The Maserati Quattroporte at 60 is as good as it ever was | GRR
The Maserati Quattroporte turns 60 this year, which is quite an age for a model that – like a four-seat Ferrari – has never really been the main character in the Trident’s line-up. But as those who know and love the Quattroporte will attest, that’s always absolutely been a part of its appeal. You need only translate the name to English – ‘Four Doors’ – to really understand that this car has always been about making the mundane just a bit sexier and more interesting, but always without being garish.
Always a four-door saloon, always versatile, evolving through the generations with a marque that has over the decades undergone a few reinventions under a number of custodians. In the ‘60s on its arrival, it was entirely the suave, sexy Italian foil to the somewhat fusty and Aristocratic luxury four-door establishment of Bentley and Rolls-Royce. It instead served in the left-field alongside the likes of the Lagonda Rapide.
While very much a ‘modern’ three-box saloon of the ‘60s, the Quattroporte like many legendary Maseratis before it was the basis for some beautiful coach builds, notably the Frua-penned Aga Khan car, and latterly in its third-generation the Pavesi-bodied car of Italian Republic president Sandro Pertini. The Quattroporte has always been a car courted by the quietly powerful. Like car, like owners.
The Citroën and De Tomaso years yielded the second- and third-generation Quattroportes. The former used an SM underpinning, V6 engines and Bertone styling, while the latter returned to V8 power and featured Giugiaro lines from his Italdesign era.
The Quattroporte IV of 1994 was simultaneously smoother by design and thoroughly more modern but with a distinctive wedge shape that could only have come courtesy of Marcello Gandini. This was very much the upper executive express forced-induction era of Maserati, sharing as it did the platform of the Biturbo and Ghibli – as much a bitten thumb to the BMW M5 as it was contemporary Bentleys. It’s a properly cool thing, albeit without the elegance of the original.
Then we get to the fifth-generation of the Quattroporte most of our millennial readers will remember best. It’s the car that cemented the model as the low-key legend it’s always been in the minds of younger generations, with its low, wide, slicked-back styling and lusty Ferrari-derived F136 V8 engines. The 2003 car saw a return to the original 1960s Quattroporte styling tropes, albeit with a few awkward early 2000s kinks. The facelift model of the late 2000s brought cleaner styling and bigger, more growly versions of that glorious DOHC V8. All in, the later Quattroporte was much more comfortable in its own skin. It’s still thoroughly pretty, and thoroughly elegant today, offering something entirely different to the objectively stunning Aston Martin Rapide, without being any less desirable.
It was, per Maserati tradition, also the basis for wonderful coach builds, including the simply exquisite Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera and Bellagio Fastback Touring.
We move now to the latest, sixth-generation Maserati Quattroporte, which appeared in 2013. Modern and sexy, in the image of the GranTurismo super GT, the latter-day QP always had a bit of a rough paper round in the eyes of critics, who at the time thought it not special enough next to a Jaguar XJ or Aston Martin Rapide. It took some years but the M156 Quattroporte, like the fifth-generation car, really grew into its own skin, shaking the button-down executive express image the more its luscious 3.8-litre twin-turbo Ferrari-derived V8 grew in potency and personality, peaking as it has in the utterly spellbinding Trofeo, which has helped this car live up to the Quattroporte name.
So after all this time, what does the Quattroporte name actually mean? The same as it always did. Lusty, yet understated. Powerful, yet reserved. The best thing about being in a Quattroporte? At least in their best forms, this intangible feeling that you know something others don’t – a sense of comfort, of being ahead. You’ll always get the double-take as you burble and glide around but onlookers will always stop short of feeling the disdain they would for a traditional exotic. They’ll clock the trident, note the haunches but see four doors and, if they’re in the know, give you a nod of approval. The Quattroporte is a car-lover’s car and we always have and always will adore it. Long may it remain so.