Over the course of its 112-year history, England’s Aston Martin Lagonda Group has never known true stability. Along with some very memorable highs, the bespoke carmaker’s curriculum vitae enumerates many bona fide lows, including seven bankruptcies. This despite the best efforts of a century’s long parade of strutting, occasionally well-intended entrepreneurs and executives who’ve come to run Aston Martin before giving up or getting shown the door. And yet the carmaker with the grand old, double-barreled name soldiers on.
At today’s prices, it takes a car-loving billionaire willing to lose big money to right a carmaker’s ship. And that’s before even approaching a shot at turning a hyper-luxury supercar brand into a success. This is especially the case for Aston Martin, a brand that from a financial perspective would much prefer to be comparative upstart Ferrari (a stripling of 78 years), which appears to have the profitable exotic sports car formula down cold, as reflected in a $90-billion+ market valuation. That is seven dozen times higher than Aston’s current capitalization and then some, despite the Italian firm selling just over twice as many cars (13,752 for Ferrari v. AML’s 6030 in 2024). Indeed, Aston CEO Adrian Hallmark (ex-Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover, Saab, and Volkswagen) has often said his mission is to turn the “high potential company into a high-performance business.”
A tall task, to be sure, but help appears to be at hand. The company’s latest lead investor (since 2020), enthusiastic Canadian fashion billionaire and AML executive chairman Lawrence Stroll—with partners Saudi Arabian Aramco and Chinese billionaire Li Shifu—seems to lead one of the more committed teams of Aston believers yet. He has organized enormous sums to grow Aston’s F1 effort (a separate company, which employs Stroll’s son Lance as a driver), most notably poaching the sport’s most accomplished engineer, Adrian Newey, with 26 F1 titles to his name. Newey went from Red Bull to captain the engineering effort at the newly formed Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 Team. Stroll, who commissioned a $270 million tech center near the Silverstone circuit, views F1 as a critical marketing tool for the brand.
Arguably even more significant is that Aston has at the same time directed heightened attention and further funds to its civilian models, with four launch/relaunches in the past two years. One of these efforts brought us last week to the company’s Park Avenue showroom in Manhattan, where we were able to see and drive, for the first time, the 2026 Vanquish Volante. Just what the doctor ordered, it’s the third generation of the Vanquish Volante and the best (and most expensive) yet.
Following the planned route up Manhattan’s West Side Highway, we head west across the George Washington Bridge in an oh-so blue-on-blue Volante, its black electric canvas folding top effortlessly tucked away beneath the strict two-seater’s neat sail panel.
Once across the span in New Jersey, we immediately exit to follow the winding Palisades Interstate Parkway north. By the time we’ve re-entered New York state a dozen or so miles up, then traveled to the maze of serpentine roads that run through and around Harriman State Park, we harbor exactly zero doubts as to the Vanquish’s potent majesty. Its DOHC V-12 engine, extensively reworked in 5.2-liter, twin-turbo form, delivers an astounding 824 horsepower and 738 lb-ft of torque. It grumbles and shrieks, an adjustably boisterous but unmistakably patrician exhaust note supplying a forceful retort to a new generation of electric Astons. Launch of said battery-electrics, in a well-timed cost-saving move, has recently been postponed from 2025 to 2030. Or perhaps even later.
As electric car boosters, we object. But as lovers of internal combustion, we rate this powerplant a memorable delight, swan song or not. It sounds great and it goes great. Mated via torque tube to a ZF eight-speed automatic gearbox at the rear, where a new e-differential distributes power equitably, this twelve-cylinder marvel is a ripper, as fast as you please. According to Aston, it makes Vanquish the uncontested winner of the current moment’s “world’s most powerful front-engine V-12 automobile” honors. Even with 4144 pounds of dry weight to shift, the cabrio completes the 0-60 run in 3.3 seconds in advance of reaching a quoted top speed of 214 mph—the highest of any roadgoing Aston, ever.
Among other things we cannot tell you, though, is whether conversation can be heard at such elevated speeds, top erected or folded. Our excuse: We would have placed a 911 call prior to setting out, requesting a flatbed for a wrecked car, along with an ambulance to collect our remains after we ran out of road at 190 mph negotiating the tight corners and switchbacks of the narrow, wooded lanes that run through Harriman. It would have been only polite. But, alas, we had no cellular signal, so no top-speed runs or airbag deployment tests for us. We can, however, report that, at lower speeds, with the soft top raised against a punishing July sun, eight layers of insulation stifle NVH as effectively as Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban muzzles free speech.
