Short Take Road Test
How important is style? A Detroit design chief once observed that if cars were only about practicality, “they’d have to put a roof over Kalamazoo so they could build enough Checker sedans to keep up with demand.”
Checker is long gone, but the moral of that story still holds, and the Quattroporte is proof. Judged by conventional standards—conventional as it applies in the realm of $100,000 sedans—this sleek Italian job could be perceived as coming up just a little short in mundane scoring categories such as rear-seat legroom or the latest electronic gizmology or secondary-control location. (Where did they hide that seat-heater switch?) The Germans do that sort of thing better.
But those are practical considerations, and we’re talking style here, signore—style brimming with passion. Consider its voluptuous Pininfarina shape. You might argue that the Mercedes CLS is just as sexy, but if you stand on a Beverly Hills street corner for an hour, we’ll bet the frequency of CLS drive-bys will be almost routine compared with Maserati sightings. Sexiness has a tendency to diminish in proportion to familiarity.
And once the pilot has settled into the luscious interior, the seduction process accelerates. Magnifico! The inner Quattroporte is a festival of high-end craftsmanship—supple leather, beautiful woodwork, exquisite stitchery—that makes luxosedan interiors from Munich, Stuttgart, and even Ingolstadt seem a little cold and reserved.
But we spoke of passione, a dynamic trait in which the Italians have long excelled. The Quattroporte’s 396-hp, 4.2-liter V-8 is bolted to 4626 pounds of rolling sculpture—not exactly ideal at the drag strip, but if 5.3 seconds to 60 mph and a quarter-mile in 13.9 at 103 mph isn’t quite as brisk as some of the Quattroporte’s price contemporaries—the BMW B7 Alpina and Mercedes S63 come to mind—it’s not slow, either, and this Ferrari-based Maserati-spec V-8 (unique crank, revised intake, wet sump) emits power sounds that are all but intoxicating.
The V-8 in our test car was allied with a ZF six-speed automatic, the main update to the Quattroporte since its 2004 introduction and one that makes it far more pleasant to live with in ordinary driving. Excellent adaptive programming gives the ZF box a near-intuitive response to the driver’s mood, and paddle shifters deliver prompt changes that stop short of the racetrack harshness of the DuoSelect automated manual transmission we experienced in our Quattroporte comparo four years ago [“Executive Trio, Con Brio,” June 2004].
The only power-related black mark in our assessment was produced by the combination of a fairly aggressive throttle tip-in and the low-profile Pirelli P Zero Rosso tires (245/40-19 front, 285/35-19 rear) on icy roads in midwinter Michigan. But if you can afford a sedan such as this, you’ll undoubtedly have other more mundane rides better suited to the vicissitudes of winter.
In terms of its other dynamics—steering, transient response, braking—the Quattroporte still has a measure of sports-car soul that other execurockets can envy. Add sexy good looks and a designer interior, and the $118,525 (including a $2100 guzzler tax) as-tested price seems almost reasonable.
