This new Italian flagship that has won the heart of Italy’s President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, just as the 1976 edition, designed by Giugiaro, caught the eye of the then President Sandro Pertini, is the best of the nation’s luxury saloons and well equipped to compete on an equal footing with any Audi, BMW or Mercedes.
The fifth generation Maserati Quattroporte, this time designed by Pininfarina, is the ideal interpretation of a prestigious past and proof that a really good idea can always renew itself and express the essence of modernity every time it reappears.
Lorenzo Ramaciotti, Pininfarina’s Director of Design, takes Auto & Design through the various stages of a project launched in a rather unconventional manner in 1998.
” Our starting point was somewhat atypical. Usually, you start with renderings, choose a design and then make models. For the Quattroporte, we started by making scale models that we could present to the group in support of our concept”.
The reason why the design process then took so long (the general styling approach was settled by June 1999, though you couldn’t say the design was frozen at that point) is that they kept on tweaking every tiny detail, inside and out. Not that there was any drastic rethink; just an endless flow of suggestions and minor alterations to every imaginable component, large or small.
Right from the start, the team was eager to make the interior distinctly innovative and as their initial renderings show, they sought inspiration from Interior Decoration: all smooth surfaces and highly architectural effects. The end product is much more car-like and a very good car indeed, in design, as in choice of materials.
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 143
