Normally, I’m not the kind of guy that’s really into sedans. Sure, you can make them do lots of wonderful things these days, but when a car gets more than two seats, my interest starts to fall off.
However, one of the four doors that did catch my interest was the “we’re going to produce it, really” Rapide from Aston Martin. It’s a very attractive car, which helps, and it promised a lot of performance, which helps some more. And it also turns out that yes indeed, this car actually will see the light of day … as a matter of fact, it was caught by a guy with a video camera in the light of day testing in Kuwait, and we’ve got the video after the jump.
At first, an Aston Martin Rapide turning up in the wild in Kuwait might seem like an odd thing, or a temptation to make a comment on oil wealth and sheiks and all that. But it turns out there could be a more reasonable and prosaic explanation of this.
For starters, this is a not ready for production version of the car, and if you’re going to do some hot weather testing, Kuwait strikes me as a very good place to do so. Also, AM recently underwent some stock shuffling, and big pieces of the company are owned by not one, but TWO Kuwaiti banks. So Kuwait isn’t all that surprising of a location.
Wired’s Autopia says that the Rapide in the short video might be the same one that Edmund’s had video of lapping the ‘Ring. That’s not outside of the realm of possibilities either, because there won’t be many prototypes/early production versions of the car out there for testing.
But at least there’s a shot of the thing on a real road, tracking up from the rear to the nose of the car. Sadly, the guy who’s shooting has his car stereo and windows up, so we can’t hear the sound of the Aston’s V12. Pity, really. Aston’s have always had such nice engine notes.
The car looks production ready, and there’s no hint of camo or things tacked on with duct tape until they can figure out better mounting back at the factory. So this is probably a nice close up shot of what the final car will look like.
Here’s the video from Kuwait:
Source: Wired Autopia
Photo from Flickr user lander2006
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