The 2025 Aston Martin Vantage vs Porsche 911 Turbo can feign normality. They’re comfortable and composed, with their available heated and ventilated seats and nice sound systems. Hush their active exhaust, and they speak with their inside voices.
Their doors open the normal way (the Aston’s with a subtle arc upward to clear curbs), and a valet won’t have any problem figuring out how to put them in gear. But these are supercars, however you care to define the term, and even a half-asleep supercar is capable of stupendous feats—as a guy in a Hyundai Elantra discovered when he decided to join our comparison test midway down a highway on-ramp somewhere in Ohio.
He squeezed between the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage vs. Porsche 911 Turbo. and we only realized how fast we were going when our new buddy understeered off the pavement in an explosion of dust and gravel. He gathered it up, but the episode was a stark reminder that these cars can generate extralegal speed even when you’re steering with one hand and stashing a toll ticket with the other. It’s like how Scottie Scheffler could beat you at golf while doing his taxes, if he didn’t have people for that.
We were on our way to Pittsburgh, formerly home to a thriving steel industry and now host to a booming tech sector. It felt like an appropriate destination for two cars that have also reinvented themselves over the decades, with shrewd engineering and canny decisions staving off obsolescence or, even worse, irrelevance. To crib an urban-planning term much applied in Pittsburgh, both the 911 Turbo and the Vantage are examples of adaptive reuse: one car borrowing an engine to elevate its performance, the other optimizing an inherited powertrain layout long abandoned by almost everybody else.
2025 Aston Martin Vantage vs. Porsche 911 Turbo occupy a strange part of the market, which is to say they are expensive, powerful, and rare, yet not quite full-on exotic. The Porsche wears a base price of $199,850 and costs $216,990 as tested. The sports exhaust system ($3490) is a must-have, as are Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control ($3170) and the front-axle lift system ($2770). We’d normally think the central tachometer in Guards Red ($420) is frivolous, but with the 992.2 losing its real tach in favor of a digital display, we say embrace the peacocking
The 2025 Aston Martin Vantage $194,500 base price undercuts the Porsche’s, aided by dodging a gas-guzzler tax. But Aston will be happy to indulge a taste for options, and this car included $107,600 of them. We can endorse the carbon-ceramic brake rotors ($14,400), but spending a similar amount on the Q Ion Blue paint ($13,600) feels preposterous. In fact, most of the Vantage’s options focused on appearances. black badges ($1800), “contemporary” carpet color ($2400), contrast stitching ($2900). It looks good, but if we were spending six figures on options, we’d want things way more ridiculous. Like, “I want to color-match the purple on a cave-dwelling rat snake, so here’s one for you to sample. His name is Amadeus.”
While we planned to drive some great roads outside Pittsburgh, we first wanted to explore the city itself. Over in the Strip District, former produce warehouses now host and a virtual-reality entertainment complex. Down by the Allegheny River, old Heinz ketchup factories now house swanky lofts. And a bit southeast of downtown, along the Monongahela River, sits RIDC Mill 19, a sprawling tech campus where we figured the Aston and Porsche would fit right in. The main building was formerly a steel mill; its hulking steel exoskeleton now houses offices.
2025 Aston Martin Vantage vs. Porsche 911 Turbo is make for great conversation starters, and soon we were talking cars with engineers and test drivers for Motional, an autonomous-car firm with an R&D center at RIDC Mill 19. We could have stayed there all day, gabbing and occasionally stepping aside for the polite lidar-festooned Hyundai 5s cruising by, but we had places to go.
2025 Aston Martin Vantage vs. Porsche 911 Turbo Interior and Exterior
Southwestern Pennsylvania has some excellent roads, but it takes a while to escape the sprawl of Pittsburgh. That gave us time to contemplate both cars’ cabins route to the fun.
The Porsche’s interior is wonderfully functional, with an expansive view over the low hood (or frunk, really) and a thin-rimmed steering wheel bereft of much padding, which helps it feel like a direct conduit to the road. Primary controls get hard buttons, our favorite of which is the Sport Response selector on the steering wheel that instantly cues up a hyperaggressive mode for all performance-related systems.
This 911’s palette is tasteful and restrained, but for $37,180, Porsche will paint the exterior any “technically feasible” color, and the interior can get kaleidoscopic too—there are 19 hue options for the fuse-box cover alone. But if you want to see a Guards Red 911 Turbo turn invisible, park it next to a Vantage.
2025 Aston Martin Vantage vs. Porsche 911 Turbo .
HIGHS: Hyper car acceleration, GT3-adjacent soundtrack, surprisingly practical.
LOWS: Less than exotic exterior styling, earns a gas-guzzler penalty, might be mistaken for a car costing half as much.
VERDICT: One of the best performance cars you can buy, at any price.
2024 Porsche 911 Turbo is logbook entry read, “It’s entertaining to watch people ignore the 911 to gawk at the Aston.” Indeed, the Vantage’s comic-book proportions are the epitome of front-engine visual drama. The car is so wide that its 325/30ZR-21 rear tires almost look skinny under the swollen bodywork. The exterior mirrors rest on long, spindly arms; otherwise, your rear view would be all fenders. This is a car you park outside the garage so you can stare at it in the sunlight.
The interior is less outrageous, although Aston will drape it in hues far more adventurous than the Dark Knight monotone of our test car. The seats are more comfortable than the Porsche’s, soft yet supportive, and we loved the simplicity of the mode-selection buttons for the suspension and exhaust.
There are three color-coded options, so if you see red, you know you’ve conjured the Vantage’s evil side. Unfortunately, this particular example had quite a few controls that didn’t do anything at all. The cruise control was DOA, the instrument-cluster dimmer didn’t dim, and the voice control was inoperative. Most confoundingly, the rearview camera’s display was like looking through a periscope made of rigatoni—until you shifted from reverse to drive, at which point it would display a glorious view behind the car. Better late than never, we guess?
