good’ay dear readers. and WELCOME, to another edition of MaxFindsTwoCarSolutions™: The most grammatically incorrect automotive blog on the internets.

Last week we got a little carried away. Max was in his feelings, and so ended up writing 2500 words on a Land Cruiser and the historical context in which it was constructed.

This week I am going to do my best to not get carried away…

But, I may or may not have spent the last 40 minutes researching a 2300 year old mathematical principal (not kidding) to learn how to describe this car, so yeah no promises.

HERE IT IS: A 2012 Aston Martin RAPIDE (here are 2 that are currently for sale btw: Miami Auto Brokers, & Gateway Classic Cars, find yours using the MaxFindsCars automated listing alert system (its free)!)

We’re going to cover…

But maybe visuals are not enough… open your auditory canals dear reader and bask in these cold start videos (though please ignore the grunting and strange background sounds):

Okay, so we’re in agreement that V12’s rule and this thing sounds amazing. Now let’s close our ears, open our eyes, and just stare at this beauty for a moment.

Moment of silence.

Keep staring.

Okay great. So, in my never humble opinion, Aston Martin is absolutely top tier in its exterior design. The shape of all of its cars is just, perfect. They are second to maybe none, and have been in this top spot for around 20 years now. Before that… Aston’s looked a bit different:

(we all have some things we did in the 90s we regret, I pooped my pants a lot in the 90s for example, so who can blame them for designing a couple horrific looking cars).

Anyways, Aston walks a similar line that Porsche does. You immediately know an Aston when you see one because they’ve carried the same shape and design principals through all of their cars since 2004, when the Henrik Fisker designed DB9 debuted.

I mention Fisker because the guy has designed some of the most beautiful cars ever made: the BMW Z8, the original BMW X5 (sue me, but I think these still look awesome), Aston’s DB9 & Vantage. He is also the founder of a car company famous for both having the Biebs as a customer, and for its vehicles spontaneously combusting when submerged in water.

So yeah, Fisker knew his stuff, and in designing the Aston he brushed off a 2300 year old mathematical principal called the golden ratio. For those of you thinking ‘wtf is that’, please reference the below images:

still confused? same

“Max, you’re showing me pictures of random objects with rectangles overlaid on them, are you having a schizophrenic episode?” Maybe.

But what I definitely DO have is a math degree I still owe thousands of dollars to the government for and too much pride to admit I’ve forgotten all of it and can’t explain something invented by a dude who had never seen an alley-oop dunk before.

So yeah, I spent the last ~30 mins struggling to understand wtf the golden ratio is, how it was used, and why its important that Henrik used it when designing the Aston.

Let me start with the elevator pitch: the golden ratio is some weird, ethereal mathematical formula that for some reason appears frequently in nature, design, and has a tendency to ‘look good’.

But let’s back up quick, let a donkey-brained fool (me) try his best to explain what the golden ratio is, fundamentally:

Say you have a line. Here’s one:

_____________

now say you cut the line somewhere, leaving two parts:

_______ _____

If dividing the sum of both sides (the whole line) by the longer side (let’s call it side Alpha) EQUALS the long side (alpha) divided by the short side (let’s call this one aardvark), the number you get is always 1.618, and 1.618 is the golden ratio.

Alpha / Aardvark = (Alpha + Aardvark) / Alpha = 1.618. Simple stuff really.

You’ll often see it represented as this funky looking spiral / rectangle rendition:

here, the spiral arcs are drawn through these kind of nested rectangles, whose sides are lengths in the golden ratio.

One more nerdy math note (even though I’m sure I’ve lost 90% of you already):

another weird thing about this is in relation to something called the fibonacci sequence.

The fibonacci sequence first appeared in Europe when a guy (named Fibonacci) was writing about rabbit reproduction for some unknown reason, and (for presumably a reason different than the rabbit thing) today is used for things like estimating how much time it takes to code features of the social media apps rotting our brains.

The sequence looks like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

The basic idea is, starting with 0 and 1, take the sum of the two most recent numbers in the sequence to create the next. So 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, etc.

As these numbers get bigger, the ratio of the most recent 2 numbers converge infinitely towards the golden ration of 1.618. In the above sequence, we are already close: 89/55 = 1.61818182. Strange right?

