Canceled, then revived as an Aston, the big 2+2 grand tourer actually rode on a chassis derived from the one that underpinned the the V-12 coupe from Coventry. The first ones to hit dealerships for the 1994 model year were powered by a supercharged version of Jaguar's AJ6 3.2L inline six, rated at 335 SAE net horsepower.
For 1999, the coupe got its styling zhuzhed up a bit, the Vantage tag appended to its name, and a honking big 5.9L DOHC 48-valve Aston Martin V-12 shoehorned into the engine bay. This motor belted out 420 horsepower and made the DB7 Vantage a seriously fast car, even if its two-ton curb weight kept it from being blindingly quick.
Car and Driver's test of a 2000 Vantage returned a 5.1 second zero-to-sixty sprint and a 13.6 second quarter at 106 mph. A decade earlier those would have been supercar numbers, but by the turn of the Millennium you could get that acceleration from the Camaro section of your local Chevy dealer's lot. The top speed of 182 miles per hour, though, was impressive for that or any other era. The car may have been a bit on the chonky side but ther was nothing wrong with its aero. And, fat or not, it still circled a skidpad at 0.85g and stopped from seventy in 178 feet.
New, that Bowland Black coupe in the photo would have set the buyer back $145,000, or more than a quarter mil in today's coinage. It was photographed with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and an M. Zuiko Digital 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens in October of 2024.
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