DRIVEN: New Maserati Quattroporte V6 tested in Italy 8 December 2013 5:01 am / 20 comments Think popcorn, think movies, vanilla is plain – what flashes across your mind when you hear the name Maserati? Perhaps some old timers will remember their race machines, but a likely image is of a curvy Italian GT, rare and exotic, with a great sounding engine. Words such as ‘long wheelbase’, ‘China’, ‘mass production’ and ‘big volumes’ probably don’t figure. For a BMW or Audi, perhaps, but surely not when it comes to Maserati. But that’s the path Maserati is heading down. No, the Fiat-owned brand isn’t selling its soul, and the flair’s still there, but in this day and age, everyone’s got to survive. And you don’t survive by selling a few thousand units a year, no matter how much you want to ‘keep it real’.