A Used Aston Martin Rapide Is a $60,000 Ultra-Luxury Bargain

This is a repeat 2011 Aston Martin and is an absolute

bargain

in a

used

luxury

sedan. I say this because this is a beautiful and stylish V12-powered

luxury

sedan that is starting to become surprisingly affordable, not many people consider the Rapide, but today I'm going to review this one and tell you why you should borrow this repeat from ilusso, which is an exotic car dealership here in Orange County, Southern California that has a fantastic inventory of exotic cars, ferraris, lamborghinis, and porsches, just about anything you can imagine. of you can see illusory by clicking the link in the description below, you can see their inventory, but today I'm talking about Aston Martin and specifically the repeat.

Now the iteration came out here in North America for the 2010 model year and it was something of a super sedan, a sleek four-door Aston Martin designed to compete with other luxury performance sedans like the Bentley Flying Spur and the Porsche Panamera Turbo. Early Rapid models like this had a 5.9-liter V12 making 470 horsepower and 450 pound-feet of torque, which are pretty attractive numbers, unfortunately, the Rapid was too expensive, too expensive, the starting price For this car in 2011 it was around $210 and that was before options and options and it was not uncommon to see sticker prices in the 300k range.

It's just too much money so sales were slow and most of people completely forgot about the Rapid, but now you have to remember that because they are becoming affordable nowadays, a 2010 Rapid model can be purchased for less than 50,000 and a nice 2011 model like this will cost you anywhere between 60 and 75 thousand dollars, that's half of what an s class costs for an

aston

martin

v12 and today I'm going to review this car and show you around first. I'll take you on a tour of the

rapide

and show you all of its interesting quirks and features, then I'll take it out on the road and drive it and then give it an excellent rating.

I'm going to start with the quirks and features of the quick get in and that means starting with the key which is great, look at this on the one hand, it's heavy, has a nice weight to it, feels expensive and looks good, good materials, The Aston Martin logo is on the top under the glass, which is the coolest key effect in the automobile industry. This is a special key for a special car. Next, we will move on to the doors. Gullwing doors would be great, but they're not practical on a four-door car, and frankly, on most cars.

So Aston Martin has developed what they consider the next best option: they are called swan doors. They can be seen to open like a bird's wing rather than being directly parallel to the ground, giving the car a cooler look when the doors are closed. opens and also helps clear curbs on some of Aston's lower sports car models, so you have these swan doors, you have them in the front and, best of all, in the back as well, the rear doors of this car they also have this type of upward moving opening to make them look like a swan wing again, special doors for a special car and then another unusual element with the doors and many cars, especially high-end cars, you open the door and The window will roll down slightly because the window had been forming a seal with the car. to keep out the rain and when you open the door, the window has to roll down to break the seal.

Interestingly, when you open the rear door quickly, the rear window rolls down most of the way. I'm not sure why they have it. it goes down so much maybe to avoid hitting your head or for some other reason, but that's what happens when you close the back door over and over again, you can see the window go all the way back up and seal again, it's an unusual amount. go down, but perhaps even more unusual is what happens when you go to open the front door on repeat because it's not just the front window that goes down a little bit, but also the back window.

The repeater has this type of glass on glass design so both windows have to go down when you open the front door to make room for the door to open which is not a very common design feature and when you go to close the door you can see that both windows go up again. a little bit and it forms that seal around the window area to keep the rain out of the car interesting and then we move inside the quick and I'm going to start from the back because I imagine if you're going to buy one of these In an Aston coupe or convertible Regular Martin, you're probably planning on using the back seats and I'm here to tell you that they're actually not that big.

I have the driver's seat where I would put it if I were sitting there and I don't really have much room for my knees back here, but you have a lot more space than you would have in a normal two-door Aston Martin with small rear seats. This is a reasonable four-door car with reasonable rear seats, but not exactly. Now they are huge, beyond the size of these back seats. It's worth noting that the setup back here is interesting. You don't get a rear bench in back, but rather two bucket seats and a fairly large center console, which I'll get to in a second. and the bucket seats are actually sport style, they have a lot of grip and they really hug you a lot more than basically any other back seat that you can see in almost any other car, but next I want to move on to some of the controls.

I come back here and I'm going to start with the climate control system, which is quite unusual and quite strange. Okay, increase the airflow so there is more or less air. Basically you just turn this little dial and the airflow increases or decreases, that's pretty standard, but then you're thinking well, how do you change the temperature? The answer is that you press the mode button in the center of this dial and then a thermometer appears on the screen and you can move the temperature up or down. There are no temperature units listed, but the top of the thermometer is hot and the bottom of the thermometer is cold.