Power and Performance of Porsche 911.
At the quarter-mile, the 911 Turbo and Vantage are both traveling at 133 mph. But how they get there—and what happens afterward—reflects the vast disparities in mechanical hardware and engineering philosophy.
The 911 Turbo, with its all-wheel drive and 5000-rpm launch-control engagement, leaves the line like it got rear-ended by a supernova. In an era when electric cars dominate the drag strips, the 911 Turbo stands up for piston power, hitting 60 mph in 2.3 seconds and blasting through the quarter-mile in 10.3 seconds.
The Vantage requires 11.1 seconds to do the latter deed, owing to its relative lack of traction at launch. One of our testers remarked, “Hitting 60 in 3.2 seconds, like the Vantage does, is crazy quick. But a 911 Turbo is even quicker, and not by a little bit.” Vantage owners racing for pink slips will want to specify a race to 180 mph, which is the point where the Aston finally hangs a lead on the 911 Turbo, 24.1 seconds to 25.0.
Driving Experience of Porsche 911.
Down in the twisty hollers around the State Park, the Vantage was a big surprise—rear-drive cars with 656 horsepower aren’t supposed to slay bumpy, off-camber back roads, but the Vantage is anything but ill-mannered. Leave the suspension in its default mode, and it soaks up big hits while allowing enough squat to help the rear end cope with injudicious throttle application.
2025 Aston Martin Vantage.
HIGHS: Showstopper looks, outrageous high-speed acceleration, AMG thunder under the hood.
LOWS: Electronic snafus, rear-drive traction deficit off the line, options easily inflate the price by 50 percent.
VERDICT: A 656-hp argument against Brexit.
The 2025 Aston Martin Vantage nonlethal behavior also seems to owe to some possible torque modulation in first and second gear, and the acceleration numbers support the impression that the Aston only unleashes full fury once it’s decisively hooked up. A bump at the exit of a really tight hairpin caused a momentary flare of wheelspin, but the Aston was generally buckled down and more genial than it has any right to be. The main issue is that its limits are so high you’ll break the speed limit long before the car is really exerting itself.
That critique extends to the 911 Turbo and then some. Other than its own Turbo S brethren, this might be the quickest point-to-point car you can buy—any road, any conditions, no excuses. A 911 Turbo makes you think you could enter a WRC event and win. Or maybe that you’re possessed by Fangio. Mash the throttle, and the world scrolls at five-times speed, so better keep up.
2025 Aston Martin Vantage is on its own, is sublime. Then you get in the 911 and realize there are fine gradients of excellence that Porsche knows how to exploit. Dive into a corner in manual mode, and the 911 Turbo’s dual-clutch transmission cracks off perfectly smooth downshifts, while the Vantage’s torque-converter automatic imposes a slight lurch as it grabs a lower gear. The Vantage’s AMG V-8 sounds silky and expensive but ultimately less exotic than the Porsche’s howling flat-six—this active exhaust gives the Turbo a huge helping of GT3 aural drama. The 911 Turbo pulls off rare alchemy, turning cold, rational engineering excellence into soul.
And the Winner Is . . .
At one point in our journey, we drove past a 19th-century log cabin with a window air conditioner stuck through the wall, and it occurred to us that, under the wrong stewardship, that could have been a metaphor for the 911 Turbo. After all, this is a car that can trace its family lineage (both mechanical and genealogical) to the Volkswagen Beetle. But the 911 Turbo long ago banished the dynamic compromises imposed by its layout, such that you forget that a rear-engine platform isn’t simply the best way to build a car.
In a straight-line race, the Vantage eventually catches the 911 Turbo, but the Porsche’s head start extends beyond the drag strip—this car is the culmination of 50 years of development, and you can tell. We applaud Aston for stepping up against Porsche’s performance dreadnought, but the 911 Turbo takes the win.
Here’s a comparison table between the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage and the 2024 Porsche 911 Turbo:
| Feature | 2025 Aston Martin Vantage | 2024 Porsche 911 Turbo |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 (Mercedes-AMG) | 3.7-liter twin-turbo flat-six |
| Horsepower | 656 hp | 572 hp |
| Torque | 555 lb-ft | 553 lb-ft |
| 0-60 mph | 3.2 seconds | 2.3 seconds |
| Quarter-Mile Time | 11.1 seconds | 10.3 seconds |
| Top Speed | 195 mph | 205 mph |
| Transmission | 8-speed automatic (torque-converter) | 8-speed dual-clutch automatic |
| Drive Type | Rear-wheel drive | All-wheel drive |
| Fuel Economy (mpg) | 18 city / 24 highway | 20 city / 27 highway |
| Price | $194,500 (base), $302,100 (as tested with options) | $199,850 (base), $216,990 (as tested with options) |
| Interior | More comfortable seats, simple mode-selection buttons | Functional, minimalistic with advanced tech |
| Exterior Design | Bold, wide body, dramatic proportions | Classic, understated Porsche design |
| Technology | Basic tech, some features malfunctioning in test model | Advanced, responsive with features like Sport Response |
| Driving Experience | Powerful, rear-wheel drive offers a fun yet composed ride | Precise, all-wheel drive, incredible cornering capabilities |
| Exhaust Sound | AMG V-8 sounds smooth but less exotic than the Porsche | Howling flat-six with GT3-level aural drama |
| Special Features | Aston’s “Q Ion Blue” paint options and customizations | Dynamic chassis control, active suspension management |
| Verdict | A fast and stylish car, but less refined than the 911 Turbo | The ultimate all-around performance car |
