Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £83,000 to £94,000
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.
With its expansion to 4.7-litres, the Aston Martin V8 Vantage at last has the engine it deserved from the start. It is of considerable, albeit academic, interest to note that its 420bhp is the same now as quoted for Aston's 6-litre V12 when first put under the bonnet of the DB7 in 1999, and even today is just 50bhp short of that engine's output in a DB9.
On paper, all the effort seems barely worth it: the 0-60mph time is trimmed back by 0.2sec to 4.7sec while top speed rises 5mph to 180mph. But out in the real world, the car's performance has been transformed.
You notice most how many fewer gearshifts are required: on a road that would once have required constant juggling between second and third gears to keep the engine on song, you can now just slot it into third - or even fourth - and leave it there, leaving you free to concentrate on driving and enjoying the ride. On a more downbeat note, gearshift quality, if improved at all, requires further work, as it remains quite heavy, slow, imprecise and quite out of keeping with the car's otherwise entirely sharpened-up responses.
Impressively, just as much progress has been made in the corners. The Vantage is still as forgiving and indulgent as ever, even if you disable the electronic stability programme, but what has been introduced is better feel from the steering, more grip from the tyres and a tighter, more precise reaction to any given input. It's probably still not quite Porsche 911 or Audi R8 good, but we've be surprised if it did not turn out to be the next best thing and close enough as to make no difference to the vast majority of prospective purchasers.
One of the few areas left unchanged are the brakes, as Aston Martin feels they were already overspecified for the job. We didn't drive the new Vantage on the track to give them the ultimate workout, but in many hours driving hard on tortuous and hilly roads, they gave not one moment of concern.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Aston Martin V8 Vantage
wrote on 07 07 2008
wrote on 08 11 2006
wrote on 25 07 2006