Aston Martin Vantage | The Badge Demystified

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] did you enjoy viewing the exterior montage that was just the sprinkling of what you could expect this is one of the most prototype looking cars on the road it turns heads even in one of the most boring paint colors you can get on here china gray the entire concept of aston martin is to make this bespoke to you if you head into the dealership and you say i want lime green or i like my wife's nail polish colors you can get pretty much any color you want from teals blues reds it's amazing what you can do in the color palette and it carries over into the interior so let's talk about that now the base price for advantage coupe is around 150 000 this is 175 and when you start playing with the configurator or your local salesman gets at you the sky's the limit and you might look at this interior space and say well it looks like somebody went crazy with the alcantara and i don't disagree with you but luckily you can have it your way everything in here is customizable if you want more leather you want different color alcantara and you want different color leathers you can do all of that and that's what makes this a special experience buying an aspen over some of the other luxury or prestige brands now let's talk about some of the packages this has the comfort package which adds 17-way adjustable seats driver and passenger it also has a tech package for around 3gs that adds a touch pad now let's start with the positives the aston martin premium audio system which is around twenty three hundred dollars it sounds great audibly you're gonna be really impressed with this and the big part is this is a small space so it's hard to control but it is so isolated it's so quiet the noise floor is so low that you're not going to notice some of the problems that our audio engineer picked up on in the testing now frequency response is great there's a bit of a suck out around 1kc which you don't really notice listening to music however when we look at the harmonic distortion when you raise the volume levels in here the sub 100 hertz starts to get a little messy and same thing around the one kilohertz range the harmonic distortion goes up there too and we're trying to think about maybe it's driver related but it's something that you don't really hear audibly driving this and you're supposed to be listening to the engine anyway now let's get into the technology that doesn't work so well that is the infotainment and before i get into that i have to explain something since mercedes-benz and aston martin are tied up a bit they have a partnership part of the deal is aston martin gets to use some of these switch gear from mercedes and like the infotainment and obviously the amg engine but part of the issue with the infotainment is they are using a two generation old version of the mercedes unit in here if i had to say one really negative thing about this it's just the usability infotainment is really bad i just like to put a bag over it and never use it i just set my music up let it play and that's how i enjoy it the center gauge cluster is similar the menu navigation on the right hand side there's a ton of lag there's a ton of delay and i've actually had to reset it to factory defaults a couple times to get it to speed up but again you know you have to weigh what you're looking at in a car in terms of technology whether this is going to bother you or not but let's talk about some of the huge pros about driving this car sitting in it and the interior capacity or cargo capacity usability the hatch space is enormous and we just got done looking at cars like the c8 corvette which is a lot cheaper the lc500 and you can put way more stuff in here and the width is great the depth is good it's totally usable as a daily driver and that's something that aston martin strongly considered in the design of this they didn't want it to be like a cardboard supercar where you just can't do anything with it and the interior space follows the same idea they wanted this to be comfortable for someone up to six foot six and if you know anything about our previous videos you'll know that many manufacturers don't really think about bigger and taller people anymore you always feel like you're jammed in and in this car while it feels fitted like a sports car you can still have the height and the width and enjoy driving this let's get into the shop and talk about all the technical things that they've done with this we are underneath the aston martin vantage on the bendpak lift and what are you interviewing for another job defending my dissertation in business mark wow so before we talk about the aston martin's engineering let's talk about something a little different and that's public perception and the way a vehicle makes you feel because in that regards this car is greater than the sum of its parts if you're someone like me who grew up with an english grandfather an english dad you were taught from basically a young age to worship jag and aston martin and then on top of that you grow up with your parents watching james bond the db4 the db5 the va vantage that timothy dalton drove or more recently daniel craig it's pretty much god's status in fact it's more of a mythical creature than an actual car a character almost i would