Aston Martin DBS

By. Stuart Birch

I have spent two days bonding with a car. By the end of the second day the relationship had stirred from a cautious, nodding acquaintance to being dangerously close to something like passion – via interest, amusement and healthy respect. The car is Aston Martin’s new DBS.

Aston Martin likes to consider itself very cool, a fact supported by its four decades’ association with James Bond and underlined by the DBS making the cover illustration of a new book called CoolBrands, published by Superbrands. Writing in it, James Aitchison, the managing editor of the World Advertising Research Centre, says that some people may struggle “like frustrated alchemists trying to understand and define what cool is”. Superbrands provides interesting insight into this.

So does the DBS. It may be based on the company’s successful DB9, a pretty chilled out piece of kit, but it is more physically rounded – wider and lower – and it has a “soul” with a “thunder and lightning” persona, as Dr Ulrich Bez, chief executive of Aston Martin, puts it.

It is a car that has a curious effect on the environment. At the beginning of my bonding experience, which took place mainly in bucolic southwest France, I was concerned about how a lightning supercar powered by a 6.0litre, V12 engine producing 510bhp and able to reach 191mph would be received, particularly because the thunder from its twin exhausts (a modest touch, this; I had expected at least four, possibly even eight tailpipes) could probably be heard in Paris.