The Art Of Four Play!

Aston Martin Rapide.

It's the Greatiest four-door that I've seen.

Introduction:
The Aston Martin Rapide is a four-door, four-seat coupe, which British luxury marque Aston Martin plans to introduce in late 2009 to compete with the Porsche Panamera, Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class and Maserati Quattroporte. It was first presented under the form of a concept car at the North American International Auto Show in 2006 . The Rapide name is a reference to the Lagonda Rapide, a sedan produced by Lagonda, now part of Aston Martin.

It's five metres long. That makes it the size of a Mercedes S-Class, or a Maserati Quattroporte.

Architecture
Underpinning the Rapide concept is Aston Martin's VH architecture, developed to offer exceptional manufacturing flexibility. This high-strength, low-mass architecture forms the backbone of the current generation of Aston Martins, spearheaded by the DB9 Coupé and flanked by the DB9 Volante and the Vantage.

Tradition
Aston Martin has always acknowledged the need for elegant, high-speed touring sports cars. The four-door, four-seater saloon displayed at the 1927 Olympia Motor Show began a long tradition of cars that combined elegance, style and power with usability. The Olympia car was a closed-body tourer that sported long, flowing lines for the era, tapering to a luggage trunk and mounted on a tubular frame. The car was also low to the ground, purposeful and sporting. Four years later another four-door saloon was exhibited, with an aluminium-panelled body by Bertelli, finely engineered, detailed and upholstered throughout, with intriguing touches like the roof-mounted opening glass panel above the rear passenger compartment.

An Aston Martin is about elegance, power and innovation, a bespoke form constructed to high standards that provide the model definition of 21st century design and engineering execution.