agree with that because i didn't grow up passionate about cars i had no exposure to them and the first time i even knew or heard of aston martin was because of the james bond movies and i didn't even think it was a real card to be truthful so in driving it today now we can talk about the past but that carries over now because when you put this out on the road whether whatever you think about aston martin is a brand people respond to it in such a way that i have an experience it's positive it's positive it doesn't have like if you drove around in a ferrari which i have people are like they get this mixed reaction here's another rich you are approachable in a car like this and it makes you feel good special yeah so that that's an intangible about car ownership experience that you cannot be measured let's talk about the engineering and some of this is kind of buried that we can't talk about we don't get all the information some of it's proprietary but we will talk about what we know let's address the first misnomer that this is just an amg gt in drag and yes this does have some mercedes parts mercedes now is a small owner in the aston martin company but the only thing that's really carried over is the engine block and turbos the rest of this car chassis suspension tuning transmission is all aston so aston designed a global architecture that like many companies they can share certain components with their other cars so explain that so this has about 30 of the parts from the db11 from an architecture standpoint the rest of it is vantage okay and the advantage of that no pun intended is that it's lighter and more nimble the db11 and the dbs are really long distance tours this is more of a nimble feeling daily driver so this entire car the entire body structure is all aluminum all of it uh with the exception i believe of the trunk lid which is like a carbon deposit i don't know i think it's a fiberglass composite but that's the only thing the suspension your subframe carriers that house all the suspension components the engine cradle and in the back the subframes are aluminum we have double wishbone in the front with adaptive dampers now the damper control is all aston tuned and they have some fancy marketing for it skyhook in fact this whole car mark was actually designed by a former engineer matt becker from lotus at least the suspension yes the suspension so matt becker worked for lotus for a long time i think over 15 years and lotus did a lot of contract work they obviously were not making a lot of cars and so a lot of the ways that they made money was consulting work and they would hire out matt to companies like honda hyundai when they released their genesis g80 in 2015 or well before that during the development hyundai had a real problem with setting up suspension so they brought in matt he helped to tune the dampers to teach them linearity and that's how he sets up cars now this is still more of a european tuned car so it's a little firm but it's not punishing this was designed as a daily driver that was supposed to feel nimble and fun and one of the ways he accomplished that is it is a very very quick steering ratio 2.5 turns the lock to lock and that helps to hide weight and size which it does but we'll talk about that in the driving part this has a zf torque converted automatic which is a transaxle unit in the back however you can get a seven speed dog leg manual which is amazing for many many reasons but it's more than just adding a manual transmission they have to change the way the brakes are set up which are ap racing brakes and the differential gets changed so with that you want to head to the back yeah let's take a look in the back you're gonna notice some uh aluminum plates more smoothness for airflow and this diffuser that is plastic you also have aluminum side skirts here but the big thing to talk about is the transmission or trans axle so you as we mentioned earlier have the option of a eight speed zf which is fine it's the traditional zf that you find in everything or you can get a gratiano built seven speed dog leg manual and that not only changes the whole characteristic of the car because the suspension tuning changes the bilstein dampers get reprogrammed and the rear spring rates and the rear sway bar gets about 22 stiffer so i would think that that would make it even more fun to slide about and i think in terms of character of this car if one thing which again we'll talk about it suits my personality yeah if you're more of a monkey that's probably going to help it because this car is very very refined to drive with the automatic and some of that has to do with the elsd that's in the background which is a first for aston martin in fact this is their probably most unique thing about this car coming from the prior generation astin and this is the best configured elsd i've ever felt in say the c7 and the c8 all that's trying to do is maximize your grip what this is doing is if you're like 10 15 throttle input sorry steering input with a lot of throttle it's trying to maximize grip but when you go full monkey mode it locks up like a bmw yeah it looks tremendous yeah and jack's been sliding this thing around and it really does do a good job at knowing where you need grip versus when you want to slide it so you do one of these it's like lock the back and