Brabus just unveiled its third truly standalone model at last weekend's FuoriConcorso close to the shores of Lake Como. Following the 2022 G-Class-inspired dune buggy, the Brabus 900 Crawler, and last year's SL-based shooting brake, the Rocket GTS, the company from Bottrop has now crowned its portfolio with the Bodo. This low-slung Gran Turismo offers stratospheric performance figures that put many contemporary supercars to shame. The car, limited to 77 units, is a tribute to Brabus' founder Bodo Buschmann, who passed away in 2018. The production number is a nod to the founding year of the company, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary next year.
The Bodo is a fitting tribute, as Brabus' new halo car isn't just fast but also guaranteeing an imposing appearance, while being elegant and kind of understated at the same time. Instead of seeking attention with flashy colours, the Germans completely stick to black, which gives the coupé a batmobile look. The interior is equally dark, lined with black leather and loads of carbon fiber, which gives the driver the feeling that he's piloting an extravagant race car. The whole body is made out of carbon and mounted on an aluminium monocoque chassis.
Bodo definitely has its own character and has some similarities to certain sportscars from Affalterbach. The front is SL-esque, while the rear end evokes memories of the F1-derived hypercar Mercedes-AMG ONE. The Monoblock Z-GT wheels give it a typical Brabus feel. If you take a closer look at the profile and especially the greenhouse of the car, you may catch that it wasn't designed starting with a white sheet of paper, but that it shares quite a lot of its DNA with the current Aston Martin Vanquish. Brabus may have broadened its spectrum over the last years and now also reworks products from Porsche, Bentley and Rolls-Royce – using an Aston Martin platform is still quite a surprising choice, as the company is famously specialized in creating individualized bolides based on models from Stuttgart.
Mercedes-AMG and the British sportscar manufacturer have been collaborating for more than a decade now, but mainly when it comes to the software and the V8 engines of the smaller Aston Martin models. The 5.2-liter biturbo V12 of the Vanquish is a quintessentially British creation though. Introduced with its predecessor but heavily reworked for the current generation introduced in 2024, it puts out 835 hp in the Aston. The high-end tuning company managed to extract quite a few additional horses from the powertrain, which is mated to an eight-speed automatic, increasing the output to an eyewatering 1,000 hp and 1,200 Newton-meters of torque.
In combination with the comparably low curb weight of 1.8 tons, achieved thanks to the extensive carbon fiber use, Bodo is capable of achieving an eyewatering top speed of 360 km/h and sprinting from 0 to 100 km/h within three seconds. A bespoke set of tires developed in close partnership with Continental is supposed to guarantee that the rear-wheel-driven coupé safely puts down the power on the street. Brabus wanted the Bodo to be one of its most exclusive offerings to date. This doesn't just show in the form of the low production numbers but also the price tag of one million Euros for the German market – Bodo costs more than twice as much as the Aston it shares its skeleton with.
