A Legitimately Super GT: 2024 Aston Martin DB12 First Drive Tells a Big Story for the Future

That's not to say Aston's quintessential gran turismo has gone soft. Far from it. Indeed, twist the rotary controller on the center console to select Sport+ mode and punch the button marked "manual" near the gear selector, and the DB12 effortlessly conquers your favorite driving road. It thrusts hard out of corners, compressing time and distance on the straights and changing direction through the twisties with sports-car alacrity.

Most remarkable is how you can drive the 2024 Aston Martin DB12 as hard as you dare, making the most of the massive traction, the engine's relentless top-end bite, and the brakes' implacable stopping power, and through it all the big Aston responds with a measured confidence and quiet assurance that feels luxurious. And at some point, whether you're crossing a continent or monstering a mountain road, you'll idly glance at the speedo and suddenly realize how deceptively fast the DB12 is.

The DB part of the DB12 name of course references David Brown, the British entrepreneur who bought Aston Martin in 1947 and kickstarted the production of the glamorous GT coupes and convertibles that would make the company famous. More than half a century after Brown was forced to sell the company, Aston Martin is again headed by an entrepreneur, this time Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who leads a consortium that owns almost 18 percent of the automaker and is its executive chairman.

An industrialist who trained as an apprentice in his family's machine-tool and gear-grinding business and who in the 1920s built his own 1.5-liter straight-eight twin-cam engine, Brown knew how things were made. Stroll's background is in fashion retailing; he knows how things are sold. And like Brown, Stroll has a clear point of view when it comes to the cars Aston Martin makes. "I am the customer," he's fond of saying in meetings with designers, engineers, and marketing execs at Aston headquarters in Gaydon, England.

The DB12 is thus very much Lawrence Stroll's car. It's the Aston Martin gran turismo he wants to drive. More important, he knows it's the Aston Martin gran turismo his wealthy friends will want to buy.

At first glance, the 2024 Aston Martin DB12 looks like a face-lift of the outgoing DB11 V8. But Aston says 80 percent of the car is new, and, as we pointed out in our first look story a few months back, the company spent a lot of money on the things it hasn't always executed well, most notably the interior and, in the digital age, the human/machine interface (HMI).

Indeed, the DB12 introduces an all-new HMI, with back-end software developed in-house, that will roll out across the entire Aston Martin range as it is renewed, refreshed, and expanded over the next two years. "Ownership of the HMI system allows us to control the size and number of screens," says Aston product and marketing strategy director Alex Long. More important, it also allows Aston to own valuable customer data.

Conceptually, there's nothing earth-shattering about this new HMI. You can switch the instrument display between two basic configurations; the central touchscreen can be set up to display tiles showing what's playing on the standard Bowers & Wilkins audio system; there's weather info and a navigation map with dynamic routing; the entire system accepts over-the-air updates. But this is all a massive improvement on anything Aston Martin has ever before offered.

It all works pretty smoothly, and the inclusion of physical buttons or controllers for functions such as climate control, audio volume, and seat settings reduces the hunting and pecking through onscreen menus. Some of the graphics on the instrument panel and the central touchscreen—both 10.25-inch ultra-black high-definition units—are a bit small and could be placed better. But four software upgrades are scheduled to fix such issues before the first DB12s are released to customers within a few months

"Preserve everything that was good about the DB11 but massively increase its dynamic capability." That, says Aston Martin vehicle performance director Simon Newton, was the essence of the engineering brief for the DB12. And ironically, it was the company's excellent DBX707 SUV that provided key insights for the new coupe's development roadmap.

With nearly 30 percent more power and a more dynamically assertive chassis than the base DBX, the DBX707 now accounts for 75 percent of total DBX sales worldwide, despite commanding a 27 percent higher price tag. More important, Long says, the DBX707 attracts a different kind of customer. "With the base DBX we were attracting Range Rover, Porsche Cayenne, and Bentley Bentayga V8 buyers," he reveals. "With the DBX707, we're in Lamborghini Urus territory." Long wants the DB12 to similarly appeal to customers who previously would not have considered an Aston Martin.

The engine was the starting point. "The DB11 V8 finished its life with 535 hp, and that's just not enough," Long says bluntly. The DB12 needed supercar muscle, he adds, a headline horsepower number that will get the attention of Ferrari and Bentley and Lamborghini buyers.