go sideways yeah pretty cool in that regards and when you have the manual trans it's a gratiano limited slip which is a mechanical unit which i have to imagine is probably great yeah it's 38 locking under throttle and 40 locking under brake okay so uh like a lot of this car like we talked about the interior you see these tips they're not big enough for me jack you want 20 tips i want 20 tips but that's well you can't get 20 tips on this car you can get quad tips you can get quad tips you can change the grill i mean there's so much that you can do to this to to give it more personality it's a farm to table car market let's talk about the engine bay we're under the hood of the aston martin vantage jack this is where their collaboration partnership marriage to mercedes-benz comes alive yes so this is the 4-liter bi-turbo m177 amg engine however what's different from the amg gt is aston martin has its own specific ecu intake manifold intakes and exhaust manifolds it also has its own oiling system so as you look at the cross balance this is a near 50 50 weight distribution both cross and front and aft and that is really rare i mean you typically see closer to 50 50 but the cross to get it as close as they have here as you can see on the chart part of that is the design that they did with the oiling system to get this engine lowered in the chassis a little bit it's a wet sump whereas the amg gt is a dry sump which further brings out the character the fact that this is not a track car however because it's a wet sump they can get it even lower and deeper into the basically chassis of the car it looks low we're just standing here i mean the car is already low but this engine looks like it's maxed out and pushed as far back as possible now is this a mid front yes it is it's technically a mid-front engine car and a lot of that too allows them to add additional chassis bracing to this car which when compared to the prior generation aston martin vantage is 30 stiffer so the motor itself is a direct injected twin turbo v8 it makes about 503 horsepower and 505 foot-pounds of torque in the automatic variant when you add a manual you lose about 44 foot-pounds of torque and that's because they didn't want to have to beef up the clutch any further because the trans alone saves them about 70 kilograms gets like 144 pounds the car is as we're about to experience quite brisk in the automatic form factor hits 16 about 3.5 seconds to 3.6 and it does 196 miles an hour and because the turbos are in the v of the v8 there is a lot of heat to manage which is why you have these hood vents that are just wide open on both sides and then the cooling that aston martin has done which we looked at a little bit underneath but in both front sides and it expels out into the wheel well liners so there's a lot here and we could go on and on but the last thing to talk about is this was hand built by dave yes dave built it but the thing dave will want you to know mark is this is a rever what i mean by that is it builds peak power near the top of its red line which is 7 000 rpms nice i can't wait to experience it dave did a great job oh thanks dave hopefully dave's not just some ai generated character [Music] aston martin all right so [Music] you know you mix german engineering with english sensibilities you end up with a very happy jack so this is what you get when you get a twin turbo v8 with a rail exhaust you get over 500 horsepower and a 60 in less than four seconds i will tell you this this car feels much faster once you start really revving it out and getting it up into the higher speeds the transmission zf gearbox we talked about it in the shop it blends smoothness with very crisp shifts but what i would want is the seven-speed dog-leg manual trans with this car yeah of course which nobody would ever buy except like a nut case like you pretty much that would basically cement this as being the car to own under 200 thousand dollars for me suspension and let's let what about handling and feel here jack so this basically everything they've gone through mark has turned this into a gt car a gt car with a very very aggressive front end it is a very quick steering ratio and unlike an 8 series or something like that this feels surprisingly nimble [Music] and it does that part of the steering uh the steering quickness that they've designed into this is to make the car feel smaller than it really is you get some of these quicker steering ratios and it hides the overall length of the car and the wheelbase and so to me when i drove this that was the first thing i thought of it this does not feel like the size it is it rides like a long wheelbase grand touring machine when you're just cruising around but when you do what you just did before you can throw it around yes yeah it does feel really stable and i think they haven't engineered out all the character either and that's what i was worried about when i saw this it's like it's got this ultra modern look to it it's got this quiet smooth feel to it i'm like is this gonna be boring as hell and i think they found a really good balance for the type of customer that's gonna buy this they want prestige first they want the badge they want the style and some of the engineering but you can still have fun and i think that that's the biggest part when you're spending this kind