The Brabus Bodo Cabriolet rolled into the Monterey sun on August 14 at The Quail with its roof lopped off, its V12 cranked to four figures, and a price tag north of $1.17 million. Seventy-seven units will exist, total, shared between this open-top car and the coupe that preceded it. That makes the convertible allocation razor thin.
Underneath the carbon fiber skin sits Aston Martin’s 5.2-liter twin-turbo V12, mounted front-mid in the Vanquish Volante’s architecture. Brabus reworked it with new hardware and recalibrated software to extract 1,000 horsepower and 885 pound-feet of torque. All of it heads rearward through an eight-speed automatic and a limited-slip differential.
Zero to 60 in 3.0 seconds. Zero to 186 in 23.9. An electronically limited top speed of 223 mph.
Those numbers are identical to the Bodo Gran Turismo coupe, which tells you Brabus did not treat the convertible as a lesser sibling. It simply removed the roof and dared the physics to keep up.
The body is entirely carbon fiber, built using a pre-preg process at Brabus’s Bottrop facility in Germany. Dry weight lands at 3,911 pounds, which is not featherweight by any stretch but respectable for a car measuring 199.3 inches long and 79.8 inches wide. At 51.3 inches tall with the roof stowed, it has the kind of low, wide stance that stops foot traffic at any concours lawn.
Active aero includes a carbon front spoiler and an electrically extendable rear wing. The wheels are 22-inch Brabus Monoblock Z-GTs, because nothing says restraint quite like a thousand-horsepower convertible on 22s.
The base price sits at €1,077,000, roughly $1,174,000 at current exchange rates. “Base” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. Every Bodo Cabriolet is built to individual order, and Brabus CEO Constantin Buschmann has described the car as being crafted “in every detail as he would have driven it,” a reference to the late Bodo Buschmann, the company’s founder and Constantin’s father.
The car is a family monument wearing an Aston Martin skeleton. Strip away the carbon panels and the Brabus engineering, and you are looking at a Vanquish Volante chassis and cabin architecture. Brabus is not fabricating a car from a blank sheet. It is coachbuilding in the traditional sense, reshaping a donor into something far more exclusive and far more expensive than the factory original.
The competitive set is exotic. At this price point and production volume, the Bodo Cabriolet parks next to cars like the Pagani Huayra Roadster and the handful of ultra-limited Bugatti convertibles that surface at Monterey each August. The difference is that Brabus has always been a tuner in the public imagination. Building a seven-figure, 77-unit halo car from Aston Martin bones is a declaration that the Bottrop company sees itself in a different bracket entirely.
Whether collectors agree will show up in how fast those 77 build slots fill. Given the coupe already carved into that allocation, the convertible’s true availability could be fewer than 40 cars. Maybe far fewer.
Brabus has been stretching beyond Mercedes-AMG modifications for years, dabbling in boats, RVs, and even a concept island. But none of those projects carry the same weight as a car like this. The Bodo Cabriolet is the company betting its credibility against the world’s most rarefied automakers, at full volume, with the top down.
Order books are open now. Deliveries have not been specified.
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