I guess that's not so strange, but the strangest part of the rear climate controls are definitely the heated and cooled seat controls to access those where you press the little button for the heated seat. in the middle of this dial and then you can see that a seat lights up on this side to turn on the cooled seat. Move this dial to the left and you can see the little blue lights come on to tell you that your cooled seat is on to turn on the heated seat, turn the dial in the other direction, the cooled seat turns off and then the heated seat The heating starts to come on and you can simply turn the dial left, right, left, right to switch between cooled and heated seats and of course if you want to turn on the seat on the other side you just press the little button on the back again. seat in the middle of the dial, the seat on the other side lights up and then you can turn the dial again for cooled or heated seats, this is actually pretty easy to use but it's a very unorthodox control, I've never seen it like this in no other car, including no other Aston Martin, but it's what they've done here now also in this central control section and in the back you've got some buttons for the climate control.

With the air conditioning you can direct the air and you also have the button to lock the doors, although it is worth noting that this button does not unlock the doors, so once you have locked them you have committed and then here we also have a little . Buttons that control the rear map lights. You can see the left and right controls corresponding to the left and right map lights that are mounted on the roof. You press that control. The map light comes on quite simply. Next, we talk about small things. Back here, let's talk. cup holder has two rear cup holders but they are very small not big enough for most drinks they are an unusual size to match one interesting thing about the cup holders although they are leather lined this is the kind of luxury and quality that you get in an Aston Martin, you've got sewn-in, leather-lined cup holders, they're so nice you don't really want to use them for cups, and then in the vein of small things back here, let's talk about rear seat storage, lots of cars have a back seat. storage pockets in the front seat backs, but the repeat has extremely small storage pockets in the rear seats here, these are not even big enough to fit a cell phone, not sure why they bothered, but they are there, in case you're sitting in the back of the rapid and want a place to put your thimble, but that being said, it's worth noting that there's more storage here than just those little pockets on the back of the seats, you also have a center console storage area you lift this lid and you can see this is where the headphones are.

You have a pair of headphones here and you also have a remote control here, of course this controls the rear seat display system, unfortunately this remote control doesn't have batteries so I can't turn it on, but obviously this car is almost 10 years old . Anyway, it won't be a very advanced system, but you can probably use the system to listen to music and maybe watch things while sitting in the back of your repeater, and by the way, another notable element here are the air vents on the rear seat, which are in the front of this rear center console, where it is tilted up and angled towards the rear seats and when you turn on the rear seat climate control, they blow out a large amount of air depending on their position and their power .

These are probably the most effective rear seat vents I've seen in any car, so you can really cool down or warm up. Back here thanks to those vents and then we move to the back of the repeat because I want to talk about the cargo area and first I'm going to start by just accessing the cargo area to get in, there's no mechanism to open the trunk. Down here, next to the license plate, that would be too pedestrian. Instead, you have this silver button right in the center, a very small circle. You push it and the trunk opens and then you can open it completely and get in.

I've always loved it. this little silver button to open the trunks of an Aston Martin, but anyway with the tailgate open you can see the cargo area and it's actually quite large for an

ultra

-luxury high-performance sedan. This is a pretty good amount of cargo space back here in case you want to put it. large items in the back of your

aston

martin

v12 while you are driving and check this out you can lower the rear seat backrests press this little button next to the seat and then you can fold the rear seat backrests down and then you will get an even more big.

Cargo area which you can see with the seats folded, you actually have quite a bit of space back here, which is a surprising thing to say about an Aston Martin V12 super sedan. One thing you may have noticed is that the cargo area is open to the passenger compartment. There is no partition between them, which could cause problems if something rolls around back here and stops suddenly, it could be thrown forward and hurt someone, but Aston Martin has thought about this little panel actually lifting up to act as a load. divider so you can store your stuff back there and make sure it doesn't roll around and get into the passenger area and finally our last interesting item with the cargo area comes with the tailgate lock on your car, you might have a small plastic handle to To help you close the rear door of this car, you have a thin leather strap because of course you pull this leather strap and then the rear door closes quite well and finally a last element in the rear before moving to the front seats, I want.

