Aston Martin DB12 Volante 2024 review – Britain’s Ferrari beater?

Since the Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll took control of Aston Martin following Andy Palmer’s financially disastrous IPO, the company has seen more CEO changes than new car launches. This trend continues with the appointment of Adrian Hallmark, the former chairman and CEO of Bentley, who will be CEO number four when he takes the AML hot seat by October 1st. And you thought certain football clubs were the only ones to chew through senior management at a rate that rivals a child devouring an Easter egg haul.

What will Hallmark inherit from ex-Ferrari CEO Amedeo Felisa when he walks through the door at Gaydon? Crucially, a new product strategy, one which started with the DB12 coupe in 2023, the new Vantage revealed in February of this year and the updated DBX. The replacement for the DBS will then arrive later in 2024 and Aston Martin’s first mid-engined ‘series’ production car, the Valhalla, will be shown in its production glory before the year is out. That’s quite the portfolio upgrade. 

> Aston Martin Vantage 2024 review – the best Aston in years

You can add to this deliveries of the DB12 and new Vantage derivatives that will also be underway, beginning with the DB12 Volante. It’s a model from a sector that Hallmark has a great deal of experience with via one of its key rivals: Bentley’s Continental GT. 

The open-top GT market is an odd one. It thrives where the fixed-roof counterparts that such models are derived from flounder. Many of us dream of idyllic cross-continental drives in a meaty, front-engined, elegant-looking coupe, chasing a sunset and a glass of something wet and cold at the end of the journey. Yet few of us actually buy them, not when new at least. Replace the metal panel with a section of stretched fabric that can go up and down at your command, however, and the customers – and profits – multiply by a sizable factor. Coupes are cool, convertibles make cash, and everyone knows Aston could do with some of that at the moment. Hence why Hallmark was at the very top of Stroll’s shortlist, with Bentley having booked over £1bn in profits in the last two years thanks to a model mix of GTs, SUVs and low-volume specials. Which will all sound very familiar to anyone who has followed Aston Martin’s line-up in recent times.

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Removing the roof takes away an element of the DB12’s elegance, with the coupe’s distinctive buttresses ditched to make room for the eight-layer fabric roof. This creates the illusion of a smaller cabin area and a longer rear deck, disrupting the previously cohesive design. Roof down, the real estate of bodywork behind the cabin looks vast following its redesign to accommodate the roof whole, and you’d need to dislike anyone you invite to sit behind you, as rear passenger space is even tighter than the coupe’s already cramped rear confines. The boot has shrunk, too, making weekends away a game of grand-master packing. Perhaps that’s what the rear seats are best used for.

From the driver’s seat, the look and feel is very current-day Aston Martin, with sweeping interior architecture, much cleaner and clearer integration of switchgear and controls, and ergonomics that eradicate the DB11’s feeling of you being shoe-horned into a cabin that still managed to make you feel a great distance away from the car’s extremities. Unlike some convertibles, with its fabric roof closed the Volante feels no less spacious inside than the coupe, and seems as capacious as the square-edged Conti GT without you feeling like the only person sitting in a cathedral. 

Aston Martin’s new TFT instrument cluster and infotainment system is a welcome step up from what went before, too, but it’s not without its faults. The core instrument dials are just on the correct side of being the right size, but the new HMI screen controls, as in the coupe, are too small to operate when on the move, the screen’s font size hard to focus on and the touchscreen controls requiring too much attention. It’s at odds with the beautifully damped and tactical controls for the air-conditioning, drive modes, roof and windows. Then when you lower the roof and the sun hits the screen you’ve little hope of being able to see anything on it to adjust anyway. Yes, it’s an improvement on what went before, but it’s an area that still needs a great deal of work. 

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As does isolating the squeaks from the rear of the cabin, where the roof, the trim for the roll-over bar cover and the rear seats are in constant conversation with each other as they rub together and rub you up the wrong way, especially when the roof is closed. These are the details you can expect Hallmark will pick up on after his half-a-dozen years enjoying the silence of Bentley interiors regardless of the body style. Roof up, you wouldn’t expect as much wind noise around the header rail from a car carrying a £199,500 basic price tag either.

