Aston Martin DBX

With Aston Martin jumping on the SUV bandwagon with the DBX, do we finally have a Bond car that will survive India?

- L Aatish Mishra

I REMEMBER FEELING THE SAME sense of trepidation when I approached the Urus for the first time. After all, spending all those hours poring over automotive magazines hidden behind textbooks in school had cemented what these brands stood for. They fixed in my impressionable mind the sort of cars they made. Lambos — low-slung, angry, sharp, potentially unreliable and often out to kill you. Astons — nearly as low-slung, dignified, gentlemanly, occasionally driven by a man in a three-piece designer suit with an unhealthy obsession for women and guns. Decades later, when I finally got my hands on them in the metal… they weren’t anything like the stuff I saw on those pages. A tonne too heavy, a couple of feet too tall. They may have been infused with the brands’ core traits but they aren’t even remotely close to what a ten-year-old me ever thought he’d come face to face with. The world may be a different place today but the question is — are we better off for it?