It’s a decent wheeze and expect others to copy. What you’re looking at is, to all intents and purposes, the mid-life update of the Aston Martin DB12 which I first reviewed back in 2023.
All those things you’d expect a company like Aston Martin to do at this stage in a model’s product cycle are here: a touch more power, some small but, as we shall see, quite significant changes to the way the car is set up, and some tweaks to the visuals to give it a fresher face without requiring any expensive surgery or, heaven forfend, significant retooling. Except, says Aston Martin, this is not a mere DB12. It is a DB12 S. A new model with an exciting name. This marks it out as something different, something special and, yes, something new.
But then you ask how sales of those cars that have already had the ‘S’ treatment are going. And you are told that 95 per cent of new Vantages are S models, and the same for the DBX. And predictions for the DB12 S? Funnily enough, about 95 per cent. So I asked whether it was even worth keeping the non-S models on sale and was told that there might be a few people dotted around the world who’d still want one. But of course if they announced the standard cars were no more, then the S would de facto become that standard car and the sales pitch would be harder as a result. So perhaps there’s an element of ‘well they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ about all of this.