To talk about sound, this car has a good exhaust note, you don't get this in an S class, listen and then we move on to the front seats in the Rapide, where there are quite a few interesting quirks and features. I'm going to start by just turning it on now, in the middle of the center control console area, you have this circle that says engine start with the Aston Martin logo in the middle, the way you start this car is you take the key and put it on. In the center of that circle, you push down the Aston Martin logo, but because the key has an Aston Martin logo on that glass at the end and when the car is started, the Aston Martin logo is preserved, actually It's a pretty ingenious way.

To do so, it's quite nice, if I may say so, from there, once you've started the car, you can see that putting it into gear is a bit unorthodox. The selection ofRunning is done with these buttons. Park and reverse in left dead center and continue. to the right and that's how you go through gears, there is no gear lever or dial in this car and further down in the central control area, it's also quite unusual, the heated and cooled seat controls, it's the same operation that on the back, but again it's worth mentioning that you push this. button in the center to switch between the two front seats and then turn this dial to switch between cool or heated seats.

A very strange way to do it. Most brands only have a heated seat button and a heated seat button, but Aston Martin is thinking outside the box. the box and speaking of the controls in this car there are a lot of buttons they are particularly a theme in this area of ​​the center console there are 35 individual buttons and five dials right in this area between the shifter buttons and these buttons on the bottom There are now 35 buttons and five dials, one of the reasons why there are so many buttons and switches here has to do with the car's infotainment system because it is purely a navigation system, there are no other controls or operations built into this system and that's because it's a garmin navigation system, take a look here and you can see it's like a 10 year old garmin like the one you probably had on a road trip or at a rental car agency before you had navigation on your phone, it just looks terribly outdated and This is, without a doubt, the weak point of this car.

It was also the weak point of this car in 2010, but Aston Martin simply didn't have enough money to develop their own navigation, so they went with Garmin, the same thing you'd buy in the store for about 299 and then pay a pretty bad subscription fee. and speaking of that Garmin system, it's a bit crazy to see that cheap old school screen surrounded by this beautiful wood and leather like you'd expect to have in an Aston Martin, it's basically everything you think an Aston Martin would be and then that. The screen opens and you say, "Oh, by the way, another amazing thing about this navigation system's screen, other than the fact that it's one of the first clothing units, is that when you turn this car on you're not greeted by a beautiful Aston Martin logo or some graphic or the word repeat instead asks you to choose between easy mode and advanced mode I've never seen this in my entire life outside of a video game, but I guess if you're someone who thinks. that the navigation system is just too easy to use, you can put it on hard mode and use it there.

It's strange that now if there is any good news with this screen it is the fact that, as I mentioned, there are no other functions built in here, so. that if you don't plan on using the navigation system, you don't really have to deal with the screen, everything else is controlled with all these buttons and dials on the center control console and, speaking of this interior and the materials, okay. It's worth noting that it's really beautiful in Here you pass that screen, look around and everything else is very well put together. Beautiful leather. Beautiful stitching. Beautiful wood on basically all surfaces.

Even all of these buttons and switches feel good. They have a nice weight. They are good for tapping or turning if it is a dial. Everything there is. There's some really premium quality here, much better than you'd get in pretty much any other luxury car of this era, and then some interesting things in the gauge cluster, one is the tachometer, which doesn't work like other tachometers because it's the other way around. I can see that when I rev the engine the attack actually goes in the opposite direction to what you would normally expect to be just a quirk of the Aston Martin and another interesting quirk of the Aston here is the owner's manual.

You can see that it is a long, thin and rather oddly shaped owner's manual. manual, that's because it doesn't fit in the glove box, which is quite small and wasn't designed to hold the owner's manual, but rather it's designed to fit in this little pouch on the passenger side door. You can see it's the perfect size for that. where the owner's manual goes quickly, another Aston Martin quirk, but perhaps the biggest Aston Martin quirk is under the hood. I told you earlier that this is a 5.9 liter V12 and indeed it is, but you can see it says 6.0. v12 someone has to be wrong here, either me or Aston Martin and wouldn't you know it?

It's Aston Martin. This engine displaces 5935cc which rounds up to 5.9 litres, except Aston rounds it up, I assume it will be a 6-0 instead. from a 5-9 v12 now interestingly there is a precedent for this for years Ford called their mustang 5-0 even though it had a 4.9 liter engine my Land Rover Defender has a 3.9 liter engine which Land Rover calls 4-0 and of course Mercedes-Benz for years called it 6.2 v8 or 6.3, but it is still strange to see 6.0 in an engine that is not 6.0, but in reality, although peculiar, it is not a big deal , really matters? The most important thing is the numbers of this engine. 470 horsepower and 450 pound-feet of torque were excellent numbers 10 years ago and are still quite respectable, especially considering the price of this car, and those are the quirks and features of the Aston Martin Rapide, now it is the time to put it on sale. the road and see how it drives well, repeat now before you start the driving experience.