Anyways, the golden ratio supposedly shows up in a lot of places in nature. The length of the digits in your fingers, mollusk shells, rabbit sex parties, etc. So-called smart people on reddit seem to think this is overblown. I choose to ignore them because doing so makes the world seem more mystical.

It shows up in art & architecture as well; you can overlay this damn spiral on everything from the parthenon, to Mondrian’s Tableau, and The Great Wave. Many famous things, and things famous for being things people want to look at.

Now, this becomes a bit of a rabbit or the egg situation. Is this coincidence? Cognitive dissonance? Is there some mathematical formula that determines if something looks nice? Why, because there’s something deep within us that recognizes that the golden ratio and nature are somehow intertwined? Or have we all been psyop’d by artists from a thousand years ago because they read some scroll about rabbit sex and decided to paint about it?

I’m not sure. As I said, I am donkey brained.

I do know two things though:

SO, the Rapide is rocking a V12 engine and is mathematically guaranteed to be beautiful for all of time. High on the Max Meter for sure

Starting with the good…

There are a few things worth highlighting here. First, apparently these V12’s are actually pretty solid. They’re reliable if maintenance intervals are kept to.

Not what I would have expected to read about a 14 year old British lux-sports sedan that MSRP’ed at $230k.

But, as with all things in life, we must trust the comments of 3 redditors whom we have never met, and have no way to be sure are actually Aston Martin owners.

Next, you have hopefully already noticed this thing has 4 doors. Rare for an Aston. Truly practical for a young family. I promise.

The cool thing about these doors though is that they are what Aston Martin calls ‘swan’ doors.

See how it opens up at an angle? Not quite billionaire doors, but they do look cool as hell and give you some extra wiggle room when you’re trying to open the doors in tight spaces or near curbs.

Other comfort things…

The interior is absolutely stunning. Leather everything, even the cup holders. All 4 seats are heated AND cooled. It has all the basics you’d want from a modern car too: bluetooth, backup camera, etc.

The bad…

A couple big things, admittedly, are not so practical about this car.

First, you can’t park them outside. Not because buying and street parking an Aston would be a sin in the face of the car gods:

but because when you park it outside the dashboard will literally begin to decompose.

Outside of that, even though the car is generally reliable, when things do go they can be expensive. The electrical stuff is all Ford/Volvo, as this is from an era where Ford owned Aston & Volvo, but anything mechanical on this car is going to cost you, its a V12, hand built in England.

In conclusion: extremely cushy, more practical than you’d expect for what it is, but still... budget a few grand a year at least to keep it on the road.

Okay… I’ll admit… if this category is predicated on never getting stuck in the winter, needing a tow, or otherwise being dependent on others to transport my family, this car is not going to rank highly.

It DOES get some juice here simply for being an Aston that will make me feel like a super spy, but yeah, its a RWD V12 luxury boat from a country not known for doing anything reliably except losing wars of independence (1776 shout out). Not great in the salt and snow.

…kind of. The car pictured sold on BaT for $50k. Higher mileage examples can be found for way less, closer to $30. I ran the numbers at 50k because the idea of a high mileage V12 Aston terrifies me.

It uses $1600 of our $1700 two car solution budget. Not ideal.

which means our total is… (drum roll please)

23/50, which puts the Rapide at THIRD (last) on the TWO CAR SOLUTION🎺🎉😤 LEADERBOARD.

Kind of what we all figured… Not the smartest choice. Am I known for making smart automotive choices though?

Nope.

so I guess we’ll see, and in the meantime I’ll be looking for more Rapides using the (SHAMELESS PLUG) MaxFindsCars listing alert software. It’s free. You should try it.

And remember…

MaxFindsCars.com is not, technically, free! By subscribing, dear reader, you have agreed to tell your friends about it.

In fact, I believe the contract specifically stated you had to each subscribe 100 of your closest friends, colleagues, enemies, exes, priests, pets, & sugar mommas. I’ll have to check the fine print to be sure, but you all may as well get started spreading the word in the meantime.

That's a wrap for today. And if you want more MaxFindsCars, be sure to follow Max’s Twitter (@maxjzin)