Hello everybody, I'm a new member here. On the occasion of my 40th birthday I'm shopping for a 06-08 V8 Vantage to serve as my mid-life-crisis-mobile. I went from the FD RX-7 to the 997 to the V8 Vantage and I'm very excited to have finally figured out what I'm getting. I took the wife to test drive one last week and she approves as well! But I still have one major reservation...I'm not sure it will make it up the slope into my driveway!
I don't know anybody who owns one, so short of borrowing one from a dealer and trying to pull it into my driveway while listening for a crunching sound, I'm not really sure how to figure it out.
I know about the Bridjit thing, but I'm not sure it's going to do the trick and I expect I'll need to build a more custom solution. In the spirit of nerding this out to the max, I plan to build a mockup to simulate the ground clearance of the car and see if it will scrape when pulling into the driveway.
So to get to the point...the overall length and wheelbase of the car is readily available information, but I can't find info on the front and rear overhang and ground clearance at the extremities. Does anybody here have this information handy, or have an easy way to measure it? Excuse the crude drawing, but I whipped this up to show what I'm talking about. Of course I'm looking for a car at stock ride height.
Also, does anybody else experience a problem getting over their curb, and what solutions did you come up with?

Thanks for any input, I hope to join the club soon!

 

Unless you have a slope extremely different from the norm, and mine has a fairly steep slope, you have nothing to worry about, unless you plan on pulling straight in and straight out. If you're turning into the drive and backing out the same way you won't have an issue, unless you intend to lower the car much.


My V8V will not touch in areas on the road where my 370Z would always scrape the front. Not that you'll never scrape the front lip a hair here and there, it's not a 4x4 truck, but the chin spoiler is easily replace for $100 if you ever scrape it up so bad you feel the need, even though you'd have to be looking at it from under the car.

 

If you got up the slope with a water cooled Porsche, which has ridiculous overhang, the Aston will get up just fine.

 

The Vantage isn't bad at all. Just angle in and out of steep driveways and go slow.

 

The vantage has excellent ground clearance... there are some awful parking lot exits here in Chicago and i've never scraped once... just angle it if its super steep

 

Overhangs are on the short side.

 

Thanks for the replies, everybody. My house is over 100 years old so my driveway probably doesn't conform to any modern norms. It's got a pretty good initial incline, it's only 9' wide with a high curb on both sides so I can't angle my approach at all, and the street is crowned pretty heavily which makes the effective incline of the driveway even more severe. I didn't mean to imply that I've had a Porsche in the driveway because I haven't, and my old VW TDI Golf would scrape so I'm more than a little concerned about the Vantage. I realize the short overhangs will work in my favor and with a little luck it won't be a problem, but I want to identify if I have an issue before I roll up to the house in a new (to me) Vantage.
Again thanks for the feedback!

 

Re-configure the driveway - it will be worth it

chr

 

The attached extracted page from the 2007 Owners Manual should be of some assistance to you. Don't forget the dimensions are in mm's .

 

BINGO!! Thank you so much!!!

 

Man, what a great looking car!

 

Are you buying from a dealer? Have the salesman bring it by!

 

A midnight spill of concrete along where the driveway and road meet would likely solve the issue once and for all.

Plenty of concrete trucks make spills, ooops

 

Yeah, accidents do happen...