Aston Martin DBX 707 2022 UK first drive

This will sound like tone-deaf blasphemy but the towering, 2.2-tonne Aston Martin DBX 707 is the best car the British car firm makes.

Aston Martin clearly knows this, and wants us to know it, too, which is why our first taste of this 697bhp crossover on British roads follows a substantial test in Sardinia and, before that, a Pirelli-smoking go behind the wheel of a validation prototype at Aston’s Stowe Circuit test track at Silverstone. In general, you don’t trail a duffer this assiduously.

Bluntly, neither can the 707 afford to be anything of that sort. Despite the £190,000 asking price – £18,000 more than the regular Aston Martin DBX – the British maker hopes the new car will make up as much as half of DBX sales. And because the DBX already accounts for roughly half of Aston’s total annual sales, the fiscal benefits of the 707 being not just good but brilliant – and an unambiguous sales success – are clear. Especially when you’re in quite a bit of debt.

But the car itself. Whether or not the beefed-up, hunkered-down aesthetic appeals to you will be personal, but in objective terms, the more you learn about the 707, the more reasonable the £18,000 premium seems. Perversely, the 707 even starts to look good value compared with the base DBX, because the changes Aston has made are not simply of a magnitude to what, say, Porsche achieves when it converts 911 GT3 into GT3 RS, but closer to what it achieves when transforming garden 911 Carrera into diamond-edged 911 GT3.

As the name suggests, power climbs, from 542bhp at 6500rpm to 697bhp (707PS), arriving 500rpm earlier. This isn’t mere software trickery. While the regular DBX sources its turbos from the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 4-Door Coupé, the 707 borrows the larger, quicker-spooling, ball-bearing-equipped, 160,000rpm blowers of the GT Black Series. The electronically controlled differential in the back axle is also upgraded, the 707 receiving the unit from the GT 63, which offers about 15% more clamping force than the E63 S-sourced unit in the standard DBX. As with the power hike, neither is this new diff plug-and-play: being 20kg heavier, the rear driveshafts have required reinforcement.

The GT 63 also donates its ‘wet-clutch’ nine-speed gearbox, which not only withstands the 707’s hulking 664lb ft (up 148lb ft) but is also said to improve throttle response and shift speed. For similar benefits, the propshaft has marginally better torsional stiffness.

A lot of work, then, even before you get to the new double-stacked outboard rads, which sit behind bodywork with 30% more intake area and the potential for 80% more mass airflow than that of the regular DBX.