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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 quot;lime greenquot; and quot;Maseratiquot; 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
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