There comes a time in a man’s life – usually on the discovery of a second fertilised egg – when he has to admit he can no longer run a Golf GTi as a family car. You can’t fit a bike, a scooter, four pairs of wellies, a set of golf clubs, a couple of tennis racquets, a picnic rug, several footballs and that black sack full of stuff to take to the charity shop in the back of a car designed for footballers who’ve just signed their first professional contract.
So he has to trade for a sensible car with a long wheelbase and good visibility so all the drivers in the household can park it. A ‘dad-racer’ with a German name and some spunky red badging if he’s lucky.
And there’s almost never any fun in that. Which is why I’m sure the people who designed Aston Martin’s four-door, four-seat Rapide S were middle-aged men with small children. ‘What can we do,’ they must have thought, ‘to make a car that looks, sounds and performs like a DB9, but which our wives can still take the kids to soft-play in?’
The Rapide debuted in 2010. By all accounts, it sort of did the job. It had four seats, was pretty fast, and looked a lot like a car Daniel Craig could crash. But punters weren’t entirely convinced. And so Aston added 82 more horsepower and a big air-sucking grill, then looked down the alphabet until they found the letter ‘S’, and gave the world the mother of all family hatchbacks.
It is brilliant. Not as pretty as a DB9, but brilliant nonetheless. Let me explain. On New Year’s Day, I took my offspring for a walk. Because they have more in common with animals than human beings, they got themselves covered in mud and had to be stripped bare before being returned to the Rapide S’s cream-leather-clad interior. This procedure took place in the boot of the car, a surprisingly capacious space, from where Things One and Two were able to crawl into the back seats. These seats were heated and therefore welcoming to their pinky flesh, and positioned in front of TV screens, which provided a handy distraction from what was happening in the front… which wasn’t suitable for family viewing.
Pump the sport button on the centre ‘waterfall’ console, pull the flappy paddles, and you unleash the Rapide S’s 6.0-litre V12 and every one of its 552 brake horsepower. The sound this creates is like God swearing, forgivable when you’re being taken from a standing start to 62mph in a two-tonne car in 4.4 seconds. That’s a lot of fast for a car that’s also a children’s entertainer. Apparently it’ll go on to do 203mph, but as I’d signed a form promising I wouldn’t take it on a track day and I wasn’t sure even my daughter could watch Frozen enough times for me to get to Germany and back, I never got the chance to find out.
Would I buy one? If I had £150k to spend and I didn’t have to park it on a residential street in south-west London, hell yes. And I’d never complain about not being allowed to own a Golf GTi ever again.
Aston Martin Rapide S, from £147,950 astonmartin.com
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