Ladies and gentlemen, put quite simply, this is the longest, fastest, car in the world. Allow us to introduce the Maserati Quattroporte GTS, which we were invited to drive in a place with lots of long, fast, roads: Dubai.
There’s a problem with all luxury cars. Don’t you know? Leather clad, button festooned and soft carpeted as they may be, they’re almost all completely soulless. Like that moment in The Bourne Identity where agent Bourne emerges from the fishing trawler at a snowy, German dock, cold, bullet-riddled and not knowing who, where or what’s going on. He still kicks the hell out of anyone like the enraged automaton he secretly is though.
The BMW 7 Series, Mercedes-Benz S-Class and Audi A8 are all guilty of being that clinical. They’re as efficient as the German foreign affairs department and as creative as the board at the Dow Jones Industrial. Thankfully, for those of us with hot-blood coursing through our bodies, there is now another way.
We were invited by the quixotic Italian automaker, Maserati, to drive their brand new luxury conveyance, the Quattroporte GTS, around cosmopolitan Dubai for a few days. It’s hard not to take in the aesthetics of one of the showiest cities in the world and it soon becomes clear that for anything to stand out in the Dubai skyline, against the world’s tallest building, the Burg Khalifa, it needs to look pretty elegant or distinctive.
The elegant styling of the Maserati four-door does the trick. It is fronted by a new, ever-so-slightly understated grille, but it’s a grille which puts one in mind immediately of the sporty, Gran Turismo and Gran Cabrio. The elegant band of LED daytime running lights glint against its body work like a wrist wearing a bejewelled bracelet.
Crucially, from there, it doesn’t follow the staid, starchy, four-door sedan recipe. I love the Maserati trident that lives like a statuesque Italian coat of arms on the C-pillar. In profile it’s long, majestic, and yes, bordering on phallic. From the rear, it’s more inoffensive than bold, but you won’t be able to take your eyes off those quad tailpipes.
Even in Dubai, the home of excess and biggest-is-best, the elegant Maserati Quattroporte is the car that stands out against a veritable ocean of Mercedes-Benz S-Class and BMW 7 Series models. In a new age of wealth in Dubai, Maserati is fostering an undercurrent of emotional appeal for its cars.
Engineering-wise, the Maserati Quattroporte is completely new from the ground up and a Maserati employee assured me quite insistently that, “only a few sections of the floor are shared with Chrysler, that is it!”
There is a V6 engine available, but as for the cars we thundered through Dubai with, the Quattroporte GTS’s heart is an all-new, Ferrari-built, 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8. This makes the car faster, stronger and more efficient than the charismatic normally aspirated GTS that came before it. The fact that this is the fastest and longest sedan (5 282 mm) in the world, will surely stand it in good stead when it arrives in South Africa later this year.
When it comes to differentiating the new Quattroporte from the Germans in interior fit and finish, the Maserati Quattroporte I drove had a mix of palatable and some not so palatable tastes, it has to be said. There is no denying the Germans make and sell more cars and it stands to reason they’ll have their build processes well honed.
The Maserati Quattroporte is clad in sweet, soft, leather from a company called Poltrona Frau. They have future plans to create limited edition interiors with designer, Ermenegildo Zegna and they’ve already tied in Bowers & Wilkins for an exclusive high-end sound system. These are the palatable parts.
The less than palatable ones are in the form of a driver’s seat with a slightly wonky backrest and a centre console that has its elegant, horizontal, design line unmistakably sullied by a Chrysler-looking touchscreen/satellite navigation system. A less than appetising gear-lever sprouts from the transmission tunnel like it’s not even from the same car.
Maserati do say the cars we drove are from the ‘first batch’ to leave the factory and none of them were specified with any extravagant interior options. Good, they can only get better then. The dashboard can be had with anything from a cool carbon fibre look, to polished walnut to go with extra padded comfort in strategic areas and rear seat entertainment, which features large, elegantly-fitted screens. I inspected another test car that had a darker interior colour than mine and in that guise it did look and feel every bit a premium vehicle.
