Calling all Aston Martin lovers: Your drop-top Vantage chariot has just arrived!

For anyone mulling whether to plunk down a couple hundred grand for an epic drop-top grand tourer, your shortlist just got longer.

Porsche’s 911 Turbo S Cabriolet is certainly a fine choice for G-force-inducing drives, while Bentley’s Continental GTC will coddle four on that drive to the picnic. But for something relatively different, Aston Martin would like you to consider its new Vantage Roadster, a 202-mph missile whose deliveries start later this spring.

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Aston's CEO says Vantage Roadster offers a 'world-class roof-down driving experience'

For the Roadster, Aston engineers added open-air motoring to an already powerfully seductive coupe without packing on the extra chassis pounds, retaining the coupe's top speed and 3.5-second zero-to-60 time. More significantly, the company insists that structural rigidity—the bane of all sliced-roof vehicles—was not compromised.

“Vantage Roadster is a fully reinvented experience, with all the benefits of the coupe and no compromise to refinement or performance through meticulous work by our engineering and dynamics team,” Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark said in a release announcing the car. “Vantage Roadster delivers a world-class roof-down driving experience like no other.”

Invaluable to the Vantage Roadster's birth: being designed in tandem with its Coupe cousin

So, how did that wee bit of magic come to pass? To begin with, the Roadster had the advantage of being conceived as engineers hammered away at the redesigned Vantage coupe, which debuted one year ago.

According to Aston, this meant identifying the load paths through the body’s structure and modifying the way the body is attached to the frame at the rear to add additional stiffness that would normally be handled by the roof’s superstructure. In addition, body panels were stiffened to help with lateral loads, and the Z-fold soft top was added to round off the package.

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Vantage Roadster's folding soft-top drops in an industry-leading time, Aston says

Many folding roofs feature K-fold geometry, which requires the addition of a flip-up tonneau to hide the roof that, in turn, adds weight. The leading edge of the Vantage Roadster roof serves as its own tonneau, which keeps weight in check and allows the roof to boast a class-leading fold-down time of 6.8 seconds at speeds of up to 31 mph. This is despite eight layers of insulating material aimed at keeping interior noise at coupe levels with the top up.

“Developing both Vantage Coupe and Roadster simultaneously meant we were able to retain the outrageous dynamic capabilities and agile sporting character of the Vantage with no compromise upon removal of the roof,” said Simon Newton, director of vehicle performance.

Vantage Roadster features modest HP ratings by 2025 standards, but it's about the old-school feel

And what a sporting character it has. Although the Vantage name has traditionally been associated with upgraded performance models (as in the DB2 Vantage from 1950), the nameplate started to come into its own with the introduction of the V8 Vantage around 20 years ago. While the company’s thunderous DB12 remains the cock of the walk, today’s Vantage is hardly a little brother.

Powering the coupe and convertible is the same 4-liter V8 twin-turbo engine mated to an 8-speed automatic transmission. Horsepower and torque ring in respectively at 656 and 590, figures that may seem tame in today’s 1,000-plus horsepower sweepstakes. But the Vantage, unlike, let’s say, a hyped-up Tesla EV, promises old-school grunts and growls as well as traditional rear-wheel-drive.

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Aston Martin's Vantage may be among the loveliest in the sporting world

As for the car’s looks, to each his own. But from this scribe’s vantage point, Aston Martin is dead on target with this model, which features a great blend of iconic elements (cue that fabulous Bond-conjuring front grill) with perfectly sculpted sheet metal that banishes images of that rather oversized and clunky Vantage from 50 years ago.

Those wanting their Vantage Roadster to be truly unique can take advantage of the company's Q by Aston Martin personalization service. The convertible also has three new exterior colors: Iridescent Sapphire, Satin Iridescent Sapphire, and Bronze Flare (you’ll have to discern those differences in person, we imagine). The roof can be specified in black, red, blue, or black and silver.

Final thoughts

The price for the Vantage Roadster has not yet been released by Aston Martin, but we figure it’ll be somewhere between the roughly $200,000 of the coupe and the $250,000-plus of the vaunted DB12.

If the Aston Martin DB12 is a “Star Wars” Imperial Star Destroyer, consider the Vantage and now Vantage Roadster as the Millennium Falcons of the rowdy herd: lithe and nimble yet powerful machines that can duel with the best of them while showing off looks that imply that a talented human and not some AI-bot is at the drafting table. 

And in an era of increasingly homogenous automotive choices, that’s a very good thing indeed.

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