With all the talk about the concepts we saw in Detroit this past week, let’s travel back in time to the 2006 North American International Automotive Show and head towards the Aston Martin stand and the Rapide concept.

Ford’s then Aston Martin division showed a four door sedan essentially a DB9 coupe that has been stretched by 11.8 inches, built off the same aluminum VH architecture as both the DB9 and the two-seater V8 Vantage. It used a 480-hp; 5.9-liter V-12 engine mated to a ZF manu-matic transmission and weighed just 309 pounds more than the two-plus-two-seater DB9 coupe.

When Ford decided to skip out on Aston Martin the Rapide concept was 86’d. When the David Richards era started at Aston Martin one of the first orders of business was to resurrect the Rapide.
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