An Everyday Luxury

Aston Martin’s latest is, quite possibly, its best product of the modern era.

- Daryl Lee

The Aston Martin DBX is a car that all right-thinking petrolheads should hate on principle. It’s an SUV, which already is a huge black mark against it, but more gallingly it’s an SUV from a manufacturer that, hitherto this point, has exclusively made two-door sports cars, with the occasional four-door sports saloon thrown into the mix. Of course, Aston Martin isn’t the first sports car manufacturer to do so. Porsche did it first in the early 2000s with the Cayenne, Maserati did so in 2016 with the Levante, Lamborghini did it a couple of years back with the Urus, and Ferrari will be following suit in the next couple of years with the Purosangue (literally ‘pureblood’ or, more accurately, ‘thoroughbred’).

So anyway, in case you haven’t heard, SUVs can be hugely profitable. The Cayenne and Urus are the single most popular models by some margin in the Porsche and Lamborghini line-ups respectively, so now you could more accurately call them SUV manufacturers with a sideline making sports cars. It’s a success story that Aston Martin no doubt hopes to replicate with the DBX, with the suits in Gaydon praying fervently it can double its annual sales volume as Porsche and Lamborghini did with their respective SUVs. The DBX will have to, since Aston Martin narrowly avoided bankruptcy last year, and it will somehow have to recoup the costs of building a shiny new factory in Wales.