2023 Aston Martin DBX707 PVOTY Review: Big Dog Runs With Big Dogs

The 2023 Aston Martin DBX707 accomplished the near impossible by eliciting feelings of happiness and joy from nearly all our judges. This is no easy task, we assure you. Unanimity is the rarest of occurrences at MotorTrend (we can't even agree on where shift paddles should be mounted—wheel or steering column?), so getting six of seven judges to feel roughly the same about any vehicle is an accomplishment in and of itself. The 2023 season just turned out to be one of those embarrassment-of-riches years, where we could only bring along so many finalists. To put it into tournament poker terms, the DBX707 bubbled.  Had we selected a 10th finalist, this Aston SUV would have been it.

We love the output available here. Displacing just 4.0 liters and fed by two turbochargers, the AMG-sourced, Aston-tuned V-8 kicks out 697 hp and 663 lb-ft of torque. That's more power than anything present save for the AMG EQS and the McLaren 765LT Spider. Hell, yeah. The torque curve is Oklahoma flat, and as such, this engine pulls all the way to the we-wish-it-were-a-tick-higher redline. Our kingdom for 7,500 rpm. Still, the mighty mill works flawlessly with the AMG-sourced nine-speed wet-clutch transmission. Oh, did we mention the sound? We love how it growls.

More 2023 PVOTY: Winner | Finalists | Contenders

The judging team thought the DBX707 was noticeably drive-mode dependent. "Sport is the correct mode for track driving," features editor Scott Evans said. "Sport Plus is super-fun drift mode. It's great sliding this thing around, but you're much slower through every single corner because you're always managing the rear end with the throttle. In Sport mode the power going to the front makes the car much more neutral and much better at going around a track quickly." Yes, friends, if you're willing/skilled enough, the 5,124-pound SUV will drift. Mind your tires, though. As we previously noted in our recent comparison test against the Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT, the DBX707 could use a set of more aggressive tires.

There's also a difficult-to-categorize, difficult-to-put-your-finger-on specialness to the DBX707. Call it an elusive X-factor; we just like it. "The Aston is super cool," executive editor Mac Morrison said. Editorial operations boss Mike Floyd noted the "raging baritone of this monster SUV is pretty darn special." Mexico editor Miguel Cortina simply said, "This is a great, great-driving SUV." I, too, thought it was great, and Evans liked it even more: "This thing absolutely lives up to the hype. It's the best performance SUV I've ever driven." That's some high praise. So what's the downside? 

Technical director and Old Man Buzzkill himself Frank Markus popped in with a big, icy-cold bucket of reality: "Fun to drive, but I end up asking myself, does the world really need a car that is this powerful and sits this high? I suppose buyers will answer that question, but I don't think its performance is spectacular enough to beat the many proper low-slung performance vehicles we've gathered here." Yeah, OK, fine, we feel that. The DBX707 is sublime as far as performance SUVs go, and most of us were having too much fun to care about the body type, but in the end, it is "just" an SUV.