Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: No data available
Sounds magnificent, goes like it sounds, corners with verve, looks menacing, beautifully made.
Feels big, handling too floaty or ride too rigid with no half-measures.
Britain's answer to the Ferrari 599.
Sit in the DBS and you notice the neat, no-frills, technical-looking instruments, handsome but confusing banks of air-con, stereo and other buttons on the centre console, electric window switches that seem to work in the wrong direction, and the glowing starter button. Then you move off, aware of that great mountain of bonnet ahead and of the DBS's considerable girth but impressed by the smoothness and progression of the clutch and the ease of the gearchange, a rear-mounted Graziano transaxle similar to those used by Ferrari and Maserati. Certainly it all flows together rather better than the manual DB9.
The DBS feels big and unwieldy at first, an impression heightened by steering which is a touch rubbery and dead around the straight-ahead, which initially makes this hefty car hard to place accurately. A Ferrari 599 is better here, even if the extra weight of the DBS's steering is more in keeping with a front-engined V12 supercar. Once you have tuned into the DBS, though, it gets better and better.
That's when you discover how the front wheels are never anything but resolutely stuck to the road. The DBS tracks round a corner with every steering input translated into an exact response once there's some side loading on the tyres, and the tail is similarly glued unless you want to loosen it in a little flourish of oversteer as you power past a corner's apex. The DBS stays flat and responsive, and you have to be going very hard on a dry road to trigger the stability control system - which you can turn off if you like.
But there are two sides to the DBS's handling style. With the damping set to soft, the tail can pitch and float over undulations taken at speed, which in turn sets up a corkscrewing motion in fast corners. This doesn't affect the stability but it can feel unsettling. Switch to firm and this tail-looseness goes away, but then the ride becomes pretty unyielding. Better control of big body movements, while keeping the soft mode's relative suppleness over smaller bumps, is what's needed. You'd think that in the Bilstein dampers' 10 different settings there would be the right one somewhere. All that's needed is some revised software to make the right setting happen at the right time.
There's no problem with the brakes, though. They are massively powerful, progressive in action and inspire great confidence.
The standard seats are comfortable and supportive enough with their leather and Alcantara trim, but for the full DBS experience you need the no-cost-option lightweight seats made from carbonfibre and Kevlar. These have fixed backrests, although all other electric adjustments remain, and put you much better in touch with the DBS's dynamics because they clamp you so well, especially around the upper body, without restricting shoulder movement. They also make the DBS 20kg lighter.
The DBS isn't actually the most powerful road car to use Aston Martin's V8. That accolade belongs to the final Vanquish S, which had 520bhp rather than 510. But it also weighed more than the DBS's 1,695kg, so couldn't quite match the DBS's acceleration even if it could beat the DBS's 191mph maximum to crack the 200mph barrier.
Not that you'd mind. The DBS's engine is a magnificent thing, with a huge breadth of torque such that you can power through a series of corners and not need to drop below fifth gear. But if you do change down, you have ever more power until you reach the 6,500rpm peak, and you can almost sense the engine's disappointment when the limiter intervenes around 6,900rpm because it's still pulling hard at that point.
You need a tunnel or two to experience the DBS at its most visceral. Were you to replicate the 4.3-second 0-60mph time there, you would hear just how much like the Le Mans DBR9s the DBS can sound, and indeed how like a good V12 Ferrari. At the other end of the scale, the DBS can trickle through traffic as smoothly and untemperamentally as you could wish for. The only blot is that a very gentle prod on the accelerator, perhaps when bringing up the revs for a downshift, is hard to achieve accurately. You get either no response or it all happens in a rush until you're used to its ways.
