The luxury that's suggested by the exterior bears full fruit when you get inside. This is the kind of cabin that even a hardened animal rights man like myself wants to sink into. You look at the Quattroporte's interior and you realize how other leather and wood applications are harsh by comparison.
You also soon learn that the car is a lot bigger than its exterior look seems to suggest (the length is 5052 mm on a 3062-mm wheelbase), and that means genuine room for four adults.
The car's second soul is a little harder to see, since you have to study the blueprints to discover that the front-engine, rear-drive sedan has a 47-53 weight distribution. Maserati-Ferrari did this by putting the engine behind the front axle and the gearbox at the back with the differential, the kind of layout you normally see in sportscars, not sedans.
That engine helps greatly with an appreciation of Quattroporte's second soul, since the 4.2-litre 90° V8 is good for 400 bhp at 7000 rpm and about 360 lb.-ft. of torque at 4500 rpm. Reaching these peaks requires a significant application of throttle, but the engine sound is superb so it's no misery to spend the 5.2 seconds needed to get from 0 to 100 km/h.
When this car is flying, as it was on streches of autostrata and country roads through Tuscany, it as an unalloyed pleasure to be in. The engine and the balance of the car are superb and they're helped tremendously by Maserati's ''Skyhook'' system, which is their unique name for active suspension.
The one part of the Quattroporte that may give North Americans pause is the electro-hydraulic six-speed Maserati DuoSelect (MDS) transmission.
In its automatic mode, this transmission behaves like an automatic manual in that it shifts itself as the situation requires and feels just like a manual but does not have a clutch. This will be a little disconcerting for people expecting the smoothness of a regular automatic, and in response to a wave of media suggestions the Italian firm will re-program it to a smoother application.