Road Trip Like James Bond in Aston Martin’s DB12

Aston Martin has been celebrating its 110th anniversary throughout this year. With more than a century under its very expensive belt, you’d think the automaker would’ve already served all of the luxury model types. Still, the experts out of Gaydon, England, managed to coin a first for the company this summer.

The DB12, which has a base price of US248,000, will arrive on the scene christened as not only Aston Martin’s but the world’s first “super tourer,” what the company defines as an elite, immaculately styled powerhouse built for long leisurely drives. While the DB line is recognised for its sophisticated, mature lines, the Super Tourer label stamped on the DB12 puts the focus on the interior cockpit surrounding its front seats with all of the essential luxury appointments.

While there is a back seat in a modern DB model, it’s there more or less for appearances and to make insurers happier. You might be able to fit a ventriloquist’s doll back there, but that’s about it. Practically speaking, this is an ultra-luxury two-seater. Inside the cabin wrapping around the snug, contoured leather seats, the owner finds the interior focused on the driving experience.

The infotainment screen is lowered and out of the driver’s direct eye line. The HUD is clean and centred for the operator’s frequent checks. The adjustable steering wheel offers oversize paddle shifters for confident flicks, and the gauge cluster is tightly arranged as it would be for a track car. Meanwhile, a new Bowers & Wilkins 15-speaker stereo system combined with impressive soundproofing keeps your music inside and the clumsy noises of a rude outside world at bay.

The adjustable steering wheel offers oversize paddle shifters for confident flicks. Aston Martin

The car’s DB9 or DB11 predecessors were just as pretty and equally capable, but neither earned that super tourer title. According to Simon Newton, Aston Martin’s director of vehicle performance, buyers drove that evolution toward this new identity.

“The market and brand expectation are for elevated performance in addition to refinement,” Newton says. “There’s keen interest in more extreme duality of purpose, such as increasing the breadth of capability whilst preserving the grand-touring character.”

The DB12 must offer supercar performance with its indulgent comfort. Newton insists his team met those expectations by focusing on refinement when the car is on the move to overcome the pavements imperfections—while keeping the feel of driving intact.

“The car needed to exude more dynamic capabilities,” he explains. “Our philosophy was to have a structurally stiffer chassis, which would help with comfort and dynamics, then tune the suspension for additional comfort with systems capable of controlling the body in sportier driving. Every control should be predictable and easy to use. Linearity of response, including steering, braking, and throttle, was key to making a refined car easy to drive fast.”

The DB12 can’t help but drive fast with an all-new, 671-horsepower V8 engine. The car builder informs the world it’ll do 0-60 mph in a tick north of 3 seconds and top out around 202 mph. While the car keeps its voice down while idling or cruising, it lets loose a roar when the driver puts a toe down to pass mere mortals along the roadways.

Those performance numbers should put gearheads at ease if they worried about Aston Martin thrills fading away with the company phasing out its largest engines in favour of more efficient V8 units. The V12 is headed into the sunset, but Aston Martin’s in-house tuned eight cylinders achieve power and acceleration in line with previous, heavier engines.

“The high-performance V8 engines are engineered to give the best balance of response, power, torque, and efficiency for any given Aston Martin platform,” Newton explains. “A V8 engine is more efficient and allows for flexibility to match powertrain characteristics to the product.”

The DB12’s engineers employ up-to-date turbocharger technology to achieve V12 power with less weight and more immediate response.

“With our expertise surrounding V8 engines, we are able to engineer the very best combinations of turbochargers, inlets, compression ratios, and camshafts, along with in-house engine calibration, for each and every application,” Newton adds.

With the power more than ample and readily on demand, Newton’s department needed to restrain it when the vehicle was in comfort travel mode over hill and dale.

“Some technologies were a prerequisite for performance, such as the tires and an advanced ESP [Environmental Response System],” he says. “We also invested in technologies which helped define the dual character of the DB12. For example, the dampers and suspension have a greater range of performance, allowing for comfort but also immediate control of reactive, powerful damping when needed for dynamic driving.”

A well-chosen test run through the hills above Monaco put the DB12’s dynamic capabilities to the test around hairpins and past lesser cars stubbornly unwilling to clear the way. Even the occasional glut of well-heeled traffic served a purpose—confirming the cabin seating ergonomics would cozily stand up to long-haul transport.

Any weaknesses remain mere quibbles. The centre console infotainment screen is small for cars at this technological level. However, the engineers at Aston Martin want very little to distract from the driving experience. The satellite navigation is touchy, but the DB12 has the ability to update its onboard software automatically, and Aston Martin should have those wrinkles well ironed out by the time the car heads out to its first buyers.

The designers here kept many of DB11’s lines and flair intact, while lowering the car’s profile and smoothing out the bonnet and haunches. Aston Martin

Finally, Penta’s test vehicle lacked a massage seat option. Admittedly, that would add weight to the machine, but it’s a feature that’s fair to expect in a grand touring, US$200,000-plus ride.

None of those minor complaints detract from the car’s beauty. The designers here kept many of DB11’s lines and flair intact, while lowering the car’s profile and smoothing out the bonnet and haunches. The final effect is unmistakable and eye-capturing.

Like its supercar and hyper-luxury competitors, Aston Martin will lean into hybrids and complete electrification in the near future. Though the automaker recently put its legendary V12 engines to rest, it must please driving enthusiasts everywhere to know that the V8 lives on in the DB12.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.