Maserati Quattroporte (1963)

The first-generation Maserati Quattroporte, internally the Tipo 107, is a sporting saloon that Maserati of Italy built from 1963 to 1971. At the start of the 1960s the market for high-performance saloons was small, with only a few models from Lancia, Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz, and Maserati, then run by the Orsi family, decided to build one after an idea of the sports journalist Gino Rancati, creating what the article calls the concept of the sporting saloon. The car was shown at the Turin motor show in the autumn of 1963 and was an immediate success among wealthy buyers, so much so that the company, which had set up its line for one car a day as an image exercise, was caught unprepared. It cost 6,230,000 lire on the road, the price of 13 Fiat 500 cars, and its buyers included Rainier of Monaco, the Aga Khan, who bought two, and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who received one in 1968, as well as film and sports figures such as Sergio Leone, Marcello Mastroianni and Peter Ustinov.