The Italian Graziano six-speed manual transmission and the ZF six-speed automatic are mounted at the rear, driven by a carbon-fiber driveshaft running at crankshaft speed and mounted inside a huge cast-aluminum torque tube that serves as the structural spine of the car. The ZF is a second-generation drive-by-wire transmission, operated by large, round PRND buttons set in the dashboard. On the right roads, at the right time, the driver can use the magnesium shifter paddles mounted onto the back side of the steering wheel for manual-mode driving, and there is no clutch assembly like some manumatics have. This one has a torque converter, and it shifts like lightning, up or down, helped by a drivetrain with a whole lot less rotational inertia than those in most high-performance cars.
This drop-dead gorgeous DB9 is the spiritual and sequential successor to Aston Martin's best-selling car ever, the DB7. As such, it represents the best that Aston Martin can do with current technology, and with help from its corporate cousins at Ford, Mazda and Volvo.
The slick, sleek, sexy DB9 is a car Aston Martin CEO Dr. Ulrich Bez characterizes as a cross between a sports car and a grand touring car but definitely not a supercar. The supercar in this house is the limited-production Vanquish, of which only about 300 a year are built.
Bez said, "It doesn't matter whether the car will go from 0 to 60 in 4.9 sec. or 4.7 sec. It doesn't matter that it will go 185 miles an hour. What matters is that it is a beautiful high-performance car that you can drive every day to work, or take on a long tour to anywhere."
Dr. B, you are absolutely right! For the record, the DB9 will indeed rush from stopped to 60 mph in 4.9 sec., from stopped to 100 mph in 10.5 sec., do a 50-to-70-mph punch in 2.3 sec., and top out at 186 mph.
The DB9 is the first Aston Martin ever to be designed, engineered, proved out and virtually crash-tested using the latest in computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing. All of its crash tests and aero studies were performed at the Volvo crash lab in Sweden. Ford and Mazda also participated directly in its development. In terms of up-front costs, this is the biggest program in the company's history by far, requiring the build of 53 prototypes, 25 for crash testing and 38 for testing in labs, on jigs and on the road to the tune of one million accumulated road miles. And they did it all, from start to finish, in 38 months, a speed that Aston Martin simply wasn't used to before this.
The striking DB9 body was designed by Aston Martin's Danish chief designer, Henrik Fisker, to have as few parts, pieces, cutlines, shutlines and openings as possible. There are no separate front and rear bumpers as such, and absolutely everything fits together into an organic sports car. It's not tiny, either, at 185 in. long, on a 107.8-in. wheelbase-5.8 in. longer than the DB7's, for more interior room and more stable handling. At 73.8 in., it's almost 2 in. wider than a DB7. While it has a rather high drag coefficient of 0.34 (for reference, the Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan generates a 0.29), the body, which was developed in a Formula One rolling-road wind tunnel, generates almost no front or rear lift at high speeds, making it remarkably stable.
The DB9 is built in a brand-new factory, and built like no other mass-produced sports car, using a combination of aluminum stampings, aluminum extrusions, aluminum castings and magnesium castings to make it one of the lightest cars in its class at a mere 1,710kg or 3,762 lb (some credit is certainly due to Lotus Engineering, which pioneered many of these construction techniques on the Vanquish supercar and helped Aston Martin carry them forward into the DB9 program). The DB9 is 25% lighter than the DB7, twice as stiff and twice as strong. Engineering boss Jeremy Main said, "We could bolt a Jaguar Formula One car on top of the DB9, and it would still weigh less than the Bentley Continental!"
The DB9 uses a combination of composite fenders and decklid, an all-aluminum body and hood and an aluminum frame, some of which is joined using a world-first ultrasonic welding process, which yields no heat and uses only 5% of the energy of electric welders.
The DB9 will be powered by a double-overhead-cam 48-valve 60-degree V12, an engine originally developed from two conjoined Ford Duratec 3.0-liter V6 engines for the little Mondeo sedan. In the DB9, it will be rated at 450 bhp at 6000 rpm and 420 lb-ft of torque at 5000 rpm, nowhere near the top of the horsepower heap.But every horse runs hard, and the power is made without variable valve timing or variable intake tracts. The V12 makes 85% of peak torque at only 1500 rpm, so you don't have to wring its neck to get very serious acceleration, but it sure is fun to wind the tach around to 7000 rpm, well above the recommended redline. Aston Martin says the six-speed manual DB9 will do 0 to 60 mph in 4.9 sec., and the automatic will do the same run in 5.1 sec. I say it feels, and sounds, even quicker than that.
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