Aston Martin Vantage Preview | Will it be better than the Porsche 911?

Welcome everyone to the new Aston Martin Vantage. It may be the smallest and one of the cheapest Aston Martins on sale today but even so it's priced from £165,000. Due for launch in mid-2024 it's still got a big petrol V8 engine in the front, two seats in the middle and power sent exclusively to the rear wheels. Whoever the next James Bond is, his new company car has just arrived. It sounds like a throwback and in some ways it is because there's a really interesting line in the press release for this car that says the new Vantage makes a stand for disenfranchised devotees of breathtaking power, razor-sharp handling and the perfect balance of a finely tuned front-engined rear-wheel drive chassis. They've dressed it up a little bit but in my opinion what they're saying there is if you're fed up of your favourite sports cars going from V8 to four-cylinder or rear-wheel drive to all-wheel drive then this thing is for you. With this in mind it would be silly to change too much of the Vantage's exterior styling and This time though the body is 30mm wider and there's a number of new details. So the grille is almost 40% larger than it was on the outgoing car and you can definitely see that it looks very very prominent on the front end of the car. The diffuser as you can see down there has also been made wider, there's additional air intakes for cooling and the standard fit matrix LED headlamps they are quite drastically different from the previous Vantage that is a big design point change on the front end. If we come around the side you see the nice side profile of the car we've got the standard fit 21-inch forged alloy wheels they look awesome and they're wrapped in Michelin Pilot Sport S5 tyres that have been specifically developed for this car and they are 275 35 on the front and 325 30 on the rear I believe. Also carbon ceramic brakes they are optional on the Vantage it's got a firmer pedal feel this time around and actually the carbon ceramics they save quite a big chunk of unsprung mass and that's not only good for the braking because they're carbon ceramics but also the steering feel and the ride comfort that's the benefit of having less unsprung mass it's not all about outright performance. Come further back we can see the more prominent Aston Martin side straight that's a nice design detail there we've also got the frameless door mirrors which look very elegant and actually while this car is wider than the previous gen the design of the door mirrors means that at this point it's not actually any wider which will be good when you're going through width restrictors as we know in London presenting door handles they come out to you when you've got the key in your pocket so that's a nice touch it sits nice and flush in the design. The colour there's 21 different colours that you can get on this car as standard and you can also get a pinstripe and a lipstick effect which this car has so it's that kind of yellowy green piping that you can see around the front end and down the side as well this car's obviously got a lot of carbon so you can see that down there and on the service that basically means that if you've got the money you can go to Aston Martin and within reason make your car a proper one-off with lots of little design changes so can't wait to see what customers do with that and then finally the rear end we've got a wider rear bumper that's the theme running through the car it's got additional side vents integrated into that and then the diameter of the quad exhaust pipes has also been increased so then the styling while an improvement is not a drastic departure from what we know and that's certainly no bad thing however that huge grille points to serious work on the cooling which can only mean one thing so the outgoing Vantage made 505 brake horsepower and 503 pounds foot of torque from its AMG sourced four litre twin turbocharged V8 engine this car uses a version of that engine but power has been increased to 656 brake horsepower and 590 pounds foot of torque and if you're wondering where that 153 brake horsepower increase came from it is nothing to do with hybridization or an electric element it's all in the engine they've achieved the higher outputs using modified cam profiles a better compression ratio larger turbos and of course a redesigned cooling system featuring an additional low temperature radiator and two further auxiliary coolers what's more there's been a 50% increase in the amount of cold air reaching said radiators you've still got the same ZF 8-speed automatic gearbox we're told there's no sign of a manual sadly but they've retuned the shift calibration and shortened the final drive ratio so you get quicker gear changes and better in-gear acceleration nought to 62 miles an hour takes 3.4 seconds and top speed is 202 miles an hour no doubt those are some big improvements over the previous Vantage a car that when it came out at least was a bona fide rival to the Porsche 911 the new Vantage has an aluminium structure a perfect 50-50 weight distribution and much improved torsional rigidity part of this is re-engineering and repositioning the front cross member so what they've done is they've pushed it back a little bit and that allows the mounting point stiffness for the double wishbone front suspension to be improved which in turn should deliver better steering feel they've also improved the stiffness between the suspension towers both at the front and the rear it's actually up 30 percent under load at the rear and again that just makes the whole car feel a bit tighter and more cohesive or at least that's the idea one thing i did want to talk about is the weight of this car now Aston Martin quotes 1605 kilograms dry and the previous version was 1530 kilograms dry so essentially you've got another adult human being being carried around at all times and to be honest i don't think that's too bad we've seen bigger jumps in weight from one generation of car to the next than 75 kilos yes realistically it's going to be a bit heavier than a 911 turbo which is about 1640 kilograms curb weight so realistically this is going to be more than that with fuel on board but still it's not a bad weight increase when you think of how much extra power there is and how much work they've done on the chassis Aston's also upgraded the adaptive dampers with DTX Bilsteins that it claims delivers five