Of course, in common with many other expensive marques, both had been severely affected by the sudden 1973 oil crisis making uneconomical cars virtually impossible to sell anywhere.
This situation also deprived us of a Rolls-Royce-rivalling Maserati limousine with a bespoke 5.5-litre flat 12, apparently. Wow, imagine!
Thankfully for Maserati’s 800 or so employees, work restarted within a matter of days, Citroën-Peugeot having agreed to suspend liquidation by six months while it tried to secure a future for them.
Bertone might well have played a part in that U-turn too: rumour had it that the coachbuilder had already readied the tooling and fittings for the Quattroporte but hadn’t yet been paid for them.
A lifeline was thrown by the Italian government and fellow Modena marque De Tomaso, and in 1976 the Quattroporte quietly went into limited production – despite Alejandro de Tomaso himself telling Autocar that “it’s too heavy, it has too small an engine and the suspension causes servicing problems”.
He had already cancelled plans for a version with a new 4.0-litre V8. In fact, planning for an all-new Mk3 Quattroporte was already under way, a concept by Italdesign having been unveiled at that year’s Paris motor show.
The Mk2 had never gained type approval for sale in the EEC (the forerunner to the EU), and clearly De Tomaso didn’t think this worth the significant expense, instead building to orders from the Middle East, South America and Spain.
The immediate priorities were instead the proven Bora, Merak and Khamsin super-coupés and new De Tomaso-based Kyalami GT, production of which was set to hit a healthy 600 for the year.
Understandably, Autocar never got to discover how the Mk2 Quattroporte stacked up. In fact, we can’t find a review of it anywhere, so who knows how talented or how similar to its French cousin it was? A handful of survivors are known to exist in Belgium, France and Germany, but even those are elusive…
