Aston Martin’s Muscular Vantage Is a Combination of Sophistication and Aggression

Aston Martin builds all of its cars with a peak blend of performance and luxury. Still, their six-figure creations can lean more aggressively into one side or the other of that simple recipe.

For example, the DBD707 SUV hides a 4-litre V8 engine capable of 697 horsepower, but its overall size and endless creature comforts nuzzle a little closer to luxury’s embrace. The small-batch Valour muscles up on the performance scale with its prized manual transmission and 5.2-litre, 705 horsepower V12 power plant. Meanwhile, the recently redesigned DB12 is the company’s best attempt at splitting the performance-luxury gambit right down the middle.

Amid all of those supercar machinations, the Aston Martin Vantage sneaks away to play as the most performance-centric car coming out of the Gaydon, England, factory. Redesigned for 2025, the US$191,000 coupe reasserts itself as the most dedicated “driver’s car” in a very driver-friendly line. Should this be in pounds first?

During a road drive and speed testing event at Spain’s Circuito Monteblanco about an hour outside of Seville, the new Vantage proved itself as Aston Martin’s most accessible track-day companion.

Aston Martin is the most accessible day-track companion. Aston Martin

A first look at the latest addition to its very elite Warwickshire family pulls the eyes right to the newly extended rear wells that jut out around 21-inch, forged alloy wheels. While widening the car’s haunches, the wheel positioning reduces unsparing weight and gives the new Vantage a much more athletic pose.

Beyond that muscular base, the Vantage continues the modern Aston Martin styling tradition of riding the razor’s edge between aggression and sophistication. While the car’s Italian and Swedish rivals opt for prominent fins and big scoops, Aston’s designers keep the lines low, wide, and balanced from the signature highlighted grille to the understated aerodynamic spoiler.

In the performance specs department, the Vantage now packs an AMG-built, 4.0-litre, V8 twin turbo, front-mid mounted engine, capable of 656 horsepower, and a top speed of 202 miles per house and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.4 seconds.

According to James Owen, Aston Martin’s senior manager of Vehicle Engineering, if the DB12 is the automaker’s distinguished overachiever, the Vantage is its less responsible, but equally attractive pugnacious sibling.

“The DB12 is a sports tourer and is positioned in the market as a GT,” Owen says. “It’s important for us to differentiate between Vantage and the DB12—to make sure that difference is clear for buyers and enthusiasts”

Owen describes the larger, pricier DB12 (starting MSRP of US$245,000) as more refined, while he considers the 2025 Vantage as playful and passionate. He even uses the word “brutish,” if such a term can be used for a technology-stuffed, six-figure sports car.

“The word that we keep hearing when talking about the Vantage is ‘fun,’” Owen adds. “That’s what we wanted to hear. We wanted to create a car that pulls at the heartstrings because it’s so enjoyable to drive. But, we wanted it to have a challenging character to it.”

Previous versions of the Vantage fit that punkier image. While always built for speed and powerful acceleration, the last couple editions of the Vantage were a little more harsh. The steering seemed more aggressive—demanding more input from the driver. The suspension felt tighter, deliberately transmitting more of the road’s surfaces and imperfections into the driver’s backside. If any current car in the Aston Martin line is a direct descendant of the automaker’s racing pedigree at Le Mans or in F1, it’s the Vantage.

Still, amid all this talk of driving fun and racing performance, Owen is quick to remind drivers that the Vantage is still an Aston Martin— steeped in the company’s signature identity of sophistication as the grownup’s more dignified supercar.

“The Vantage also has that added feature in its wheelhouse,” Owen explains. “Yes, it will respond to a driver pushing it in a racing scenario, but—with the technology we built into the car to stabilise the body at its most comfortable driver mode settings – the Vantage is still a very pleasant place to be.”

In keeping with such pleasantness, the interior of 2025 Vantage bears no resemblance to any race car. Handmade and stitched Haircell Leather stretches in all directions in any color the buyer prefers. The Sports Plus Seats are 8-way adjustable with heat or cooling on demand. The complete infotainment suite featuring the official Aston Martin Audio system from Bowers & Wilkins is a step up from the previous Vantage (and the current DB12).

The interior includes an infotainment suite featuring the official Aston Martin Audio system from Bowers & Wilkins. Aston Martin

Once the internal comforts and engineering feats come together, the experience behind the wheel is a sensual union of car and operator. Acceleration is smooth, yet immediate. The cornering is focused and nimble, and its rear-wheel drive allows for just enough play for the occasional drift at speed in turns.

A key piece of Aston Martin technology makes the Vantage’s elite performance potential accessible to more drivers. The ESP System (Electronic Stability Programme) debuted in the DB12, and the Vantage adopts the tech to its driver mode system. ESP takes information from multiple sensors around the vehicle, feeding the accelerometer data into a computerised concept of the car’s driving conditions and the ability of the operator.

Resulting algorithms react to those conditions, road surface issues, available grip, etc., tightening up the vehicle where necessary to aid the driver and offer as much feel and performance as the given operator can manage.

In its completed package, the 2025 Vantage is aimed at a specific buyer demographic—the driving enthusiast who puts thrills ahead of all-out creature comforts.

“For each project at Aston Martin, we have a customer profile in mind,” Owen says. “They have defined interests that highlight their demographic. For the Vantage, we consider a buyer who is perhaps new to the brand and looking into the ‘entry level’ Aston Martin. That’s a buyer who isn’t concerned with having a backseat or the DB nameplate. He or she thinks performance first and foremost.”

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

Aston Martin’s Muscular Vantage Is a Combination of Sophistication and Aggression

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.