Driving Luxury Into the Battlegrounds: My Aston Martin PUBG Retrospective

I still remember the first time I slid behind the wheel of a DBX707 on the frozen slopes of Vikendi. The exhaust note was deeper than anything I had heard in the game before, the bodywork gleamed under the aurora, and for about four seconds I completely forgot that someone was probably lining up a shot on my head. That is the strange magic of the Aston Martin collaboration in PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS — it made me care about a vehicle in a game where vehicles are usually disposable, noisy, and slightly suicidal.

The collaboration landed in August 2023, and even now, in 2026, my friends and I still talk about it the way people talk about a good concert they attended years ago. The tokens expired long ago. The Crafter Pass is gone. But the skins themselves remain in my inventory, and every time I drop into Erangel and see a UAZ, I feel a small pang of nostalgia.

The Cars Themselves

Aston Martin brought three distinct skins into the game, and each one found its own niche in my squad's rotation.

Skin	Base Vehicle	Character
DBX707	Zima, Pickup, UAZ	The heavyweight — a luxury SUV with real presence
V12 Vantage Roadster	Coupe RB	Pure speed, top end around 200 mph
V12 Vantage Roadster (Luxe)	Coupe RB	The showpiece, with a working convertible roof

What surprised me most was how much customization existed. I spent an embarrassing amount of time in the Workshop mixing and matching: twenty-seven exterior colors, ten wheel designs, six pinstripes, and thirteen brake caliper colors. Thirteen! I could not see the calipers from inside the car, and I still agonized over whether British Racing Green paired better with the silver or the black wheels.

The Convertible Roof Changed Everything

For me, the standout feature was the convertible roof on the V12 Vantage Roadster (Luxe). Pressing a key combination and watching that soft cover fold back in a three-second animation was genuinely delightful.

On PC it was H. On Xbox, LB + X. On PlayStation®, L1 + ▢.

The rules around it were surprisingly detailed, and I learned most of them the hard way:

• It only works on vehicles that actually have the convertible function.

• You must be in the driver's seat — driving or not.

• The vehicle needs HP above zero; if it is burning or destroyed, the roof stays put.

• It works at any speed, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds.

• It is disabled when the vehicle is submerged.

• It works in the starting areas, which is where I did most of my showing off.

• Collisions from characters or throwables do not register on the soft cover while the animation plays.

The Starting-Area Container

One of the most memorable additions was the exclusive Aston Martin container that spawned in the starting areas of Erangel, Miramar, Sanhok, Vikendi, Taego, and Deston. Only players who owned the skin could unlock it, and only they and their teammates could ride in the vehicle it produced. It worked in Normal Match, Ranked, Casual Mode, and Custom Match, and it vanished the moment the plane took off.

For two months, my squad's pre-match ritual became a race to the container. It was silly, purely cosmetic, and absolutely worth it.

The Honest Trade-Offs

I want to be fair about this, because the skins were not purely a cosmetic win. The UAZ, Pickup, and Zima grew marginally larger, which meant a slightly bigger hit area. Different exterior paint colors genuinely affected how visible I was across a field. The glass roof could take damage. The soft cover offered no bulletproof protection at all.

And then there was the seat issue. Because the car seats sat high, my head was covered from the rear of the vehicle, which protected me from behind — but players pushed back hard on the headrest blocking headshots. The development team listened, and in the #25.1 live server update they amended the skins so headshots could penetrate the headrest portion of the seats. I respected that responsiveness.

The Crafter Pass and the Grind

The Crafter Pass: Aston Martin came in two tiers — a Basic Pack at 1,200 G-COIN and an Advanced Pack at 5,000 G-COIN, which included five Prime Parcels, 500 Aston Martin Tokens, and twenty levels. Loot Cache Packs ranged from a single pack at 250 G-COIN up to fifty packs at 12,500 G-COIN, and no keys were needed to open them.

Daily, weekly, seasonal, and achievement missions fed me tokens, which I exchanged for the special vehicle skins and thirty-seven customizable items. I also picked up the Aston Martin — V12 Light Speed nameplate through the launch event.

Looking Back From 2026

The sales windows closed in October 2023, the special crafting tab shut down, and every unused token was quietly deleted from inventories. If you missed it, you missed it — those cars are not coming back through the same door.

But here is what stayed with me: a collaboration that treated a battle royale vehicle as a piece of design rather than a disposable tool. The boost effects, the custom exhaust notes, the lobby animations of doors swinging open — all of it made the battleground feel briefly, gloriously luxurious.

I still drop into Taego, find a Coupe RB, and press H out of pure habit. The roof still folds back. And for three seconds, I am not a player scrambling for cover — I am someone driving a very, very expensive car.