Living with Aston Martin's 697bhp V8 answer to the Porsche Cayenne

Less running in and getting to know you with the Aston Martin DBX707 this month, more hitting the ground running and we’ll come back to the pleasantries at a later date. From within a week or so of collecting our Buckinghamshire Green machine from Gaydon, it hasn’t stopped, but unfortunately they’ve been miles restricted to motorways – and not even ones that lead to anywhere interesting. Monotonous and repetitive at best, utterly forgettable the norm. There are only so many alternative routes you can seek out when confronted with another late-night M25 closure.

Anyway, it has meant that rather than spending time experimenting with the drive modes to find my preferred engine, suspension and gearbox settings to program the individual mode with, I’ve spent it setting up the infotainment system. Which didn’t take long due to the fact the Mercedes-Benz system used by Aston Martin is nearly as old as the company itself.

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This won’t be news to anyone, as it’s well-documented how poor the HMI is in Aston’s rather expensive products and further evidence of the challenge faced by those who build as many cars in a year as Mercedes does before the first tea break of each day. Manufacturers are investing huge sums into in-car tech, both the hardware and software, and also the budget to talk endlessly about it. And yet after nearly 4000 miles I haven’t given it a second thought until I came to write this update.

In between squeezing between the kerbs at Heathrow car parks and getting RSI clasping fuel pumps (25mpg on a good run, 19 not unusual), MVD continues to demonstrate the benefits AM’s engineers seized upon in developing a performance SUV built on bespoke platform rather than one supplied by a group and expected to be all things to all brands that use it.

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That said, when the 707’s dampers are left in Comfort it feels at its least special, a little normal for a car the team sweated over to elevate from the 542bhp standard example. There’s more movement across the body and it feels too close to an SUV in that it lacks the body control that marks the 707 out when you tighten up the chassis. Select Sport and that tightness is immediate, injecting poise and removing the fidget in the air springs that’s noticeable at low speeds in Comfort. And in Sport there’s no apparent trade-off in ride comfort; if anything I personally think it’s better.

Like our previous DBX, the 707 is sensitive to tyre pressures when it comes to ride quality. The book suggests 41 psi front, 45 psi rear for light loads, but a single psi drop of the 23-inch Pirellis settles the low-speed manners across the board. The factory-recommended pressures I get; Aston needs them as high as possible to help reach emissions targets (although at 323g/km I’m not convinced sacrificing ride quality is making a huge difference). But having the default suspension setting too soft is an odd one to me; I think the majority of customers would prefer the taut Sport setting as the car’s default, to deliver a more settled, reactive and composed experience from the off.

Other observations: I’d like the whole steering wheel to be trimmed in Alcantara rather than part of it (or at least for this to be an option) and the electric tailgate release is inconsistent, sometimes opening at the press of the button on the fob, in the car or on the tailgate, and sometimes merely delatching and requiring human intervention. The former is a genuine First World problem, the latter a problem I need to have looked at. Along with the magazine’s fuel budget.

This story was first featured in evo issue 312