Aston Martin DB12 Volante review

This means Aston Martin has kept the weight gain from coupé to convertible to less than 100kg, all of which is contained within the mass of a hood with no fewer than eight layers of insulation. The only change to the rest of the car in compensation is a 10 per cent gain in rear spring rate to manage the additional rearward mass. Its closest rival, Bentley’s Continental GTC Speed, is no less than 163kg heavier than its closed sister. How has Aston got away with this? Its engineers say the DB12 structure has been so radically stiffened over the DB11’s the car simply doesn’t need it.

And it would appear Aston Martin is sincere in that belief, otherwise it would never have signed off an appraisal route for journalists that, at times, seemed specifically designed to expose any weaknesses in the car’s structural integrity. It was long and tough, which I found reassuring: if it had been short and smooth I’d have smelled a rat and gone off-piste in search of roads more likely to provide answers to the questions I needed to ask.

The answers I got were good, but not outstanding. Regulars may remember I was knocked fairly sideways by the fabulous balance between ride and handling achieved by the DB12 coupé and you’ll perhaps not be too surprised to learn that decapitation has had a deleterious effect on both. Ride comfort is generally excellent but occasionally disturbed as the structure becomes excited by multiple minor ‘events’, if I may briefly adopt chassis engineer-speak. Rough road surfaces to you and me. There are no big jolts, no good ol’ scuttle shake, just a sense of imperfections making their presence felt long after they’d have been damped away to nothing by the coupé.

And the handling is just a little less incisive, less likely to make you stop at the start of a really good road to create a gap big enough to allow you to have a good go at it.

But I have also to say I’m making an unfair comparison. McLarens aside, what convertible ever rode or handled as well as the coupé upon which it was based? By the standards of the real opposition it still stacks up. Yes, the aforementioned Bentley feels structurally more sound and rides far better as a result, but that’s largely because it weighs, wait for it, over half a tonne more at the kerb. In handling terms, the Aston would wipe the floor with it.

There’s more good news from that roof. When it’s stowed and with the deflector in place the wind management is so good that by far the greatest disturbance is the roar of the vast Michelin Pilot Sport 5 S tyres; when raised you might as well be in the coupé. Indeed one of its engineers suggested to me it might even be quieter than the hardtop.

One curious discovery is that you can hear more and better engine noise with the roof up than down when the voice of the V8 – deliberately tuned away from the basso profundo found in AMG products to a timbre more baritone in nature – is rather carried away on the wind.

But roof up or down, that motor still does mighty work. At times, given the elegance of the surroundings in which I found myself, I thought it shockingly fast. So I did a little digging, and exhumed Aston’s numbers for the recently deceased flagship supercar DBS Volante with its 5.2-litre V12 twin-turbo motor, and I discovered it is just one tenth of second quicker to 62mph than this cooking DB12. Just work the car through the mid range and it is fabulously fast – use all it has to give and it becomes ferociously so.

And yet the same flaw I found on the coupé remains and I’m a little surprised so few others are talking about it. The engine has a notable lack of off-boost torque and if you’re not mindful of it and drive the car in manual mode, you can quite easily find yourself becalmed. You can see evidence of it in the stats: that old V12 DBS Volante may be scarcely any quicker ultimately, but it developed quite a lot more torque and hit its peak at 1800rpm – just where you want it in a car like this. This eight-cylinder DB12 needs almost another 1000rpm on the clock – 2750rpm – before it’ll start delivering its full punch.

Why? The old V12 had 5.2 litres of displacement to call on, for one thing, compared to this V8’s 4.0. What’s more, the amount of boost required to generate 671bhp from 3982cc necessitates a drop in compression ratio from the 10.5:1 used when this motor first turned up with just 503bhp in the DB11, to 8.6:1 in the DB12 – a startlingly low number by modern standards even for a turbo engine and, indeed, not much higher than that used by the Vantage-spec engine in the DB2 back in 1951… If Aston ever decided to incorporate a small and light electric motor just to cover for the engine while it languishes off-boost, the powertrain would be close to perfect for this car.

You’ll know now I didn’t warm to the DB12 Volante to the same degree as the coupé, but you can say that about near enough every open version of a closed car I’ve driven. The only exception that springs to mind was the Alfa Romeo 8C.

For those in the market for such a car I expect this will matter very little, if at all. What they’re after is a look, a badge and a sound. They want effortless fast motoring and enough creature comforts to keep them comfortable and entertained for the duration of any journey, regardless of distance. And now Aston has its first ever really competitive infotainment system, it can truthfully claim to have ticked every box. It may not be for me, but for those prospects who’ve always liked the idea of an Aston Martin Volante, but shied away from the reality, it’s hard to see how it would not be exactly what they’ve been waiting for.