2012 Maserati GranTurismo MC Maserati turns up the volume. Some. - Car and Driver (blog)
Customer studies from the early days of the current Maserati GranTurismo coupe bear out one of our persistent complaints with the car: It’s too quiet and a little too anodyne for a vehicle wearing the chrome trident. The fix is to open ’er up, at least for those buyers who want a little extra Italian wattage. A new, higher-heart-rate model, the GranTurismo MC, starts at $143,850 and promises to crank up the aural vibrato as well as the throttle response and curve-eating ability of the big coupe. On our drive, we found out that it does move the excitement needle for Maserati—a bit. (The company is introducing the Sport version of the GranTurismo convertible at the same time. What is it about an Italian machine that gets people to open their wallets wide for one. The dead-sexy styling that seems only to bubble up from an Italian brain is one thing. But there is one thing more, and to many, the most important quality: the uncanny sound. However, generating “the Sound” is one place where Maserati has lately lagged its fellow Latin automakers. Unless you’re standing on it in sport mode, the GranTurismo speaks softly in a hissy and unconvincing dialect of the language of Lexus. Source: www.caranddriver.com