What you would expect from a car with an AMG-sourced 671bhp V8 is exactly as wished for. There is a colossal amount of performance and the Volante certainly doesn’t disappoint. Legislation has all but silenced the powertrain to a muted rumble, but its performance remains more supercar than grand tourer. While its eight-speed ZF auto is well mapped to the V8’s torque delivery when in GT mode and with the transmission left in auto, the pick up when you need to pass something slower isn’t as sharp as you perhaps might anticipate, requiring you to pull on the left-hand paddle to stir the turbos and encourage the Volante to get on with it. Best to give the central drive mode control a confident twist to engage Sport, select manual for the gearshifts and soften the dampers back to ‘GT’. It’s a sweet spot the open-top DB12 enjoys operating in, the powertrain’s responses meeting your expectations and the car demonstrating that a large proportion of the coupe’s ‘super tourer’ DNA remains within.

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Stretch the 4-litre motor to its peak and the Volante feels every part of the supercar Aston Martin claims it to be, the performance stepping beyond anything the incoming CEO’s old company car could deliver in terms of outright speed, although still some way off that of Ferrari’s feral Roma. But… this is not where the Volante likes to play. As with its coupe brother, the DB12 becomes confused when pushed hard and asked to roll its sleeves up. While the steering remains perfectly linear, direct and precise (you wouldn’t know there was any structural weakness from the roof being ditched) the rest of the chassis can’t maintain the momentum. Across too many surfaces it can become unstuck when asked to manage multiple inputs through a corner. You can have the Volante balanced and poised through a turn only for it to sow a seed of doubt as the dampers encounter a compression and the chassis tenses up around you and becomes unsettled. 

As with the coupe, the Volante is far more rewarding at a calmer pace, even more so with the roof open and the English countryside brought inside. Build a flow and find a rhythm that suits you and matches the car and the miles glide by without a care in the world. The suppleness returns to the chassis, the body more controlled, the reactions more prescribed and predictable. It allows you to settle into the fine ergonomics but still maintain enough engagement to have a connected driving experience all of the time, rather than one you can disconnect from at will, such as in, I don’t know, a Conti GT. 

It would, to these arse cheeks, benefit from a more compliant ride, one that didn’t feel like the tyres on its 21-inch wheels were over-inflated and fighting with the surface rather than absorbing it. And when you do venture through the drive modes, the differentiation between GT and Sport and then Sport and Sport+ feels too minimal, the modes providing a tiny variation on a theme rather than a clear distinction. But like the majority of cars thus equipped, the Volante doesn’t need modes and would be a better car if its engineers were allowed to focus on a single on-point, core setting rather than trying to find three variants that only transpire to deliver an automotive no man’s land. This isn’t an Aston Martin issue, it’s an industry-wide one, but cars such as the Volante highlight such issues brighter still. 

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It is an achingly elegant car, the DB12 Volante, one that when driven to its strengths is as indulging and beguiling as any you care to mention that it competes with. For all the detail that has been lavished on the Ferrari Roma Spider’s powertrain and chassis and all the luxury poured into Bentley’s Continental GT Convertible, the DB12 Volante sits between the two. If it chased less of the Italian’s performance and took inspiration from its British rival’s confidence in focusing on the calmer aspect of open-top motoring, the Aston would genuinely offer the best of both. For now, like the DB12 coupe, the Volante requires polishing in some key areas – more consistent dynamics and delivery of the engine’s performance, redesigned HMI screens – all of which are within the grasp of those who call Gaydon home, and in Adrian Hallmark they have a new boss with the know-how to apply what’s needed to turn a good car into a great one.

Price and rivals 

As perverse as it sounds, the £199,500 asking price of the DB12 Volante looks good value. On looks alone it’s a car that can carry its price with confidence. Factor in the quality of the fit and finish, the materials and the way it drives and Aston Martin’s latest Volante has a great deal going for it. 

It also undercuts Ferrari’s Roma Spider by more than £10,000, although subjectively it lacks the cachet of that car’s badge, and objectively its dynamic sparkle at the limit. Splitting the two would come down to you being an Aston Martin or Ferrari guy or gal.

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Against Bentley’s £204,000 Continental GT Convertible, the Gaydon-built car has the Crewe icon licked. It looks sleeker, more modern and desirable and it drives with more clarity and quality across a wider spectrum than the GT, too. This is also the first Aston Martin that can go stitch to stitch with Bentley's elegant interior. With a new Continental GT around the corner Aston Martin is breathing a sigh of relief that the software issues which delayed the start of all DB12 deliveries are behind it, and that the Volante will land with customers as planned. 

We’ve yet to drive Maserati’s GranCabrio, which will undercut all of the above by some margin – it starts at £169,500 – and while it’s a fine GT car in coupe form, and one we’d happily spend many a day covering big miles in, it lacks the specialness and sense of occasion of its rivals in coupe form and we don’t see that changing with the roof removed. 

Aston Martin DB12 Volante specs

This story was first featured in evo issue 321.