Aston Martin DBX 2020 UK first drive

At 3060mm, the DBX has the biggest wheelbase of them all. It runs on 22in wheels only, with a few different design choices and three tyre options: regular, all-season or winter, measuring 285/40 at the front and 325/35 at the back. Pretty racy. 

Aston has thrown a lot of technology at its first SUV, which, priced at £158,000, is more than the base Bentayga and bang against the Urus. There’s air suspension, which can both raise or lower the body height, adaptive damping to accompany it and the 48V active anti-roll bar system that’s starting to feel obligatory on cars like this. Try to prevent body roll the old-fashioned mechanical way and you will end up with a car that’s either too loose or too stiff, and an Aston should be neither. 

Also throw in the electronically controlled four-wheel drive system, then, and you have an SUV that’s incredibly complex for Aston, a company that typically specialises in honest-feeling front-engined coupés with driven rear wheels, as it tries to do everything for everyone everywhere. Largely, it nails it. 

Big, heavy, frameless doors open on a cabin featuring a surprising acreage of leather. This is surely the easiest Aston ever to climb into. In fact, it might be the easiest car on the market to enter – with wide-opening doors, a low-access entry mode and, uniquely for an Aston of recent decades, completely flat sills. Aluminium-platformed sports cars typically have a lot of stiffness in big sills that ease occupants towards the centre of the car. Not here. With the doors closed and you surrounded on all sides by cow, this interior is plush. 

It also gets some highlights that the DB11 and Vantage should have had from the start. The digital instrument display looks of higher resolution and is certainly better-coloured, the air vents are no longer plasticky and the switchgear feels good. There are a couple of odd leather pleats atop the dashboard, like the excess skin of a facelift, and elsewhere some grainlines like on your gran’s neck are present, but I don’t know if they’re deliberate so that it looks hand-finished or because our car was early-production. The brogueing and stitching looks great. 

The seats are big and very widely adjustable, the steering wheel easily comes to where it’s best and I suspect that no occupant, whether driver or passenger, will feel short-changed. 

Boot volume below the cover is similar to that of the Bentayga, at 480 litres, but less than you’ll find in the Range Rover. Of more relevance is that the floor is quite high (although there’s room beneath it too) and the DBX’s rakish looks are likely to have a small impact on to-the-roof, taking-the-kids-to-university loading. But, like with all these SUVs, it will be big enough. And the DBX’s towing limit is 2700kg: good for boats or horses. 

There’s reasonable oddment space around the cabin, too. It’s weird to be talking about an Aston primarily in these terms, but here we are. What stay from sportier cars are the gear selector buttons on the dash. That’s great: I like those, and they free up space on the transmission tunnel for the controller for the Mercedes-based, Aston-faced and pretty straightforward infotainment system. 

Familiarities and differences, then. The DBX’s speciality. Would you know this is an Aston to drive, if it were possible to test it blindfolded (don’t laugh, we had to do a risk assessment for that once)? 

Yes and no. No car of this height and weight (2320kg) is going to act like a coupé half a tonne lighter, but there are hints of Astonness. 

It feels like you sit relatively low for an SUV, with a high window line. It’s much more car-like than the Range Rover or Bentayga, more crossover than 4x4 – although I’ve also driven it a little off road, where it will do all that’s reasonably asked of it. 

The DBX’s steering, at 2.6 turns between locks, is smooth, accurate, responsive and medium-weighted. And the ride is controlled. But by gum is the low-speed ride noisy. 

Aluminium and air can be a high-volume combination, and while the DBX rides with suppleness over imperfections, it clonks audibly around town. That’s a shame, because it’s otherwise very refined and, away from poorer surfaces, quiet. Stability is so good that it makes a quite brilliant motorway car, with an 85-litre fuel tank.