Aston Martin

British super car offers high-speed, high-style cruising with a few quirks.

NEW YORK (By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNNMoney.com) August 16, 2006 — Tradition can be a such a wonderful thing. It keeps us in touch with our past and it communicates our varied cultures.

But sometimes it's a pain.

In the Aston Martin DB9, for example, you put the key into the ignition and turn it, but nothing happens. You have to reach across and press the backlit glass button with the winged Aston Martin logo etched into it.

The 12-cylinder engine starts up with a rough growl then settles into a low-rev rumble.

Having to insert a key then press a button seems to me like a silly bit of make-work just to start a car. But it's a tradition.

Next, you pull a tiny toggle in the center console and up and away goes the cloth roof, folding backward into the trunk, leaving the sky above you and the open road ahead.

Another button press, this time on the "D" for Drive button. The $185,000 DB9 Volante I was driving for the day had a 6-speed automatic transmission controlled, not by the usual gear-selection lever, but by push buttons in the dashboard for Park, Reverse, Neutral and Drive.

I learned quickly to be gentle on the gas pedal. The DB9 moves out without hesitation. After a few blocks of city traffic to the nearest highway entrance, the car and I were cruising happily north out of the city.

The point of a V-12 engine isn't just power, by the way. At 5.9-liters and a maximum output of 459 horsepower, you can get more power with a V-8 and it costs less, too.

But those eight cylinders have to do real work. The dozen in the DB9 barely rolled out of the backyard hammock for anything less then felony speeds. At 70 miles per hour, the tachometer showed what would have been a fast idle in most other cars.

That's practically the entire point of an Aston Martin, come to think of it. It's something that British luxury cars do so well. If you want thrills, the Brits don't do that. If you want the car to handle the performing for you, well that's the sort of service you're paying for.

In the case of the DB9, the car itself performs brilliantly, accelerating smartly from any speed. It feels balanced and assured in turns. But, overall, it can leave you feeling a bit like a cook banished from the kitchen.

The steering offers only polite resistance as you round bend after bend with your right foot down close to the fine carpeting. In the automatic version you can shift gears using leather-trimmed metal paddles at the sides of the steering wheel. But the shifts aren't quick and precise. For my own afternoon drive, I went back to letting the car handle it all for me.

Allowed to be what it is, a rapid transit tourer, the DB9 is a pleasure. With the top down and the clouds blurring overhead, you and your beloved passenger can enjoy a scramjet-powered magic carpet ride. If you try pretending you're out for a day at the track, though, you're in for a disappointment.

The DB9 does have back seats, by the way, but they've been cleverly engineered to resist all forms of human occupation. No worries about noisy kids along for the ride. I assure you, you'll be leaving them far behind.

The Jaguar XK, from Aston Martin's poorer corporate sibling, offers a similar sort of experience. The XK isn't nearly as quick, of course. More importantly, it isn't an Aston Martin.

That's no small matter. Aston Martin makes much of the fact that each car is a handmade piece. While the actual benefit of so much reliance on fallible human hands becomes less obvious with each passing Lexus, it does convey an undeniable exclusivity.

Aside from the back seats, which can simply be ignored, the DB9 does offer a few petty annoyances. Greatest among them, to me, are door handles, both inside and out, that seemed designed more for the sake of design itself than for actual use by human hands.

When I finally parked the car and asked myself the question "Is this worth a total price of $185,000," that proved difficult. It's certainly not true that no car is worth that much. The Rolls-Royce Phantom, for example, is clearly worth twice that. In the sumptuously loaded Phantom, though, the value practically pours from the rear-hinged back doors which, by the way, each offer you a silver-handled umbrella should it be required. And it is, in its own whafty way, a pleasure to drive.

My attempts to rationally tote it up having failed, I somehow ended up wanting the car and wanting to keep driving. It came down to four things. It's gorgeous, it's fast, the roof comes off and it's an Aston Martin. For whatever its failings, that's still a powerful combination.