of money on a car you don't just want it to be a total snooze because there's plenty of cars out there luxury cars that are a total snooze fest yeah and this has got a good dual personality in sport and well sport which is their normal mode it rides really well and you can make it quiet so let's talk about suspension damping and tuning here when you kind of wind this out and get this at a little bit of a higher speed and i'm going to have you switch steering modes once we get up there [Music] okay so once you get it up there in track mode and we're not on the most perfectly smooth pavement but it really reduces that lift effect in track so if you're on smooth payment at higher speeds this does a really good job with compression and rebound where you don't feel unstable now switch it over to your regular sport mode this brings it back down to regular driving you still have a lot of good you still have a lot of control in the suspension you don't get a ton of float but it's just firm enough and i feel like this is very more european tuned than american tuna yeah it wasn't really meant for our style payment but no nor is it porsche but it does a reasonable job at it i do think you could drive this every single day you could drive it every day and i think the main thing is when you go from your regular regular damper settings all the way to track there is a noticeably large difference between the polar extremes so it does get very firm for like high speed driving and then you can get more into a comfort mode which i still think is a little bit on the firm side for american roads like this we just got out of the lc 500 the 2021 made some major suspension and damping revisions that car is like american tuned it's super soft you glide over everything this you still feel pavement and you know again that's what you're getting in an aston martin yeah and on that note when it comes to the buyers of this car what it competes against this is a expensive car i'm not going to try to make a value proposition it's about 150 starting and as tested 179 which is a lot of money but what this car competes against according to aston martin what they've tuned it to compete against is a carrera s okay which is cheaper but not much cheaper carrera s which we're going to test here shortly the 992 you can balloon that price to 150 grand that's nuts that's absolutely nuts and i think you're still getting the personality you're getting a lot of things that i'm going to talk about in the final thoughts jack all right final thoughts on the aston martin vantage and here's the thing you have to take in account the price tag it's not for normal people it is not trying to be for normal people this is for someone that's affluent that has disposable income that values the prestige the heritage and the history that aston martin brings to the table you also have to factor in its manufacturing process this is a car that's not going through some mass production cycle it's a limited production car that has tons of hand assembly and human quality control checks so that's what allows them to make it more bespoke or customizable for that end user that needs that their factory is pristine and you can see there's a lot of pride that goes into producing this so if you love all that the price tag is going to be a non-issue for you now in terms of design the big thing is exterior there's nothing else that looks like this aside from maybe an lc 500 and that's very japanese now in terms of exterior it still has this timeless aston martin look from certain angles and some of that can be tweaked as well you have clean lines it's still muscular it's going to be super attractive in certain colors let's talk about some of the pros and cons while this still has an amg engine it's not totally esoteric it's been in production you know you can still get parts for it it uses a zf transmission which is tried and true but those aspects of the car are what kind of detracts from the personality because it's a zf it still feels the same as what you get in a hellcat or a bmw the engine still sounds very much like an amg or mercedes so that's kind of confusing but the days of that crazy sounding naturally aspirated engine that we all love is kind of disappearing and this is just the future of cars so we have to get used to it the interior space as a pro is enormous for a larger person it's a great fitted cabin but the negative parts are you got some carryover mercedes stuff in terms of technology and it drags it down hopefully they can allocate some budget and money for kind of improving that in the future as it stands this is an extremely unique vehicle that's not designed for everyone and that is what makes it so attractive but again if you could swallow the price tag and you love it just go out and buy it you're really going to enjoy this thanks for watching i'll see you next [Music] time [Music] you

Channel: savagegeese

Views: 430,607

Keywords: cars, reviews, trucks, carvana, carfax, cargurus, exotics, aston martin, db11, vantage, 2021, 2020, fun, power, lexus lc500, bmw m8, AMG GT, convertible, v8, LCF, porsche 911, Jaguar F Type, james bond, 007, no time to die, fast, loud, best new car, best used car, best exhaust, shelby gt500, Corvette c8, expensive

Id: LXa-86fQvFw

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020