Aston Martin Rapide S arrives with 550 horses

Aston Martin is replacing the four-door Rapide with the Rapide S, which gets minor styling tweaks and extra power.

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The Aston Martin Rapide is a thing of beauty, as is every Aston Martin, but its paucity of power compared to obvious rivals like the Panamera Turbo and Ferrari FF have hurt sales. So Aston has decided to do something about that by dropping the Rapide and delivering a new version – the Aston Martin Rapide S – just as we predicted last year

Just as they did with the new DB9, Aston Martin has made the new Rapide S a more aggressive car, with small styling tweaks like a new grill and a small spoiler at the back, some minor trim tweaks with the addition of Piano Black trim and a new duotone black and red leather trim, and an optional carbon fibre pack for exterior highlights.

Under the skin, the Rapide S is still based on Aston’s VH platform, but it does get the latest Gen 4 tweaks including new adaptive dampers with Normal, Sport and Track modes, tweaked dynamic stability control (DSC) and the latest AM11 engine dropped by 19mm for a lower centre of gravity.

But the big change is to the AM11 6.0 litre V12 which gets significantly more power – 550bhp instead of 470bhp – and an extra 15lb/ft of torque (and Aston say the low end torque is up by more than twice that), and despite the extra power emissions drop to 332g/km and economy improves to 19.9mpg.

The extra 80bhp the Rapide S does help performance, with 0-62mph now coming up in 4.9 seconds (Rapide 5.3s) and top speed rises to 190mph. They are more impressive figures (about as quick as a Jaguar XJ 5.0 S/C), but a long way short of the performance of the Panamera Turbo (4.2s to 62mph) and the Ferrari FF (3.7s).

Still, people buy an Aston Martin for its beauty rather than its raw power, and the tweaks to deliver the 2013 Aston Martin Rapide S are welcome and worthwhile.

The new Aston Martin Rapide S goes on sale next month, and prices are expected to stay close to the £150,000 starting price of the current Rapide.

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