Driving the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Coupe

There are five drive modes in the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage coupe: Sport, Sport Plus, Track, Individual, and Wet.

No Normal. No Comfort. No Eco. No point in pretending anyone is going to drive this car in a tame manner.

A 656-horsepower twin-turbo V8 under the hood, rear-wheel drive (RWD), and a chassis built for pure athleticism make Aston’s signature car a brutal tool with a single purpose. Which makes sitting in traffic in one feel a bit like walking an angry guard dog through a children’s birthday party: You’re just restraining this thing.

You’d need race track access to test even 20% of what the Vantage can do. I had the unique experience late this summer of driving it back-to-back with a Mazda MX-5 Miata, learning the visceral difference between a car built to be most enjoyable at legal speeds and, well, a car used as the safety car in Formula 1 racing.

But I found the Aston’s sweet spot, not at a track day, but on a long, winding road that coursed through Northern Virginia horse country on a bright Sunday morning when the leaves showed the first hints of turning. Few things smooth out the soul and slow the pulse like a beautiful drive in a car with lively handling, with no one else around.

There’s a button on the center console of the Vantage that opens a baffle in the exhaust to make it louder, in case you’re not drawing enough attention in your highlighter-yellow quarter-million-dollar supercar. But this thing is at its best when there’s no one around.

Which Trim Level

Aston Martin builds the Vantage Coupe in regular and S form, as well as a pair of roadsters with the same two trims. The difference is mostly a matter of tuning. They get the same 4.0-liter twin turbo V8 — a reworked Mercedes-AMG engine. But Aston credits the Vantage with a 3.6-second sprint to 60 and the Vantage S with 3.4 seconds.

My tester had plenty of expensive options, from a Bowers & Wilkins audio system (a $10,300 upgrade) to a $14,100 paint job (in Cosmopolitan Yellow). See the window sticker in the gallery below for precise details.

Favorite Feature

The best features of the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage all have to do with sound.

The electric vehicle (EV) age has scrambled our understanding of speed. The quickest cars I’ve driven in the last few years have almost all been electric. I recently piloted a Lucid Air sedan that can get from zero to 60 faster than the Vantage, though it seats five and looks an order of magnitude less dramatic.

Downshift the Vantage and open it up a bit on a winding road, though, and you won’t care. All the noise and drama of internal combustion make zero-to-60 feel faster in a V8-powered car than it does in an objectively faster EV. I found myself using that ridiculous button that opens the baffle with no one else around because I wanted the sonorous theater of a real, glorious, old-fashioned engine.

Years of testing cars have left me a firm believer in the electric future. But this car reminds me what is so deeply pleasing about the gasoline-powered present.

The Bowers & Wilkins Halo surround sound system, with 3D speakers in the headliner, is one of the best I’ve ever encountered in a car. It’s easier for audio engineers to tune a perfect audio experience for just two seats, and all 1,170 watts of this one are tuned astoundingly well. 

What It’s Like to Drive

Automotive journalists love to argue over whether the Vantage is a pure sports car or a Grand Tourer — that is, a luxurious, beautiful 2-seater as powerful as a sports car but slightly more tuned for comfort.

A country drive in the Vantage won’t settle the question. A big, twin-turbo V8 in front of you putting down all its power to oversized wheels behind you feels deeply, almost subliminally powerful. That deep, rumbling exhaust note underlines it in a way you can feel in your bones. It’s hard not to feel this is a pure performance car.

Handling is lively at legal speeds. Paradoxically, steering may be heavier than what you’re used to in a family sedan, but that feels more alive and responsive. Dynamic torque vectoring means the weight of the steering wheel feels serious in your hands, but the car’s response is lithe and whiplike-quick.

Standard Michelin Pilot Sport S tires glue it to the road. Brake feel is progressive, but should you need to stand on it, the Vantage can stop in a stunningly short distance.

I didn’t get track time, but didn’t want it. The Vantage cries for an undulating country road and feels most at home there. You may even find yourself turning off that extraordinary sound system to enjoy letting the car sing you home.

Interior Comfort and Technology

The 2025 Vantage’s interior follows a design scheme common to supercars, but one that is fading today. It seats the driver and passenger in deep wells, separated by a tall center console filled with buttons and switches, creating a cockpit-like feel.

It’s what you want in a car this powerful. The switchgear is substantial and heavy, conveying a feeling of quality. The central touchscreen is not overly large, showing that the drive is your entertainment.

It does, however, have a high-tech feature almost no other car on the market this year can offer. Aston Martin is the only automaker in the world, so far, to sign on to the next generation of Apple’s CarPlay phone projection system.

Called CarPlay Ultra, it lets you control both of the car’s display screens — the driver’s display and the central unit — as projections of your phone. You can select several odometer and speedometer displays not created by Aston Martin, but by Apple. Your phone can adjust the car’s temperature and activate the heated seats.

If there’s an improvement to CarPlay Ultra, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Whether you use the car’s native control interface or one chosen by Apple, you’re tapping the same screen to turn up the heat.

Limitations

The old-fashioned concept of a Grand Tourer includes a vision that you could take the car on a long holiday. With the Vantage’s tiny hatch area (just 12 cubic feet), you’d better be packing only bathing suits.

Key Considerations

Price is not likely a serious consideration for anyone shopping for this car, but I can’t help but notice that even an ultra-rare Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 comes in cheaper than this and looks extraordinary in its own way.

James Bond wouldn’t be caught dead in one, though.