’s not really just a stuck touchscreen. The DBX was completely dismantled with a completely new dashboard – a prime investment for a four-year-old car. The basics are very similar to the design of a sports car, with necessarily the same center. Geared console flanking a new chunky gear selector that replaces the old P/R/N/D buttons on the outgoing car, plus a rotary unit. Mode selector with integrated stop/start button. In front of them is a wireless charger, with a 10. 2-inch touchscreen in the center of the dashboard.
Well, it’s not really “applauded” territory in terms of state-of-the-art automotive technology, especially considering the number of brands that now offer wall-to-wall high-definition displays. The DBX707 has physical curler controls for heating and fan speed. and volume, a touch zone for seat heating and ventilation, and shortcut buttons to adjust damper stiffness and exhaust mode separately from dynamic modes. Less clever is the glossy black end of plastics, which happens to be all the rage at the moment, but will soon be covered in fingerprints unless you’re driving around with gloves.
The touchscreen has a giant binnacle and is tilted at an indirect angle, meaning it suffers from a reflected image when sunlight hits it from certain directions. The UX Formula runs Aston’s own Unix-based operating formula, which provides the basics in a professional manner. There are some shortcut icons on one side, but navigating other apps means jumping in and out of the home screen; a little confusing when switching between CarPlay and anything else. My 15-year-old daughter, a gourmet of those things, thought it looked and performed much better than the clunky PCM formula in our 2009 Cayman, but it wasn’t as slick as the one in the 2020 Skoda Superb family, if that helps. . to position it in the UX verse. But compared to the old Merc formula of the first DBX, with its clumsily spinning and clicking wheel, it seems from another century. In short, the revised DBX707 made progress in one key domain and remained almost exactly the same in each and every other domain. Actually, that was all there was to it.
Engine: 3,982cc V8, twin-turbo Gearbox: Nine-speed automatic, rain clutch Power: 707 hp at 6,000 rpm Torque: 663 lb-ft at 4,500 rpm0 at one hundred km/h: 3. 1 s Top speed: three hundred km/h (limited)Curb weight: 2,245 kgMPG: 19. 9CO2: 323 g/kmPrice: £205,000