In the end, we lost neither our lives nor our licenses. Not that we didn’t give it the old college try. The Vanquish is a big, wide car, not ideally sized for narrow country lanes (meaning, come to think of it, much of the United Kingdom as well as these unspoiled backroads), but it is blessed with some of the best road manners we’ve ever experienced in an Aston. Controllable and easily placed, the ride is notably suppler than recent Astons. The company credits the model’s Bilstein DTX shocks, tuned (like the rest of the suspension with its stiffer springs and anti-roll bar) for cabrio duty and the 200-pound penalty the Volante pays for losing the Vanquish coupe’s fixed roof.
The droptop’s structure comes very close to matching the coupe for lateral stiffness, Aston reports—now 75 percent improved over the previous flagship—and we believe them. Scuttle shake and related convertible maladies don’t enter the equation, either, even on poorly surfaced roads, which the double wishbone front and multi-link rear suspension dispatch with ease. Meanwhile, throttle response on the finely fettled V-12 improves, too, with a new Boost Reserve feature that keeps the two Mitsubishi turbos spooled up at part throttle, making for a quicker, smoother speedy getaway. Meanwhile, allied with the car’s electronic stability program, a new e-differential, capable of shifting from fully open to fully locked in but 135 milliseconds, promises superior control in low- to medium-speed corners, enabling greater oversteer control and making high-speed lane changes less alarming, cornering more composed.
A big round of applause, too, for Vanquish’s lengthened wheelbase, stretched by 80 mm or just over 3 inches, all ahead of the windscreen. This permits further rearward placement of the engine, a near front mid-engine arrangement that now brings weight distribution front and rear to the platonic ideal, 50/50. We also note that its tires (Aston-specific Pirelli P-Zero’s sized 275/35YR21s up front, with 325/30YR21s to the rear) appear to have just that extra bit of ride-enhancing taller sidewall that makes so much difference when compared to the vibe-crushing stretched rubber band elevations of many supercar sidewalls. On today’s gargantuan rims, these low-profile giants accentuate road imperfections in desperately expensive cars as readily as they do in economy transport, degraded ride quality becoming endemic in recent times as cars grow ever heavier and wheels ever larger.
Here, the Vanquish Volante takes an honest step in the right direction and rides quite nicely, thank you. Though one shudders to think what the Volante might have weighed and what it might have ridden like if it didn’t sport a bonded aluminum chassis and a very wide body made entirely of carbon fiber (highlighted by what we suspect is the widest Aston grille ever). Very neatly finished carbon fiber, one might add, as befits a machine that won’t leave much change from half a million dollars: $483,000 sticker price plus $5000 gas guzzler tax and a $1700 delivery charge for a grand total of $489,700. Coupes check in $41,000 cheaper at $448,700, delivered. Both figures are before options, which are, as any hyper-luxury carmaker can tell you, the profit-rich name of the game. As one might expect, exterior colors, leather hides and trim finishes can be specified to suit the new owner’s taste (or lack thereof) with only the limits of one’s imagination and the required extra funds standing in the way. Fitted luggage for the decent-sized trunk, anyone?
For all its expense, all the visual and technical drama, driving the Volante is not difficult. A very smooth, indecently fast express for open roads and sunny days, it’s a grand tourer with serious sporting overtones and a fresh infusion of “olde-world” quality that some Astons of not-too-distant memory lacked. The sound of the doors closing is impressive. And while we wouldn’t necessarily recommend any Vanquish for daily urban use, driving in traffic on our way back to the city and Aston’s Park Avenue showroom in the Volante was exceedingly pleasant, with smooth throttle tip-in and seamless gear changes, powerful air conditioning, comfortable seats and today’s expected modern complement of dashboard tech including Apple CarPlay and all the lane departure warnings one could ever want or need. Hard keys, in addition to standard touch screen stuff, strike a happy balance between the old and new. Not that new tech is lacking; drivers may select between five driving control modes, (GT, Sport, Sport +, Wet and Individual), for instance, and different muffler volumes, from mild to wild, with intuitive paddle shifters to handle gear selection.
Aston Martin hope to sell 1000 examples of the new Vanquish, what it calls its “halo” model, this year, with some 400 examples being the open-topped Volante. As the world’s well-heeled citizens follow the time-honored maxim—”The rich get richer”—we expect that the customers will turn up in sufficient number. Even today, many credit Aston’s historic James Bond tie up, which commenced almost half the company’s lifetime ago, for the brand’s longevity. It certainly didn’t hurt. But it’s the current offerings that count. Meaning Aston may be in luck. The Vanquish may be hella expensive. But it’s quite the machine.
Highs: Revised DOHC V-12 makes this the fastest Aston ever. Carefully engineered, with improved performance, ride, handling, NVH, and build quality.
Lows: Eye-watering price, still a bruiser weight-wise, plus the scary depreciation curve that almost surely awaits owners.
Takeaway: A graceful patrician, the most compelling Aston in recent memory. The most convincing proof of substance undergirding Aston’s upscale intentions. Only the top 0.01 percent of income earners need apply.
