Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante

I’m sorry, but if I’m going to blow half a mill on a car I don’t want the inside to look like this.

Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante, $559,000

Of course I will go and see the new James Bond film, but I almost certainly won’t enjoy it. I haven’t really enjoyed any of them since Daniel Craig took over. I know he wants his Bond to be fallible, like the character in the books, but I don’t want to see 007 bleed, or fire his gun at something and miss. I want him to be Roger Moore, the cheeky chappie who could speak Latin, fly a space shuttle and lay anyone low with a karate chop. Craig’s Bond can’t do that.

In fact, he’s completely useless. In Casino Royale, he didn’t notice that the woman he’d fallen in love with was spying for the other side, and then, despite his best efforts, he let her drown in a lift. The next woman he lurved, in Skyfall, got shot in the head by a former colleague. In one scene, Bond was shot by Miss Moneypenny. I’m telling you, Johnny English is better at espionage than this guy.

But the worst bit in Skyfall came when the director, Sam Mendes, decided to blow up Bond’s Aston Martin. So he had it pumped full of bullets until it exploded. To some this was fine, because a car is just a collection of plastic and metal and glass. But a car is not just a collection of plastic and metal and glass. And Bond’s Aston is more of a car than most. It has been a part of my life since I was four. And Mendes blew it up so he could get Daniel Craig to do some acting.

I bet Aston Martin had a duck fit when it saw the DB5 reduced to a smouldering ruin, because Bond is its marketing department. He is its PR machine and its ad agency and its ambassador all rolled into one. Without 007, the company would have to maintain a public profile on its own. And it doesn’t have the cash for that.

I’m not sure it even had enough cash to develop the car you see before you today. It’s called – deep breath – the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante, and sometimes you get the impression that you’re tootling about in almost two tonnes of make-do and mend, with a bit of cast-off Mercedes tech to maintain a veneer of modernity.

To create it, Aston had to chop the roof off a normal DBS, but this meant finding somewhere to put the roof mechanism. That meant rerouting the massive exhaust system and that meant turning the fuel tank round and redesigning every body panel aft of the doors.

The company managed it, but sometimes the roof doesn’t go down when you operate the switch, the boot is laughably tiny, and it gets so hot in there (thanks to the exhaust system) that you could roast a chicken. There’s also a problem with the interior: it is almost identical to the interior you get in a far cheaper DB11 Volante. And that’s not good enough.

The basic starting price of the DBS Superleggera Volante is $559,000 and, I’m sorry, but if I’m going to blow half a mill on a car I don’t want it to have the same innards as a car that costs about $160,000 less. The trouble is, of course, that when you’ve spent all that money turning the fuel tank round, there simply won’t be enough left to do the air vents as well. Or fit a glovebox.

It sounds like I have a real downer on this car, and I haven’t finished yet, I’m afraid. Because superleggera is Italian for “super-light”, and it just isn’t. With a couple of people on board, it weighs more than two tonnes. That’s why it endlessly catches its chin-mounted skid plates on speed humps. And why its tyres are so thin you need to be very careful when you’re parking or you’ll kerb the wheels.

You can feel this weight when you’re driving, too. It certainly doesn’t come across as a feisty little whizz-bang. But that said, it’s fast. Rocket-ship fast. It’s almost too fast, because on wet roads you would be well advised to treat the throttle with extreme caution or you will have a crash. You even need to be careful sometimes on dry roads.

And that raises a question. If you can’t unleash all the volcanic fury without the back end having a few moments of panic, then why not save yourself $160,000 and get the DB11 Volante instead? Because you can exploit all the power in one of those, all of the time. And it has the same interior. And it’s a little bit more civilised and comfortable. The DB11 Volante, in fact, is brilliant. That sort of car at that sort of price? Nobody does it better.

Aston Martin DBS Superleggera Volante

Engine: 5.2-litre turbo-petrol V12 (533kW/900Nm)

Average fuel 14.0 litres per 100km

Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive

Price: $559,000

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars