Aston Martin’s most driver-focused car gets more power, sharper style, and a better cabin. Can it eclipse the Porsche 911 Turbo and AMG SL 63?
When you’ve upwards of $191,000 to spend on a new car like the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage, justification looks somewhat different to the decisions being made in the average Toyota or Kia dealership. The new Vantage picks up the torch as the British automaker’s most driver-focused car but skips the usual route to demonstrating that — even if, for most buyers, the most convincing evidence of success may go unexplored.
While «better than the old car» is the obvious metric by which any new model is judged, the 2025 Vantage finds itself with a far more intimidating benchmark than mere incremental improvement. Aston Martin’s self-imposed goal of gliding up, out of the sports car segment and into the ultra-luxury performance set leaves it squeezed by Rolls-Royce and Bentley on one side, and McLaren and Ferrari on the other.
Outright speed, then, or some nice leather is no longer sufficient. Put simply, the wealthy clientele a reinvented Aston Martin hopes to court expect not just a fancy toy, but an experience. In the case of the new Vantage, that experience means power with the confidence to actually use it.If looks could kill
Even before Vantage graduated into its own model line, cars bearing the badge have leaned brutish. This 2025 model looks good in colors both wild and reserved, though darker shades can hide some of the surfacing. From the back, in dark blue, you could almost think you were following a 911.
Where the DB12 is long and sleek, effortlessly graceful as befits a grand tourer (or, in Aston Martin speak, a «super tourer»), the Vantage eschews any possible excess. It’s the sports car equivalent of a club bouncer in a straining dress shirt: covered up, certainly, but with no question as to the potential mayhem underneath.
Because of that shrink-wrapped design, like a Saville Row tailor discovered Lycra for the first time, the Vantage looks smaller in person than it does in photos. Its proportions — the wide front, pinched midsection, and meatily broad rear fenders — are exaggerated and boisterous. The price of options could be described similarly. This Cosmos Orange example added on $13,600 for the paint, $1,500 for the satin black wheels, $11,700 for the exterior carbon fiber, $1,800 for special badging, and $1,400 for smoked taillights, among other things. A cabin to take on luxe behemoths
Inside, the vast improvement in ergonomics and tech that we first saw in the DB12 has been carried over. The dashboard blends physical controls for the driver-friendly essentials — tweaking suspension, traction control, exhaust, and other settings, along with climate control and multimedia — with a 10.25-inch touchscreen running Aston Martin’s new infotainment software. It’s fast and cleanly laid out, as is the matching 10.25-inch driver display. It also supports wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
This hasn’t just been a surface makeover, either, with a new architecture that supports, among other things, over-the-air (OTA) updates for future features and improvements. A Bowers & Wilkins audio system has been specially tuned for the Vantage’s cabin, meanwhile, and that’s not the only adjustment. You sit 10mm lower than in the DB12, and so Aston Martin reworked the positioning of every control and interface to make sure they’re within comfortable reach.
Combine that with the lavish application of leather and metal — and the automaker’s expansive Q Division customization options, which can leave the Vantage’s cabin anything from classically sober through to eye-searing — and you have an interior that feels more than up to the self-imposed goal of challenging Rolls-Royce and Bentley. It’s priced that way, too: the Cosmos Orange Vantage here stacked $10,000 for the audio system, $11,700 for the interior trim, and $3,100 for the fancy brightwork onto the price tag, taking the total including exterior options to a heady $261,900. More power, more usable power
Under the hood is a 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8, now with 656 horsepower (around 30% more than the old Vantage V8) and 590 lb-ft of torque (up 15%). 0-60 mph arrives in 3.4 seconds, and the new Vantage will go rocketing on to a top speed of 202 mph.
Aston Martin isn’t exactly ashamed of its partnership with Mercedes on engines, though it prefers to highlight the changes made to make it fit for the Vantage. That includes new heads, bigger turbos, along with revised compression ratios and cam profiles. There’s a new, 8-speed ZF transmission uprated for the extra torque, along with a new electronic differential and a new quad-exit performance exhaust.