"We could have put the DBX707 engine in the car, but that wouldn't have been right," Newton says. That's because the 697-hp, 664-lb-ft Aston super-SUV engine's power and torque curves have been tuned to handle its extra mass, different gearing, and all-wheel-drive system. For the DB12, the versatile Mercedes-AMG-sourced V-8 received modified cam profiles and bigger turbos, along with compression changes, to enable it to develop 671 hp at 6,000 rpm and 590 lb-ft of torque between 2,750 rpm and 6,000 rpm.

Although the 2024 Aston Martin DB12 engine's peak power and torque outputs intersect at 6,000 rpm, just as they do in the DBX707's V-8, it all feels livelier, especially at the top end. There's a noticeable surge in thrust at around 3,000 rpm, and then the engine pulls like a train all the way to the 7,000-rpm redline. The 13 percent shorter final drive and snappier shift protocols programmed into the eight-speed ZF automatic transmission help make the DB12 feel an order of magnitude quicker and more responsive than the DB11 V8.

Newton says his brief for the DB12's driving dynamics was simple: "To be best in class." To give the revised suspension the best foundation to work with, the overall body structure stiffness increases by 7 percent, with the stiffness across the front strut towers upped by 140 percent, and additional strengthening added at the rear bulkhead and the rear floor. The shocks have 40 percent more damping range than those found on the DB11, and the spring rates increased by 5 percent. The front and rear anti-roll bars are also marginally stiffer.

The DB12 is the first car in the world to get a version of Michelin's new Pilot Sport 5S tire, and Newton's team spent a lot of time working with the French tiremaker's engineers to ensure it provides the precision and linearity they wanted in the steering feel. The tires also have a foam element inside designed to reduce tire noise on coarse tarmac, and Newton reversed a decision made by his predecessor to mount the DB12's rear subframe solidly to the body for the same reason.

The new DB12 also introduces a new stability control system that combines four intervention protocols—Wet, On, Track, and Off—with five overall drive modes including GT, Sport, Sport+, Individual, and Wet. The heart of the system is a new Bosch six-axis inertial-measurement unit that can build a real-time understanding of what the DB12 is doing and predict available grip levels. And because it allows more subtle powertrain and chassis adjustments to be made earlier in any given dynamic scenario, this reduces the number of times a driver will feel the interventions.

Even with the stability control switched off, the Aston's electronic brain is on standby to help: As in a GT3 race car, you may select from nine different levels of traction control. "It's not a gimmick," Newton says. "Even expert drivers use it."

GT is the default drive-mode setting and is calibrated to ensure good primary-ride quality for long-distance cruising, while Sport and Sport+ modes cinch down the body motions and sharpen the DB12's reflexes. GT is perfect for more than 90 percent of the DB12's duty cycle—the car still feels quick and alert, the eight-speed transmission shuffling rapidly down the ratios to ensure you're always in the correct gear even under light throttle. Yet it is always smooth and comfortable.

For our fast and flowing runs along the fabled Route Napoléon in the south of France, we settled on Individual mode, with the powertrain set to Sport+ to deliver maximum acceleration and the quickest manual-mode gearshifts, the suspension set to Sport to allow the car to breathe over the occasional heaves and humps in the road, and the steering set to Comfort to allow the lightest feel and the most precise control.

Despite being based heavily on the DB11, the DB12 feels "100 percent new," Newton claimed before our test drive, and it only took a few miles to conclude the Aston Martin dynamics chief wasn't just parroting a PR script. The DB12 feels almost as big a step change over the DB11 as the DB11 was over the old DB9.

For instance, the front axle responds obediently to steering inputs, and, with the standard e-diff helping to dampen the yaw rate, there's immediate support from the rear axle as the big Aston changes direction. Understeer is minimal, meaning you can go to power early, the e-diff playing with the torque flow to ensure immense traction as you exit a corner. The car's straight-line stability is superb, and the brakes are easy to modulate. The DB12 feels calm and coherent and controlled at any speed, which is exactly how you want a GT to feel.

The outgoing DB11 occupied a niche between the Ferrari Roma and the Bentley Continental GT V8. The DB12 blows right through the gap between its Italian and British rivals. It has more power than either, and when driven fast it feels lighter on its feet than the big Bentley and less manic than the racy Ferrari. It also has stunning presence, with an exterior that's more elegantly athletic than that of the Conti GT, and an interior that makes the Roma's look slightly utilitarian.

We said in our first look story that this Aston promised to be the most important new Aston Martin gran turismo since the DB7. After driving it, we must admit we called it wrong. This is the company's most important new offering since the DB5. The 2024 Aston Martin DB12 is a car that will define the Aston Martin brand in the 21st century as emphatically as the DB5 did in the 20th. Which is exactly what Stroll wants.