If you look at the lineage of Aston Martin’s main production grand tourer over the years, it goes straight from the DB9 of the 2000s and early 2010s to the DB11 in 2016. Why did they seemingly just skip DB10? Is the number 10 unlucky in British culture? Turns out, A) it didn’t and B) no. In fact, Aston Martin did indeed build a DB10; it just never made production.
A few years before the DB11 came along, work was underway on Daniel Craig’s fourth James Bond movie, “Spectre.” Director Sam Mendes, who helmed the wildly successful and, by most accounts, very good “Skyfall,” was returning, and he wanted a new Aston Martin for Bond to drive. Enter the DB10, a car that was originally a concept sketch for the next Vantage, but became its own special model brought to life specifically for the movie. Fun fact: this was apparently the very first time an entirely new car was made for a Bond film.
Movie Vantage
Mendes wanted the car to serve as a sort of spiritual successor — but not a direct retro-adaptation of — the superspy’s iconic DB5. Aston design boss Marek Reichman spoke to Top Gear about it at the time, saying, “This isn’t a mere pastiche of the original,” and that “We don’t want a parody, otherwise why not just get an original DB5.”
To modern eyes, the DB10 may look like a lot of the Astons that have come since, but at the time, it was quite a departure. It was built using the underpinnings of the V8 Vantage of the era, and eventually fulfilled its original purpose, heavily influencing the next-gen Vantage that showed up in 2018. A shark-like front end would eventually be seen on the production DB11, and behind that gaping maw sat a 4.7-liter V8. It had a longer wheelbase than the Vantage it was built upon while being almost as wide as the One-77 hypercar.
Within movie canon, Q says the DB10 can go from zero to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds. The car was also fully bulletproof, according to Q, and hiding “a few tricks up her sleeve,” such as an ejector seat with a parachute system, a rear-mounted twin-barrel machine gun with a rear window digital targeting system, and two flamethrowers in the exhaust.
Slower than it sounds
In reality, the Aston had a claimed a zero-to-60 time of 4.7 seconds and a top speed of 190 mph. All of the DB10’s body panels were made of carbon fiber, and only 10 were ever built — eight used in filming, two for promotional purposes. The promo cars probably didn’t shoot flames.
As cool and undoubtedly pretty as the DB10 itself is, its big car chase in “Spectre” is a bit of an odd one to watch. Bond is being pursued through the streets of Rome by Dave Bautista in an even crazier-looking British sports car that also never made production, the Jaguar C-X75. The sequence is awkwardly shot like a car commercial, and it doesn’t feel like they’re going very fast.
In fact, they’re driving so leisurely that Bond still has the bandwidth to hop on a whole phone call with Moneypenny for a bit of exposition. That said, I’m a car reviewer, not a movie critic, but here’s the scene in question so you can judge for yourself.
