Not only is Aston Martin sticking with ICE engine for the foreseeable future, but it has no plans to downsize its mills.
The British sports car maker unveiled a redesigned version of its V-12 on Wednesday. We won’t have to wait long to see the hand-built 12-cylinder in action, either. It’s expected to be under the hood of the brand’s next flagship, which will launch later this year.
The new engine makes its debut during a time when most premium automakers, like Bentley, are moving away from 12-cylinders altogether. It also arrives just weeks after Aston chairman Lawrence Stroll said that the company would continue to build vehicles with combustion engines well into the next decade due to lower-than-expected EV demand. We don’t know how the mill’s displacement will compare to the marque’s outgoing 5.3-liter V-12, but it says that it has been “completely redesigned.” The changes include a strengthened cylinder block, redesigned cylinder heads, a revised fuel system with a more efficient flow rate, and a pair of higher-speed, reduced inertia turbochargers for increased performance.
Aston is just making modifications for the sake of change. The brand claims the new V-12 will pump out 824 horses and 738 ft lbs of twist. That makes it comfortably more potent than the most powerful iteration of the current V-12 which produces 759 hp and 664 ft lbs of torque. That engine can be found under the hood of DBS 770 Ultimate. Up until now, the ultra-sleek grand tourer had been the most powerful sports car in the automaker’s history, a title it will lose when the brand’s new flagship debuts.
That car is expected to be unveiled during the second half of 2024. We know little about it right now, except that it will feature the new V-12. A video accompanying Wednesday’s announcement, entitled “Dawn of a New V-12 Era,” which prominently features the words “All will be vanquished.” Naturally, this has led to speculation from outlets like Motor1.com that the flagship will be the next Vanquish, a nameplate that hasn’t been used since 2018 Others, like Car and Driver, believe the video’s tagline is a smokescreen, and that the DBS’s successor could be based on the DB12.
Either way, the new model sounds like it’s going to be a brute that delivers the “sounds and smell” that customers have come to expect from the marque.
