Aston Martin Rapide going through final tests in the Arctic Circle

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We have already showed you bunch of spy photos of the upcoming four door Aston Martin Rapide and also first official studio images.

This time we have another set of spy photos from the Arctic Circle where Aston engineers are doing final tests on this Porsche Panamera fighter.

The car has very little tape to hide rear doors, it also misses badges and the mirrors are not the ones we are going to see on the production version. Rest of the car is exactly what you can expect once it goes on sale second half of this year.

Refresher: Power will come from the 480-hp, 6.0-liter V12 that is mated to a ZF six-speed automatic transmission with Aston’s Touchtronic manual shifting controls.

As Rapide shares the architecture with the DB9 changes were done to the wheelbase, which is stretched 10 inches (25.4 cm), also the roofline is raised 2.5 inches (6.35 cm) for more headroom for the rear-seat passengers.

Overall length is somewhere around 16.5 feet (5 meters), which puts it to the same category as Mercedes-Benz S-Class and Audi A8/S8.

Aston Martin Rapide is expected to accelerate from 0-60 mph (0-96 km/h) in around 4.5 seconds, while the top speed is over 180 mph (290 km/h) and will likely cost somewhere around $200,000 (156,000 Euros).

Update! Official debut is not in Geneva as speculated earlier. Official word from Aston Martin is: “We will show a production version of the car towards the end of this year.”