#AstonMartinRapide

The Rare Rides series has covered every generation of Aston Martin’s Lagonda four-door except one. In the Sixties, the Lagonda Rapide helped to define the super sedan class: A grand tourer that could sweep four passengers and their luggage across Continental Europe with ease.

Then there was the late Seventies Lagonda, which had a long production run through 1990. Advanced electronically, that Lagonda was too ambitious and generally earned its reputation as a good-looking, expensive disaster. Finally, there was the Lagonda Taraf, a large sedan designed specifically and cynically for the UAE market. It was built to extract maximum dollars from oil barons and the like. Great success!

But between Lagonda Rapide and Lagonda was a missing link. It was called the Lagonda Series I and is the rarest Aston Martin Lagonda ever made. And one is for sale.

Rare Rides has featured a couple of fine Lagonda sedans previously. First was the 1980s rectangle designed by William Towns, which miraculously remained in production from 1976 to 1990. Next was the Lagonda Taraf, a super sedan intended only for the oil-flush UAE market.

Today we bring you the genesis of the Aston Martin Lagonda sedan line, the Rapide.

British tabloid The Sun reported this week that the next James Bond movie will feature an all-electric Aston Martin Rapide E as 007’s featured ride in an effort to give the government-sanctioned killer a greener persona. While Bond films have featured countless vehicles, Astons are typically reserved for series’ titular hero — though he has driven a weird amount of Fords throughout the years.

Developed with loads of help from Williams Advanced Engineering, the Rapide E will be James’ first electric vehicle (watercraft and moon buggy excluded) and was an intentional decision on the part of the film’s director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, to update the character. “The decision was spearheaded by the film’s new director, who’s a total tree-hugger,” claimed The Sun’s unnamed source. “He is working directly with Aston Martin to get one of their electric cars ready for its big close-up.”

We’re all used to driving curvaceous V12 sedans, right? Now, how would you react to news that your luxury automaker of choice planned to strip all fossil fuel-related hardware from it just to satisfy some squares with exceptionally strong regulatory powers?

That’s the situation for fans of the Rapide S, which Aston Martin claims is — in AMR guise — the world’s fastest four-door vehicle. Aston claims it just can’t keep building all of these 12-cylinder beauties in Europe’s regulatory environment. For some vehicles, gas has to go. And guess which model takes the first hit?

The penultimate set of bends along the road course at Atlanta Motorsports Park, located in God’s own country about an hour outside of the big city, is a serpentine testament to all of the things that make motoring exciting. Triple-digit speeds approach quickly. The checkered start line quickly becomes a blurred memory. Warm tires grip the tarmac as beads of perspiration mount for the upcoming lap.

It turns out that the usual excuses for denying consumers a station wagon variant of a given car – the regulatory hurdles, lack of demand from the market and expense of homologation – can be circumvented with one simple item; cash.

I know someone who’s been in the fashion biz most of her life. Her affinity with handsome male models is not surprising, yet her insistence–a “shush” sound accompanied by a finger on their lips–that the Eye Candy refrain from voicing their opinions definitely got me thinking. Perhaps beauty and critical thinking are two circles that rarely intersect in the Venn Diagram of life?

True dat, since I can’t remember a day when Aston Martin’s historically gorgeous automobiles weren’t trampled by the performance of neighboring Jaguars or the German and Italian marques. And with the Rapide sedan, we have another stunning Aston Martin to admire. Shush!!!