I also had a lot of opportunity to inspect the Maserati Quattroporte’s interior from the rear quarters on the long drive down Dubai’s vast, mostly-uneventful, multi-lane highways. The rear quarters are unashamedly lush and with pre-loaded Andrea Bocelli piping into the cabin courtesy of Bowers & Wilkins sound, the charismatic Maserati trident cushioning my head on the headrest and the GTS’s sensual V8 burble accompanying every kilometer of the journey, it became hard not to get all ‘La Dolce Vita’ about the experience. My goodness, these Italians can get the heart strings tugging. I’ve certainly never gone all gooey in the back of a BMW 7 Series.
When my turn came to drive the Ferrari-engined machine, although I got the fastest stretch of road that tore into the desert with minimal consideration for speed enforcement, I didn’t get much opportunity to feel the Quattroporte’s dynamics. This was sad because judging from the occasional traffic circle I darted across with deft inputs at the steering wheel, it felt bloody sorted. In the same vein as a Jaguar XJ in fact: light; agile; sporty, but probably even a little suppler.
The all-new architecture retains perfect 50:50 weight distribution, double wishbone front suspension and five-link rear suspension. A Maserati employee confessed to me that journalists at the press launch in Europe were flicking and sliding the GTS around like it was a compact sports car. Not bad for the longest, fastest car in the world. I’d have to take his word for it on these arrow straight roads though.
What I did get to test during my stint was the aural pleasure of the Mazza’s sport mode and the impressive V8 engine. This isn’t the first time Ferrari has provided the firepower for a Maserati limo and it creates a recipe for exquisite, spine-tingling driving. The direct-injection V8 supplies 390 kW of power and 710 Nm of torque, which Masserati say gives the car class-leading power output and torque per litre. The 0 – 100 km/h sprint is completed in just 4.7 seconds and top speed is 307 km/h, all harnessed through a smooth 8-speed automatic transmission.
Initially, burbling around the city and along the highways, the Quattroporte felt and sounded pretty mute versus what I was expecting. A twiddle with the sport button turned the tables on that idea. Then the throttle sharpened and the engine sounded much bigger than its compact 3.8-litre dimensions suggested. It’s still pretty muted from the front seat, but as our fleet of Mazza’s crisscrossed each other’s paths around the city, it become clear that this is one orgiastic sounding car, particularly from the outside.
It terms of performance, the GTS is smooth and torquey from as low as 2 000 r/min, but it does run low on power as you near the redline, which is where I’d suggest the engine begins to feel its size, often prompting an earlier upshift on the big aluminium paddles that allow you to operate the gearbox manually.
I’ll tell you because it didn’t happen in South Africa and I hope the ambassador isn’t listening, but I took the Quattroporte past 250 km/h on the desert stretch of road where I was assured it was safe to do us. Shifting early and getting back into the torque band helped the big car along. It is still fast though and very stable at high speed. I’m not sure about 300 km/h plus. I think you’d need a very long piece of road to achieve that, but the Maserati Quattroporte is as sporty, balanced and composed as you’ll get in this category.
With that blast behind me and all the traffic circles in Dubai well-and-truly attacked, all that was left was to enjoy the Italian V8 symphony soothing my eardrums all the way back into the city. I realised as our convoy of glorious Maseratis skirted the cities highways for the last time, with the dusky sunset colouring the vast Dubai skyline, that the city has something in common with this exotic, Italian, machine. For the layman, the Maserati brand and the city of Dubai stem from similarly conservative roots, but despite this, both are attempting an unprecedented accent towards worldwide acceptance.
Maserati hopes to achieve five figure sales with the Quattroporte, the Ghibli and the Levante (an SUV competitor coming later next year) and certainly in the Quattroporte GTS they’ve captured a little bit of magic. Having the talent, overcoming challenges and utilising your resources is only part of it, the other is converting public opinion. Consider me a Maserati convert.
South African pricing for the Maserati Quattroporte S (V6) and GTS (V8) will be announced closer to their launch, which is expected around June/July.