times as much bandwidth of force distribution than the previous gen car bringing this together with the electronic driver aids of which there are a few is the active vehicle dynamics control system which sounds a little bit like the six-way chassis dynamic sensor on a ferrari 296 what it does is measure the car's movement across a number of different axes and using this information acts on the brakes powertrain and edith to deliver the perfect amount of esp intervention what's also cool is the new adjustable traction control on the vantage and that obviously has a big impact on how much slip you're getting at the rear wheels so in addition to regular modes such as esc on and off and esc track and wet what this does is it switches off the vehicle's yaw control function so off power you haven't got any assistance but on power it's got varying levels of traction control and they go from one to eight with one being the safest and eight being the larious and perfect for power slides reminds me a little bit of the system you got on the old mercedes amg gtr and that worked pretty well so i'm looking forward to seeing what this is like and how quickly you can get through a set of these nice custom built tires that sounds like a lot of fun but in truth gadgets that help you power slide will only take the sales figures so far what's really going to make a difference for the new vantage is without doubt the cabin now this is much more like it even when the previous vantage came out the interior already felt a little bit dated and the design was a bit illogical it wasn't the best place to sit but this this is leagues ahead the quality feels like it's moved up a step the design is better and also the technology so we've got a 10.25 inch central entertainment screen we've also got a 10.25 digital dashboard display and it just feels bang up to date but also crucially a lot of car makers are now getting rid of actual physical buttons not so Aston Martin we've got dials for the temperature we've got shortcut buttons for the traction control the exhaust the adaptive dampers so you can activate them really really quickly and also this engine start button it doubles up as the drive mode selector so you can quickly switch it and you don't have to go into the screens saying that the screen is actually pretty good it feels very responsive it's quite clearly laid out it's got plenty of functionality and yeah it's a huge step forward from the previous vantage which if you remember it used an old Mercedes-Benz command system that had a reskin and it wasn't very good this feels a lot lot better so it's got full Android Auto and Apple CarPlay capability it's got 3D mapping it's got what three words integration and there's also an Aston Martin connected service which you can link to an app on your phone which does all the usual things that an app on your phone your car does doesn't sound particularly special and perhaps it's not but these are the kind of things that you weren't getting on the previous vantage and again it's a big step forward so thumbs up for that what else shall we talk about the steering it's an electric power steering system it's on a 12.81 ratio as far as I know it's a nice feeling steering wheel it's got the paddles now on the actual wheel previously they were on the column so now they're on the wheel I'd like a bit more of a click from the paddles themselves a little bit more satisfying but still they're a nice quality they feel really good in your hand the driving position it's nice and low down you can't quite see the bonnet unless I sit up then you can see just how long it is but it feels like you're in a proper rear wheel drive v8 sports car so that's a nice touch seat is holding me in nicely it's quite aggressive but it's a good shape quality now I mentioned that it is I think a step up from the previous vantage but and I will caveat this with the fact that this is a pre-production car there are some cheaper feeling plastics especially around the steering wheel buttons here this up here feels a bit firm and there's a little bit of wobble there but I think we'll wait for the final car to make a proper verdict on that because yeah this one isn't quite up to production standard there's also a launch control system I don't remember that being on the previous vantage so that'll obviously get you off the line faster and there's a lovely Bowers and Wilkins sound system which is 1770 watt 15 speakers I believe 3d sound it'll inevitably sound awesome but then will you even want to have it on when you've got that v8 engine who knows we'll find out just before we wrap up here's a quick look at the gt3 racing equivalent of the new vantage which coincidentally was in the studio next door it uses the same twin turbo v8 engine as the road car but boasts a far more dramatic aero package as well as a totally revised suspension setup and extensive use of carbon fiber needless to say the fancy new cabin has been completely ripped out and replaced with one which is much more pared back and focused in its design built to comply with the fia gt3 class regulations expect to see it fighting for honors in the world endurance championship IMSA fanatec gt world challenge and many more so I think the new Aston Martin vantage looked very promising indeed they've fixed the interior hurrah it's a massive step forwards over the outgoing car and while it's not quite yet on the level of a Porsche 911 it's no longer a major downside of the car it's pretty much where it needs to be they've also tweaked the exterior looks now I wasn't actually too fussed about how it looked before I thought it was a good looking car but some people weren't so keen the front end has now been changed I don't think there's any doubt over the fact that this is now a better looking car so that's another plus point they've kept the v8 great but they've added more power nobody's ever had any problem with that and they've also improved the chassis by tightening it up adding extra tech and changing the damping and the suspension setup so really keen to see what that's like as far as I can tell there doesn't appear to be any obvious downsides to this car so I can't wait to drive it hopefully that's going to happen in about April 2024 and if you want to make sure that you see the video of us driving it make sure you subscribe to the car magazine channel and turn your notifications on so the moment that it lands you'll know about it