Maserati Quattroporte Diesel 2014 Review

There’s a question with a very simple answer. How has Maserati just made a land-yacht Quattroporte with sub-six economy?

Maserati now has a diesel version of the Quattroporte to give the Trident some footprint in the businessman’s end of the luxury market, where the rich just don’t like stopping for fuel. And, paranoid that the Quattroporte Diesel might not deserve to be called a proper sports sedan, Maserati gave it a 3.0-liter turbocharged V6 with 202kW and 600Nm.

Maserati is not only bringing this Euro-oriented machine to Australia, it is bringing it here below $200,000 (about $40,000 less than the next-cheapest Quattroporte) and it is reckoning on the Diesel taking 10 per cent of the Quattroporte’s sales, with almost all of that taken from other brands.

The new diesel engine itself is not quite a technical masterpiece of fuel-squashing technology, in the mould of BMW M550d’s tri-turbo. In fact, the single-turbo engine is very close related to the Dodge Ram 1500 truck Dodge Ram 1500 truck and Jeep Grand Cherokee’s diesel engines and the highest piece of tech in it is a piezo injector capable of delivering eight separate squirts of fuel each time a cylinder needs to work.

Sure, there are some other trick bits that lesser versions of this engine don’t get, but you’d need to be a diesel engineer operating at the very edges of diesel engineering to understand they were significant. (Alright, then, there’s a variable geometry turbocharger with a shaft that spins on ceramic ball bearings; Air Gap exhaust manifolds that are lighter and soak up some of that awful diesel harshness; and a polyurethane soundproofing support between the timing cover and the fuel-injection pump.)

For all that, the V6 is capable of delivering 202kW at 4000rpm and 600Nm between 2000-2600rpm. Sure, the BMW motor, which is probably the pick of the big six-pot diesels these days, delivers 740Nm of torque in X6 form and is capable of more, but the Maser's punching enough gristle to log a 0-100km/h in 6.3sec.

That isn’t in the ballpark of the fastest Quattroporte’s sprint, but the target buyer for this style of car is after faster elapsed times for their intra-city business trips due to not having to stop for fuel every 400km. Besides, the car is still good for 250km/h, which is enough to see you imprisoned in all European countries bar one.

The reality is, though, that this is a different style of Quattroporte; one without the 3.8-litre V8’s blasting 390kW or without the 3.0-litre BiTurbo petrol V6’s optional combination of all-wheel drive and sub-five second 0-100km/h sprints.

While it’s a lesser machine in performance, it’s demonstrably a greater machine in economy, chewing through less than half the fuel of the V8’s NEDC combined figure.

The thing is, the Quattroporte Diesel just doesn’t behave like a diesel. Only the BMW motor comes close for the sound quality but even that engine struggles to match the Latin V6's smoothness.

Left in its default settings, the Quattroporte’s motor is basically uninvolved in the daily goings on in the driver’s ears. It’s only a bit icky when it refires on the standard start-stop system at the traffic lights, so most people are just going to turn the system off to avoid the tremor it sends through the car.

Then you push the Sport button. Maserati uses, in effect, a pair of bagpipes behind each the four exhaust tips to make the V6 diesel sound like a cross between a throbbing V8 petrol engine and an offshore powerboat.

It’s damned near as strong as an offshore powerboat, too. The torque peak arrives at 2000rpm, which is a touch higher than the best of the German engines and the engine is more laggardly just off idle than its rivals as well.

Get a little more momentum swinging through the crankshaft, though, and it’s a different story. The Quattroporte is a willing partner in any sort of shenanigans, capable of sliding gracefully and quietly onto a hotel forecourt or pounding through tunnels with a howl that belies the very low revs it pulls.

It’s flexible and willing and, despite not having the upper rev range of its foes, its slick eight-speed automatic transmission shifts silkily most of the time, crunchingly fast when you want it to and ensures there’s always urge on tap.

But the trick of the Quattroporte Diesel isn’t its engine. It’s that Maserati plonks this great lump of a thing inside an engine bay built for petrol motors and still handles like a dervish.

That’s partly because, at 1990kg, the Quattroporte is lighter than some of the big limos that claim “light-weight technology” status and partly because it retains a 50:50 front-to-rear weight distribution.

It combines a double-wishbone front suspension with active damping, 20-inch alloy rims and a well-sorted five-link rear end and delivers handling a BMW M5 owner would struggle to match.

Yes, the car defaults into a Comfort mode (and, yes, it’s indeed comfortable), but it doesn’t help you find a character in the car that sets it apart from its rivals or justify its badge. For that, you just push the Sport button and firm up the dampers. Immediately, the car feels tauter without losing its ride comfort. It communicates better at every contact point with becoming demanding and needy. It feels, well, alive.

Push Sport every time you get into it and leave it there.

This is a huge car that can pull more than 1.01g on a skid pan. This is a car that can embarrass just about anything with four doors in the winding bits of road Maserati buyers love.

There is nothing, nothing at all, in the large luxury class that is this fleet of foot and that handles with this combination of involvement, dignity and utter joy. Its brake pedal remains rock solid and its steering system favours old-fashioned hydraulics to fuel-saving electrical operation and delivers unabashed accuracy because of it.

Combine it all and start throwing it at corners and you find that this is a car that shrinks around you, regardless of an overall length of 5.26 metres and a width of almost two metres, until you feel like you’re punting a purpose-built sports sedan.

But you’re not. You're punting a car that feels like a purpose-built sports sedan, but is dripping in ludicrous levels of leather and luxury and disturbing levels of interior space. You could lose entire baby capsules in the rear seat and the rear carpet is so thick you’ll never find a dropped dummy.

The old Quattroporte wasn’t small, but this one has 105mm more rear legroom and 80 litres more luggage capacity in a long boot area.

It has some niceties, like a reversing camera that shows its view in the dash-mounted 8.4-inch multi-media display, but there are a lot of things missing here that we’ve come to expect from the Germans. Things like Lane Departure Warning systems, drowsy-drive systems, blind-spot warning systems and active cruise control are all missing.

A self-parking system would be a real boon, because while the Quattroporte shrinks around you at speed, it sure doesn’t at walking pace.

For the driver, a large, 7-inch TFT screen sits in the middle of the instrument cluster, flanked by a traditional speedo and tacho, and is used for everything from delivering fuel economy figures to bringing up telephone contact lists and warnings.

There’s a 12-way electrically adjustable driver’s seat, clad in leather and heated, naturally, and a touch-screen multimedia system that includes the navigation and ventilation and the car also has the option of WLAN technology to make it a rolling WIFI hotspot.

The sound system is good, but the optional Bowers & Wilkins system we had is better.

It is, in short, a surprisingly convincing piece of work, the Quattroporte Diesel. There are some significant things missing, but those bits might be considered to be tinsel on an otherwise very good tree.

2014 Maserati Quattroporte Diesel:
Price: sub-$198,800
Engine: 3.0-litre V6 turbo diesel