By
LATEST ARTICLE
2013 Lexus ES: First Drive
For years, the Lexus ES has been a great luxury sedan for impressing the clients. It's been... Read More
2013 Lexus ES: First Drive
For years, the Lexus ES has been a great luxury sedan for impressing the clients. It's been... Read More
- #10LEADERBOARD RANK
- 2349ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED
- 95COMMENTS POSTED
22,491 views
The editors of TheCarConnection.com have driven the Quattroporte and present their own impressions and details in this Bottom Line to help provide you with the best information. TheCarConnection.com has also read reviews from a wide range of Web sites and publications, bringing you the highlights in a definitive review.
Likes:
- Not the most common car
- Sports-car-like interior feel
- Responsive steering
- Quality finishing
Dislikes:
- Rattling interior
- Limited headroom in the rear
- Small trunk
- Erratic ride
Judging from the sexy design and appeal of the 2010 Maserati Quattroporte, one would never guess that it had been in production for five years. In this case, that isn't a bad thing because the car has been refined over the years; in the looks department, it's still great.
One can easily spot the car due to its strikingly unique looks, with a sharklike front end, an aggressively raked windshield, and a smoothly sculpted roofline that leads to a very elegant tail; the vehicle's designers have reached a compromise between sports car and elegance. Unlike German luxury sedans, the Maserati offers a richer interior with a lot of woodwork and little touches like leather piping.
That said, the 2010 Maserati Quattroporte is a very different machine from luxury cars such as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class; it's more of a four-door sports car than a sporty luxury sedan. On patchy back roads, the suspension can get a bit jittery, yielding more road noise than you might expect. Also worth mentioning, though some might not complain, is the Ferrari-designed, dry-sump V-8 under the hood, which causes a constant rumbling accompaniment. To a car enthusiast, that is part of the Maserati's appeal; its faint rumble in gentle driving yields to more urgent sounds under brisk acceleration and a tuneful wail by the time it reaches its 7,500-rpm redline.
The offerings from Maserati on the 2010 Quattroporte is a 400-horsepower, 4.2-liter V-8 engine, while the Quattroporte S gets a 425-horsepower 4.7-liter engine and the newer Quattroporte Sport GT S picks up a 434-horsepower version of the 4.7-liter mill. Though Quattroportes in previous model years were fitted with the rough Duo-Select gearbox—one of the worst automated manual transmissions TheCarConnection.com has tested and especially out of place on a sedan—the 2010 Quattroporte, just like last year, comes only with the six-speed ZF automatic transmission first offered two years ago on the Quattroporte Automatica.
