Gadgetory

if you look at the world's most exciting performance cars you'll find that the majority of them offer two doors in two feet most of the time that's just fine but every now and again you might want to take some friends along for the ride or some kids or maybe even some dogs in that case is certainly far more comfortable if you have four doors and four seats to play with the problem is it's very difficult to find a four-door car that's worth getting excited about but don't worry we found one for you this is the Aston Martin Rapide s seats for in relative comfort it's got even a decent sized truck it all starts up front with this trademark Aston Martin grille which I admit is a little bit less distinctive these days since Ford and jag where I started putting it on their cars - but it never looks better than on the front of an Aston Martin the repeat s is significantly better looking up front than the original Rapide which had this chrome bar going across the front it almost made it look like it had braces not very flattering we'll come back and open up the front door which you can see has a little bit of an upswept lift to it not quite as dramatic as a Lamborghini of course but it gives it more clearance over the curb or also over the bodies of your fallen corporate enemies and then there's the rear hats which is a little bit difficult to open here but when you get it open you get a fairly sizable interior and fold down the rear seats which gives you even more storage space a nice flat area not quite big enough for a sheet of drywall maybe but a couple of sets of golf clubs should be no problem at all but of course it's the rear doors that really set this car apart and the rear seats inside they're small but they're actually quite comfortable and they're fairly sporty - with a lot of bolstering not exactly sized for a grown adult like myself I can get in here and I'm reasonably comfortable but I would like a couple more inches of headroom and a little bit more legroom wouldn't hurt either it's definitely more suited for children than for grown adults on the rear seats here we've got an infotainment system that you can get into your kids can plug their videogame system into the centre console if they won't stop complaining about your driving the car even comes with wireless noise cancelling headphones which may be will finally shut them up so it all starts with this weighty aston mark keye with crystal on the back you slot it into the center console and then you're greeted with a very nice sound indeed that slots into what is it very nicely laid out a nice looking infotainment system that is unfortunately totally bereft of any sort of modern technology we've got an am/fm system from banging olsen which sounds really great it's got these pop-up tweeters that are very dramatic when they raise and the sound quality is indeed very good but ultimately it's pretty limited in terms of what you can do you do have AM FM and Sirius of course the CD player here and you can connect through the center dashboard here a USB Drive if you want to or an iPod which uses a dock connector if you've got a newer iPod or iPhone you're out of luck unfortunately there's a 3.5 millimeter line in too but if you want to do any Bluetooth HTTP streaming or anything like that you are out of luck you can connect your phone to the car but only for actually making phone calls that is pretty disappointing this day and age I have to say as we move down here you can turn on the navigation system by hitting the nav button you might think that you control the nav system by using this nice big dial that falls right to hand between the seats but no actually that's just for the seat here to control the navigation yet to reach up to this smaller dial on the dashboard and toggle in things like your city name the address the street name and I'll do a character by character letter-by-letter there's no voice recognition it takes an absolute age to enter in anything here so hopefully you're only going to a few places that you can add as favorites and then in the gauge cluster there are two more small displays on the Left you've got your gear and your current speed on the right you can tell go through a couple of different things from the trip computer your remaining range your current average fuel consumption which is 14 for us orbit painful tire pressures and that's about it it's pretty disappointing for a car in 2013 so what does the repeat s offer that the original repeat from a couple of years ago did not what we've stepped up about 80 horsepower this time we're up to five hundred and fifty which is pretty healthy out of the v12 it's also a very thirsty car the EPA rates this at 13 miles per gallon city and 19 highway our testing which included a mixture of both found us coming in much closer to the low end of the scale just over 14 miles per gallon that brings the zero to 60 time down under five seconds which is really where it needs to be for a car on this category though it's not really a hard accelerating car in that way it's got more of a top-end push which means you've got a rev it sounds pretty nice so we're not going to complain the other nice improvement is a tunable suspension by pressing this button here you can go from a comfort mode all the way up to a track mode we've driven plenty of cars where the suspension really doesn't make that much of a difference but here it's very noticeable as you go through the different modes we're in comfort now and on a bumpy road it's actually quite comfortable but hold the button down for four seconds go into track mode and it's very very tight indeed we've actually had the opportunity to take it out on a track it does surprisingly well a bass Aston Martin Rapide s will set you back just under $200,000 but as is the case with many luxury cars there are plenty of options to choose from many of which will quickly drive that price much much higher but you have to ask yourself is this a car that I am buying with my heart or with my head because if we look at this analytically cars like the Porsche Panamera S or even a Tesla Model S offer greater performance and much much more intelligent interiors for less money but if this is a car that you're buying with your hearts if you're looking for a car that you can truly fall in love with this is a pretty difficult siren song to resist