Aston Martin DBX707 review: It’s so loud and confronting, it’s like driving Anthony Mundine
The DBX707 is so loud and confronting, it’s like driving Anthony Mundine.
In terms of excitement levels, telling me that a vehicle is the World’s Fastest SUV is right up there with asking me to thrill to the notion of the World’s Least Awful Cruise Ship, the Most Capacious Bus Ever or Keith Urban’s Best Album.
That might seem weird, or unfair, because I am undeniably a fan of fast vehicles, and driving them, but I do struggle to get my head around the idea that giant Utility Vehicles need to be Sporty, or even supercar fast – which the Aston Martin DBX707 definitely is, with a 0 to 100km/h sprint of just 3.3 seconds – because it seems akin to buying an elephant that can out-gallop a horse. (Elephants, of course, are majestic creatures and have a kind of inherent, if somewhat wrinkly beauty to them, while SUVs are, almost without exception, fat and ugly.)
Aston Martin has always built truly beautiful cars – and I mean so attractive that you’d buy one regardless of whether it’s good to drive, or mechanically reliable – but even its very talented designers couldn’t squeeze the DBX into a sinuous, svelte or sexy shape.
This 707 version (named after a passenger jet?) is admittedly butchly bold to look at front-on, because from that angle it looks like an Aston Martin car that’s puffing out its chest and making itself look tall – like an elephant under threat – but take a walk to the rear and you can see just how difficult SUVs are to design.
The back view has so much going on that it’s like the car-design version of a platypus in a top hat, although mine was made to look less woeful by distractingly brilliant blue metallic paint. Now, blue is my colour and in the past I may have mistakenly said you can never have too much of it (I once painted my entire bedroom the colour of the American Express logo), but this DBX707 disproved that theory.
Its interior had so much blue on bright blue that I assumed it had been commissioned by the Blue Man Group, or Neptune. It made some passengers bilious, but what drove me bonkers was the non-touch-screen. Finding this kind of technology in a modern car –which means you have to spin a little mouse wheel to move a cursor around your Apple CarPlay – is staggering, particularly when that car costs $428,400. (Worse still, it’s clearly a system lifted from a generation-old Mercedes-Benz.) Truly, the user experience is like going back to the days of television before the invention of the remote control, although more dangerous, because your TV was never moving at 80km/h towards solid objects.
Perhaps because the space for a gear shifter has been taken up by the fiddlesticks mouse thing, Aston insists on putting buttons for Drive and Reverse up on the top of the dash, causing you to flail about while reverse parking like an old man hailing a bus.
Fortunately, I found another button that put the DBX707 into Sport+ mode and that made me howl so hard that I forgot all my complaints. While I knew, on paper, how fast this Aston Martin must be, I was still genuinely shocked and awed by its lurid levels of thrust. Its 4.0-litre, twin-turbo V8 attempts to send 520kW and 900Nm (a significant lift of 115kW and 200Nm from a normal DBX) to all four tyres via the hardest-working traction-control software in showbiz.
It is so fast that I actually believe the claimed top speed of 310km/h would be achievable. And while producing its prodigious thrust, it makes gloriously old-school (and very Aston Martin) howls, growls and roars. That vast max power figure is achieved at an exciting 6000rpm, by which point you’re going to be approaching take-off speeds. In Sport+ in particular, the settings for the throttle, gearbox, suspension and exhaust are so loud and confronting that it’s like driving Anthony Mundine.
I loved it, I must admit, but what really surprised me was how much I liked driving it around corners. Obviously, it was always going to be great in a straight line, but it also provides the kind of connection to the road, the muscular but sharp steering and the lack of body roll that you’d expect to find on an actual sports car, not an SUV. Indeed, I’d say it’s the best steering on any Aston Martin, ever.
When this mad 707 variant was unveiled in Australia, Aston Martin chose to launch it at a very fast race track, which sounded like a truly awful day out to me, so I sent a colleague to do it instead. I now realise this was a terrible mistake, because this DBX is so fast and racy that a track might well be the only place to properly appreciate it. And no, I can’t believe I’m writing those words about an SUV either.
Unfortunately the incredibly annoying and backwards-ass operating system of this Aston Martin is so unforgivably awful that I can never really love it, nor recommend that anyone buy one (and surely anyone in the market for a DBX707 already owns a car with a functioning touchscreen, so it’s not like it won’t drive them into a sweary fury as well).
But if you ever get the chance to sit in the passenger seat of one, you really should. Just wear sunglasses, and maybe take sea-sickness medication.
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