Introduction

The Maserati Quattroporte is about the sexiest sedan you'll ever see, and its Italian craftsmanship reflects passion. Its styling, by the legendary Pininfarina, shows them all how it should be done, without tricks (except for three little portholes, touches that work). The lines are so shapely they're striking. Quattroporte is Italian for "four door," and this is Maserati's flagship sedan. Its cabin is roomy for a car this low and stylish, but it's really all about the quality of its materials, with nine shades of leather and six types of wood to choose from. The controls could and should be simpler, but that's true of all the top luxury cars today. The Quattroporte comes into its element at high speeds, and inspires confidence when driven at those speeds. This reflects the high engineering quality of the car. Alas, we live in a world where it's illegal to use such technology to its capability. Around town, the QP, as its fans call it, is as easy to drive as a Toyota. The new, aluminum, Maserati 4.2-liter V8 is high-revving, sweet and sensual. It makes 400 horsepower, more than that of the Mercedes S550, BMW 750i, or Audi A8. The six-speed manual automatic transmission with optional paddle shifters is responsive. The suspension is active, meaning that sensors make infinite adjustments in the shock absorbers and other dynamics, depending on the movements of the wheels and chassis. The resulting ride is flawless, neither too soft nor too firm, at any time. There's a Normal and Sport mode that respond appropriately, during casual driving and when we did a 100-mile run over some of our favorite curves through a remote forest in the Pacific Northwest. The cornering is exciting because it's so precise, thanks mostly to a double-wishbone suspension front and rear, and excellent 51/49 weight distribution. With a wheelbase of 120 inches, the Quattroporte is a fairly long car, but its handling is nimble.

Walkaround

It's gorgeous, it's sexy, it's Italian. Lines created by Sergio Pininfarina. And the best part is, it's not a Ferrari. Not that Ferraris are bad, of course, just that everyone knows what Ferraris are. The Quattroporte has four doors, which mostly only you as its owner will know. Except for those chrome door handles, Maserati blew a chance, there, to make it look like a coupe, although the GTS does it right with body-colored handles. Gazers will have to count the door handles to recognize the QP as a sedan, causing them to do a double-take when they get to four. A sedan! That's all another way of staying the styling is ever so subtly sleek. It's long, with a wheelbase of 120.6 inches, but when you look at the car, all you see is a beautiful long hood. However from the driver's seat, the hood doesn't look long at all, and that's quite a great trick. That open oval grille, with a notch at the top for distinction, and puckered out like Sophia Loren offering a kiss, is stunning whether with the chrome bars or black mesh. We're partial to the racy black mesh, of course. And in the center of the grille there is the Maserati Trident (the best-looking emblem in cardom, even cooler than Jaguar's leaping cat). The small horizontal headlights are perfectly tidy, and make it all look so easy. Same with the fascia under the grille and the air intakes. The three portholes behind the front wheels aren't functional, but they look cool; we'd be tempted to say they're reminiscent of the classic 1955 Buick Roadmaster, except the ports are much better done, with three instead of four, trapezoidal instead of round, and closer together. Unlike a BMW, which feels the need to sculpt swoops and scallops in its search for eternal beauty, the Maserati is smooth. And it works. There's nothing plain about the Quattroporte, but nothing gratuitous; and don't call us on those ports. The QP is simply the cleanest sedan with style that we can think of. Or maybe the most stylish sedan with clean lines. The standard 18-inch wheels are 11 spokes. The optional 19-inch wheels are beautiful tapered nine-spokes, wagon wheels honed to fine art, and the 20-inch wheels are thicker seven-spokes. There's very little overhang behind the rear wheels (or ahead of the front wheels), but again, there's mystery to that reality. You don't notice the short deck until you look for it, although you might notice the strategically placed Maserati emblem on the coupe-ish C-pillar. The tail is totally clean, no lip or spoiler, which makes you wonder if it's all true what they say about lips and spoilers being necessary to keep a car planted to the pavement at high speed. The Quattroporte can do 170 mph, and runs at 130 or more on motorways in Europe, a lot. The taillights are kind of (forgive us) Acura-looking, but the smooth bumper fascia and cool double twin exhaust tips that peek from holes in that fascia make up for it. And right there above the license plate, in neat chrome script, it clearly says it all: Maserati.

Interior Features

Interiors aren't quite as tangible as exterior styling, so the Italian edge in visual sensuality goes away a bit. It comes down to materials, and even though one might say that cows are cows, leather isn't always necessarily just leather. The Italians do a good job there, too. Shoes, anyone? With nine possible colors of leather and six types of wood, if you order your Quattroporte, you can go crazy weighing your decision. Isn't that 54 possibilities? Oh, wait, more than that, because you can order two-tone seats. Our test QP was medium brown, with the optional Rosewood trim, and what's not to like? Although photos of the black leather with red stitching, and Black Piano wood trim, look hot. Then there are the light tones. We're glad we don't have to make this decision. Our upgraded steering wheel came in dark Rosewood, three wide spokes with leather on the inside, beginning at 2 and 10 o'clock with nubs for your thumbs and wrapping all the way around the bottom. You can hang your thumbs there and still reach the big shifter paddles with your little fingers; the left paddle downshifts, right paddle upshifts. But chrome trim on the black aluminum paddles? Really, now. Maserati misses on the ergonomics of the turn signal stalk, which is stubby and too hard to reach beyond the paddle shifter. The steering wheel has controls, but they're as confusing as an Italian election, at least to us. Right thumb does the radio, whose reception isn't as strong as many low-cost cars we test. But we liked the mute button located there. There's another button on the steering wheel that says INFO, but despite repeated pressing no information appeared in any little windows on the instrument panel. However we're sure that somewhere, deep in the manual, is the info required to learn how to operate the INFO button. The gas mileage computer is crazy, as it calculates the range based on your mileage in the previous mile or so. This results in readings like we got: after some hot driving, our distance to empty was 98 miles. We then drove 26 miles at an easy pace, and the distance to empty magically grew to 277 miles. The overall mileage will be somewhere around 15 mpg, which doesn't seem that low, but low enough that the QP gets hit with a $2600 U.S. Gas Guzzler Tax. Tuning the radio is not intuitive. Too many knobs require too many moves resulting in too much distraction to get where you want to go with the radio, even after you learn the drill. Our Quattroporte had a navigation system but no disc, so we couldn't test it. The gauges in front of the driver are nice, having a blue background with white notches around the rim of the speedometer on the left and tachometer (redline 7500!) on the right, both with that Trident sign again, just to remind you of your Maserati-ness, as if you could forget. Between them is a window about three inches wide and five inches long, for a digital clock, temperature, date, odometer, transmission gear and radio station. There are also oil and water temperature gauges, with red needles, same as the speedo and tach. Those white notches within the gauges turn lime green at night. Now write your own sentence in this space. We're kind of at a loss, unable to say "lime green" and "Maserati" in the same sentence. Our dashboard was a dull black leather that also covered the tops of the doors, and switched to a lush brown at the glovebox. There were nice leather handles to close the doors, but the levers to open the doors were only big enough for two or three fingers. The wood-paneled center stack is topped by vents and a football-shaped analog clock, under which is the navigation screen over a CD slot. On each side of the screen are four buttons, controlling sport and snow modes, stability control off, door locks, sunscreen and a couple other things. Below that are three more panels of buttons with arrows aiming in all four directions, having to do