Aston Martin DB12 Volante 2024 Review | First Drive

The Aston Martin DB12 Volante’s hard-topped sibling was undoubtedly one of our favourite cars of 2023. That it wasn’t in our mammoth Goodwood Cars of the Year video (which you can watch here) was simply due to scheduling conflicts.

Now Aston Martin has done exactly what it was always going to do, and chopped the roof off the DB12. Traditional GT cars like the Aston Martin DB12 are ripe for convertible conversions, and in the hands of Director of Vehicle Performance Simon Newton, the hope is that this will capture all the things that made the coupe so good, just sans roof.

I think the Aston Martin DB12 looks a little odd in flat images. But when you see it in three dimensions it’s a very pretty car. Turning it into a convertible has stifled its good looks very little. Although the coupe has a clarity of vision that brings its design together slightly better than the convertible, it still works.

The front is far more aggressive than the rather neither-here-nor-there DB11 it replaced, and the DB12 has a far more purposeful stance than the achingly pretty DB9 before that. There’s a lot of DBS in the DB12 (which was a far better looking than its DB11 sibling anyway) while the rear is very much DB11-based, but that was the most successful part of the old car.

Roof up the DB12 Volante loses some of the good looks that the coupe had – like it’s been sketched with a slightly dodgy pen. Roof-down, it works nicely. The wide rear arches don’t look quite as aggressive without the roof tapering inward, but the low nature of the DB12’s shoulders work just as well with or without a toupé.

The raw Performance figures are the same as the coupe. The 4.0-litre turbocharged V8 from AMG has two turbochargers to boost power to 680PS (500kW) and torque to 800Nm (590lb ft). 

Underneath surprisingly little has changed to accommodate the alterations needed to chop off the top. The DB12 is now 90kg heavier thanks to the roof mechanism, so the suspension has been stiffened slightly at the rear to accommodate for a rearward shift in weight distribution.

But that change is only slight. The other small change is that the toe angle at the front has been modified slightly to reduce a reported propensity for understeer at slow speeds. That change, according to Aston Martin, hasn’t been made for the Volante alone and can be carried over to the coupe as sales continue. 

That lack of modification is thanks to the solid nature of the DB12 underneath. Large changes needed to be made, says Aston, to switch the DB11 from coupe to Volante, but the things they learned from DB11 (that is its less than good bits), meant DB12 could become a much more solid platform.

They’re not wrong. There’s a sign of what’s to come the moment we steer the DB12 out of our Cotswald base for a couple of hours’ driving. Something about its crisp steering, even at slow speeds, tells you that Aston hasn’t ruined the DB12 by lopping off the roof.

The extra weight and stiffer suspension aren’t immediately noticeable. Through town the DB12 still manages to cope with rutted roads and any traffic calming measures it comes across. Then, once we find a proper bit of road, unleashing Aston Martin’s big GT brings all the pleasures of driving the coupe flooding back – it’s just that now my already receding hairline is being given the hurry up.

The steering is communicative and crisp and the DB12’s chassis still feels eager and ready to go through slow or fast corners. It is possible to provoke understeer should you really want to but refine your ham-fisted inputs and the DB12 will follow your wishes. The rear, using all that phenomenal 800Nm, can then be asked to just spring the DB12 away from the corner. Sport+ and a heavy right foot can send the DB12 sliding around in ways that would definitely catch the eyes of Thames Valley Police, but just as fun is using that power to bring the rear out in a nicely coordinated effort. You drive with the car as a partner rather than being brought along for the journey.

Where it does become noticeable that you’ve removed something from the DB12’s chassis is on a longer cruise through a less than well-assembled road. There the suspension will just develop a slight prolonged jiggle as the mass of vibrations and inputs builds through the chassis. This is most pronounced in the sportier modes, but that’s no surprise. The real surprise is that the added rumble to the journey is so slight, so barely noticeable over the coupe that you could easily go through your journey unruffled.

The engine is just as good as before, not feeling too much like it’s twin-turbocharged, with peak torque arriving from 2,750rpm. In fact, despite the extra mass from the roof system, the DB12 Volante does the 0-62mph sprint only 0.1 seconds slower than the coupe at 3.6 seconds and will still hit a top speed of 202mph.

Power delivery is good, but you’ll probably want to set your own individual setting to give you the most aggressive throttle response at all times. In GT mode the more laid back response with the gearbox in gentle mode can feel like waking the car up a little. Just pop it into sport and leave the chassis in a softer mode and you’ll be grand.

Our test car came with the optional carbon ceramic brakes, which are strong, albeit perhaps a little snatchy at first. We’d be interested to try it with some traditional steel ones at some point.

One of the biggest step ups over the DB11 was the insides. The DB11’s interior design looked dated even seven years ago. A weird mix of some of the things that looked nice on an Aston Martin 15 years ago and a sloppy seconds Mercedes infotainment.

Happily, the DB12 doesn’t attempt to go all tech bro on us. Indeed Aston Martin people say that “tech heads” are absolutely not the audience they are after with the DB12. “This still has to be a drivers’ car,” says one, adding “just with bits from this decade”. 

And that is perhaps a good way of describing it. The seating position still feels nicely cocooned next to a thick door liner and high, rising centre console. It gives you that lovely feeling of looking up over a long bonnet that a front-engined GT car should have.

The screen integration is also well thought out. There’s a 10.25-inch screen at the head of a long centre console, but override switches have been left for all the dynamic functions of the car, from active exhaust to suspension. Heating and ventilation also have physical buttons, all of which Aston says is because it understands the need for balance between screens and the “positive tactility” that buttons bring. And we agree.

The roof takes 14 seconds to retract behind its cowling and can be dropped at speeds up to 31mph. Roof down the manually flicked-up deflector does keep things relatively calm in the cockpit. Only those of us over six foot will really notice much ruffling from over the heavily rake windscreen.

Perfection has been missed slightly in some areas. The switchgear behind the steering wheel looks very much like it came from another car in about 2009 – especially the odd rotary control for the heated wheel, which you cannot tell is illuminated without peering around the wheel. As lovely as those door cards do make you feel, they also feel perhaps a little over designed.

The DB12 comes with heated seats, 21 inch alloys, Bowers & Wilkins audio system with 11 speakers, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration, sat-nav, and DAB Radio all controlled on the 10.25-inch touchscreen as standard. Automatic wipers and headlights as well as reversing sensors are all standard. Four different roof colours are no-cost options – red, blue, black and what Aston Martin calls “black and silver.”

When we drove the DB12 coupe the infotainment system was still very much in a pre-production state, set to have several updates before it went live. Now it’s ready for the world. Has it improved? Yes. But not to levels of excellence.

The system is still a little laggy, even when Apple CarPlay is active. Its touch response is roughly fine, but what’s behind that can take its time to load through. Considering where the DB11 was, this is a big step up, but don’t expect all-singing all-dancing from Aston Martin just yet.

The Aston Martin DB12 Volante would probably be my choice if you asked me to make the very tough decision of how to cross Europe in a convertible. That’s a major turnaround from a DB11 which seemed to please very few.

The real achievement from Lawrence Stroll’s company is that the DB12 as a whole was so good that it’s barely been compromised in the Volante transformation. The chassis control is up there with the best around and performance has hardly been altered despite the extra weight and lack of roof.

The new Mercedes-AMG GT will perhaps provide it with some stiff competition, but at £200,000 DB12 is nearly 100k less than a Ferrari 812 GTS and far more stylish than the Merc or even a Porsche 911 Turbo. No matter what you might think of the Canadian billionaire who took over at Gaydon, this is Aston Martin confident and on the up. New Vantage is next, and that is really exciting.