I mean yes, this car is an absolute

bargain

, from an initial purchase point of view, compared to a modern or new luxury car, the problem of course will come with maintaining it for as long as you have it. I don't think it's as bad as everyone thinks. He had an Aston Martin. I had some problems with it when I first bought it, but then I drove it. 000 miles in one year to 34 states plus DC and Canada and it was flawless. Drawing. I got a photo of that car next to a bison in North Dakota. Not many astronomers understand that, so I think they can be reliable if you keep them. correctly, a lot of the problems my car had came at the beginning of the ownership experience, I think because it sat for a while before I got it and started using it all the time and then it was fine, so I say this car is a bargain.

But go in with your eyes open, you're not going to get out of this thing cheaper than a Mercedes-Benz under any circumstances, but it may not be as bad as you think and you're going to get an Aston Martin, so let's talk. sky and aston martin when this car first came out I thought it was the best, it's a really beautiful car, this is an example of a four door sloping roof car done right, uh, the first Panamera, the Accord Cross Tour, They were such. disasters, but this was the same type of car but nice in terms of the driving experience, it's fast, no doubt about that, um, it's not as fast as you might think, a couple of things, it's certainly slower than a panamera turbo transmission, it's definitely a reason for this the shifts are a little slow um they're laborious they're not that fast panamera turbo had the dual clutch automatic pdk this thing is light years behind in terms of actual power and performance feels pretty good and sounds amazing I've driven all the cars in this segment, Flying Spur and Panamera and anything else you can think of, Rolls Ghost and this is the one with the sound that was, it was more aggressive and more exciting than those, in Ultimately, this car is so much more.

The charm and appeal of this car is the fact that it's cool. The technology I showed you is not that good. I mean the navigation system screen is absolutely ridiculous, but there are a lot of interesting things about this car. For starters, it's absolutely beautiful. It's lovely. on the outside beautiful on the inside plus it's weird that the rapid really is some kind of forgotten

ultra

luxury sedan uh most people remember aston martin for its coops a lot of people just forget that the rapid even existed but it did exist and of course it's cool because it looks great and it's fast it's a v12 and it's fun and those are those benefits and I think they start to become real benefits when the price starts to get lower and lower I mean you can get higher mileage 2010 one of these in the 40s. that's a pretty good number but if you want to spend you want to get a good one, spend 65.70, that's still not too bad, it's like a mid spec e class or you could have an aston v12 as long as you understand what's coming and so on.

That's the Aston Martin 2011 repeat. This is a special car, and while it was overpriced when new, it's starting to become more and more attractive now that prices are becoming more affordable, especially if you're interested in a cool sedan like no one else. Right now you could buy a new S-Class or for half the money you could get a rare Aston Martin V12 anyway, with that it's time to give the Rapide a Doug Score starting with the weekend categories and the styling of the Rapid is really beautiful and gets eight out of ten acceleration from zero to sixty in the high four second range and gets six out of ten handling well excellent for a sedan and gets six out of ten fun factor is pretty good , it's nice to drive It would be better with an upgraded transmission and gets a 6 out of 10.

The cool factor is strong, it's an Aston Martin luxury sedan, but it's styled similarly to other more common Aston models, so it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 32 out of 50. Following are the daily categories and features. It's reasonably well equipped, nothing crazy, and gets a 5 out of 10. Comfort is okay, but low for a luxury sedan. It's more sporty than luxurious and gets a 6 out of 10. The quality is a mixed bag, it's beautiful inside and out with really fantastic materials, but reliability is a concern and that Garmin gets a six out of ten.

Practicality is also mixed, it has only four seats and the rear seats are narrow, but four doors. Nice looking and the cargo area is larger than most rivals, so it gets a 5 out of 10. Finally reckon this is a deal compared to its original price, but it's still $70k for a sedan 10 year old questionable and reliable luxury car with a garmin, it gets a 6 out of 10 for an overall daily score of 28 out of 50. Add it up and Doug's score is 60 out of 100, putting it here against other luxury cars and luxury sports cars of this era, the Rapid is successful as it is both a luxury sedan. and a sports car and it does both reasonably well for much less money than it cost when new