Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £83,191 to £135,000
Modifications to the engine and chassis answer most dynamic questions originally raised about the car.
Revised interior is still looks better than it works.
A clever and successful update to Aston Martin's best-seller, offering improvements where needed, leaving alone where not.
Time was when a long trip in an Aston Martin could turn into a will-it-or-won't-it odyssey into the unknown, as likely to end up on the back of a breakdown truck as at your intended destination. Happily that time passed many, many years ago and, with Aston Martins now being made with a degree of automation at its new factory in the Midlands, we have seen standards improve hand over fist.
That said, an Aston Martin is still a very low-volume product assembled slowly and with a much greater degree of human input than that lavished upon, say, a Porsche 911. While this provides the V8 Vantage with a bespoke feel, it also means it feels less precisely assembled than its key rivals, the 911 and Audi R8. And if you drove all three over 100,000 identical miles, we'd not mind betting that it would be the Aston that proved the less dependable of the trio.
Even so, build quality should no longer be seen as a reason not to buy this or any other Aston and, when you look at the quality of the materials used, if not always the way they are assembled, it's clear that Aston Martin is up there with the best this kind of money can buy.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Aston Martin V8 Vantage
wrote on 07 07 2008
wrote on 08 11 2006
wrote on 25 07 2006