Why you don’t want to buy an Aston Martin Vantage

When it comes to this much-loved and fawned over new Aston Martin Vantage, don’t believe the hype. Believe me instead.

Stephen Corby

Before I unfurl the churl, I should say there is a lot I like about this Aston Martin – most of those things don’t involve driving it. Picture: Supplied

3 min read

12:00AMMay 29, 2025.

Updated 8:05AMMay 29, 2025

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Churlish really is the only word to describe my ungracious ingratitude, my whining and bitching about the clearly beautiful and evidentially wonderful Aston Martin Vantage. But as usual, I blame everyone else.

When this car was first launched, on a drive through the Andalusian foothills to the Circuito Monteblanco in Spain, I was busy – feeding the poor and healing the sick, I think – so I generously sent a colleague who filed a review suggesting that Aston had created a machine so emotionally profound that he’d wept words of wonder all over his keyboard.

The numbers made it hard to argue with his frothing verbiage as the Vantage’s 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 had been stupendously enhanced with 30 per cent more power and 15 per cent more torque (jumping from 375kW and 685Nm to a supercar silly 498kW and 800Nm). It also had enhanced aerodynamics, retuned suspension, more body stiffness and a nine-stage traction system that somehow allowed all that power to be directed to the rear wheels alone without turning the car into a pinwheel and the driver into road pizza.

As a result, I was very excited about driving it on the sightly less smooth and inviting roads of NSW, where I was more likely to explore its body stiffness than its 325km/h top speed (I believe I can legally say I did test out its 3.5 second sprint to 100km/h, however, and it was both delightful and deafening).

Everyone I took for a drive in the Vantage (some of whom had resorted to quite unseemly begging) was very excited about it and raved over its muscular physique, the fact that it looked exactly like the F1 Safety Car from that Drive to Survive show (including the garish yellow lipstick on its duck-beak rear end and its mouth, which make it look like Kermit has dressed for Mardi Gras), the lashings of carbon fibre and sexy knurled touch points in the cabin, and the hairy-chested engine noises, which sound like Javier Bardem singing scales.

And every single one of them gave me a look that suggested I was being extremely churlish by not loving it as much as they did.

The fact that there is no Comfort setting available is a clue to what the ride is like. Picture: Supplied

Before I unfurl the churl, I should say that there is a lot I do like about the Aston Martin Vantage – it’s just that most of those things don’t involve actually driving it. I’d damn near buy one for the Bowers and Wilkins stereo alone, a system that allows you to adjust not only things like Bass and Treble but Presence and Intensity. The bass is so profound that it vibrated the rear-vision mirror to the point where it looked like it was scared of Daft Punk.

Speaking of frightening noises, I also enjoyed the faux firecracker stylings of the Aston’s exhaust (and the piercing whistles of its turbochargers), particularly when you push it from its default Sport setting right up to Track mode. Unfortunately, because I insist on changing gears myself even when there isn’t a clutch, the soundscape is spoiled by the incomprehensibly cheap clicky-clack noises you get from the shift paddles. It’s like hearing a classically trained pianist chewing bubblegum during a performance.

The fact that there is no Comfort setting available is a clue to what the ride is like in this Vantage; I’d go so far as to call it churlish. Similarly, the carbon-backed racing seats in the car I drove were hard and sharp-sided. I have no problem believing that these seats felt perfectly adapted to the task of tackling the Circuito Monteblanco, which would also have been a far better place to plunder its prestigious power, but in the real world the Vantage feels like using an axe to trim your bonsai.

The carbon-backed racing seats were hard and sharp-sided. Picture: Supplied

Other supercars can feel stupidly overpowered and yet somehow get away with it, but the Vantage feels like heavy metal in every sense of the words, as if it was designed by the sort of pencil-bearded style victim who calls a watch a “timepiece” and believes such a thing is only worth wearing if it is so weighty you can barely move your forearm.

The pricing of the Vantage is similarly weighty, with the entry point sitting at $410,000 before you add options that are obviously so alarming that the local Aston people claimed they couldn’t find the prices for the ones on my car (I really wanted to know what the optional Bowers and Wilkins stereo costs, and whether I could buy it separately).

The problem the Vantage has is that it is trying to reach up into Ferrari territory while punching down at Porsche, but the fact is I’d take the entry-level Porsche 911 ($296,700) over this Aston every time, and, outside of a racetrack, I reckon the 911 would be faster and more fun, too.

It’s possible that I’m wrong and that everyone else is right, and perhaps I would have loved it more if I’d encountered it on a Spanish racetrack. But in both cases, I doubt it.