Aston Martin Refines Its Exotic Family Car

The DBX, in base or 707 form, is certainly practical for everyday activities.

It’s a two-row SUV whose rear passengers enjoy plenty of legroom, separate climate controls, and heated seating. Although the carbon ceramic brakes are standard, lifestyle options include accessories for transporting pets and “event seating” to enjoy tailgate parties. The latter are amenities once seen only in the popular Range Rover—a car that now has a lot of competition.

“The average mileage driven in our SUVs is two to three times that of the sports cars we sell,” says Alex Long, a product and strategy executive at Aston Martin, which was presenting its upgraded 2025 DBX 707 in Edinburgh earlier this month. “It’s a huge ‘conquest’ car, meaning that three-quarters of the initial buyers were new to the brand. Previously they might have said, ‘I love Aston Martin, but the cars aren’t practical for me.’”

The DBX 707s at Scotland’s famed Gleneagles golf resort.
Jim Motavalli

The redesigned interior on the test car was a riot of red leather, even on the hand holds. Carbon fibre, in a process co-developed by Aston, is mostly decorative on the interior, though it’s employed for lightness in the tailgate and tailgate surround. The car lacks a head-up display, but it has just about every other modern amenity, including Apple CarPlay and an (optional) 23-speaker, 1,600-watt Bowers & Wilkins sound system that is new in the 2025 model. There is a 12.3-inch instrument cluster and a 10.25-inch central display. The bottom line for the 707 is US$249,000, putting it considerably below Rolls-Royce Cullinan territory (that one starts at US$392,000). Deliveries began in the second quarter of this year.

At the wheel of the DBX 707 in right-hand drive form
Aston Martin photo

The power comes from a four-litre, twin-turbo V8 obtained from Mercedes-AMG. The output is 697 horsepower and 663 pound-feet of torque, shifted by an also-Mercedes-derived nine-speed wet-clutch automatic. The bulk of the time you’re in rear-wheel drive, but power is directed to the front axle as needed, and the DBX is a capable off-road performer. Americans will also want to know that despite being derived from a long line of two-seat sports cars, the DBX can haul nearly 6,000 pounds.

Big V8s can move a lot of weight, and despite its 4,949 pounds the DBX 707 can reach 60 miles per hour in 3.1 seconds and attain 193 mph.

More than half of Aston’s current sales are of the DBX SUV, and even in Scotland—where the small car used to reign supreme—it’s apparent that the SUV is taking over the roads, Long says. North America is Aston’s biggest market, accounting for 35% of sales.

The DBX was launched in 2020 and the upmarket 707 in 2022. The platform is not used on any other car. Andy Tokley, chief engineer for the DBX, says the chassis layout of the refreshed model has been modestly redefined for better passenger comfort. There’s ample rear legroom, and fully adaptive shock absorbers, air suspension, and active roll bars deliver a smooth ride. But not too smooth. The tweaks to the DBX included exhaust note tuning so that passengers hear more of that distinctive V8 rumble, Tokley says.

The DBX could be seen as Aston Martin’s best bet for an electric drivetrain, although the company is actively working with American brand Lucid on EVs and plans are somewhat delayed. Aston was to have launched an EV in 2025 but chairman Lawrence Stroll recently told Autocar that “consumer demand is not what we thought it was two years ago.” Four EVs have reportedly been designed, but it will likely be at least 2026 before we see one of them.

The DBX group on the trail
Jim Motavalli

Aston Martin’s portfolio includes accessible, almost mainstream, models like the DBX and exotics like the US$3 million Valkyrie supercar, of which 150 coupes and 85 Spyders have so far been built. Only 40 are left to be constructed. And in addition to the cars, well, there’s real estate. In the wake of Porsche and Bentley, the company developed the Aston Martin Residences in Miami, which had its grand opening in April.

By that time, 99% of the 391 luxury condominiums, located where the Miami River meets Biscayne Bay, had already been sold. But the US$59 million triplex penthouse with 27,191 square feet of living space is available, an Aston spokeswoman says. The 66-storey building is constantly reminding occupants of the Aston brand, whose cues adorn door handles, room number signs, and door tabs.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Aston Martin Refines Its Exotic Family Car

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.