If you want a big, luxurious, Big Beef Boy car, you’ve got plenty of options. Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7, Jaguar XJ, Audi A8, Lexus LS, and probably something else that I’ve evicted from my mind for being too boring. The Maserati Quattroporte is not too boring, however. Oh, not at all.
The thing about a lot of those Big Beef Boy cars is that they’re designed for, well, Big Beef Boys. The ones who are getting on in years, fatty plaques accumulating in their arteries. The cars are all wonderful and large and sumptuous and comfortable, but they’re almost entirely designed around being wonderful and large and sumptuous and comfortable, possibly for fear of over-stressing the Beef Boys, thus killing them. Any driving excitement always seems to have been added later in the engineering process, rather than being baked in from the beginning. Yes, you can get a 760iM AMG R, but those tend to be large barges with a sledgehammer’s worth of power shoved in.
Not so with the Maserati. Yes, it’s wildly luxurious and miles more comfortable than you would think, but it feels like it was designed as a driver’s car from the beginning. Despite also being a large barge.
What I Like
- The steering. My god, the steering. It’s not chattery like a Porsche 911, mind you, but for how huge this thing is, it’s practically alive. You really can feel the road.
- It’s way more comfortable than you might think. “Maserati? That’s like a sports car?” you, my new-to-cars friend, ask. But no, this thing really is just as comfortable as a Lexus LS over the rough stuff. Just floating over bumps without feeling like a boat.
- Every single surface you touch is covered in impeccably soft leather.
What I Don’t Like As Much
- All that leather comes at a price. The smell of it. All that impossibly rich Italian leather is quite pungent, making it smell a bit like a tannery. New car smell is great, but at some points I had to put the window down.
- Maserati interiors are infamous for being a bit... Italian. I defy you to get into this thing and find the trunk release button. No, it’s not where you think it is.
- The ZF eight-speed transmission, which is featured in pretty much every big car nowadays, could be a bit more exciting when you’re going for some hustle.
But overall, I really, really like this car. What do you want to know about it? Hit me up in the comments below.