Brabus Just Cut the Roof Off Its $1.2 Million V12 Hyper-GT -- Just 77 Cabriolets Will Exist

Brabus used Monterey Car Week to pull the roof off the Bodo, its V12 "Hyper-GT" tribute to late company founder Bodo Buschmann, unveiling an open-top Cabriolet version at The Quail by The Peninsula on August 14. The coupe had already broken cover in May at FuoriConcorso on Lake Como, but the Cabriolet is the version most collectors have been waiting to see -- and hear -- with the top down.

Underneath the completely reworked bodywork sits an Aston Martin Vanquish, though very little of the donor car is visible once Brabus is finished with it. The entire exterior is hand-formed carbon fiber, built using a pre-preg process at the tuner's Bottrop facility in Germany, which keeps dry weight down to roughly 1,775 kg despite the size of the car and the hardware packed into it. Power comes from a hand-built 5.2-liter twin-turbocharged V12 producing 1,000 PS (736 kW) and 1,200 Nm of torque, enough for a 0-60 mph run in around 3.0 seconds and an electronically limited top speed of roughly 223 mph.

A Cabriolet Limited to 77 Owners

The Bodo is named for Bodo Buschmann, the Brabus founder who passed away in 2018, and the project was reportedly a vision he discussed for years with his son and Brabus's current CEO, Constantin Buschmann. That personal history is part of why Brabus has kept production so tight: the Cabriolet is capped at 77 examples worldwide, a separate production run from the 77-unit Coupe that broke cover in May -- 154 cars across both body styles combined, not a single shared total. Pricing starts at EUR1,077,000 before taxes and options, which puts a well-specified example comfortably north of EUR1.2 million by the time it reaches a customer.

For a tuner best known in recent years for reworking Mercedes-AMG and G-Class models, the Bodo is a statement that Brabus wants to be taken seriously as a maker of its own halo cars, not just an upgrade shop for someone else's. The styling draws more from grand-touring coupes of decades past than from anything currently in Aston Martin's own lineup, and Brabus has been explicit that this is a car built to be driven, not simply displayed.

Why This Matters for Dubai and the GCC

Cars capped at 77 examples per body style worldwide rarely reach the open market through a normal dealer network -- allocations are typically settled directly between the manufacturer or tuner and a short list of existing clients, long before a car is ever advertised. That is exactly the kind of vehicle where being plugged into the right relationships across Europe and the Gulf matters more than being first to place a deposit.

It is also a useful reminder of how quickly the ultra-limited segment of the market has grown in Dubai and across the wider GCC. Collectors here have shown a consistent appetite for coachbuilt one-offs and capped production runs from Bentley, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce and tuners like Brabus and Mansory, often paying a premium simply for the certainty that no more than a handful of other examples will ever exist. At House of Cars Dubai, sourcing and placing cars like this is a regular part of the business -- whether that means helping a client secure an allocation on something this exclusive, or handling the sale of a similarly rare car already in a Gulf collection to a buyer who has been searching for exactly that specification. As tuners increasingly build their own limited-run halo cars rather than simply modifying existing ones, that sourcing relationship only becomes more valuable for buyers who don't want to wait for the secondary market to catch up.