1985 Maserati Biturbo
It sounds amazing. In Golden, Colorado, the owner of a 1985 Maserati Biturbo actually traded in his exotic Italian grand touring sedan, with an odometer reading of only 18,480 miles, for $3500 from Barack Obama as down payment on a new Subaru.
The Maserati is doomed. Its engine’s crankcase will be filled with sodium silicate in a government stimulus program resembling those of the Great Depression in which farmers were paid to shoot pigs or plow under wheat, then the whole car will be crushed into a cube of metal.
In this case, maybe Obama should just save a few quarts of good sodium silicate. That Maserati already wouldn’t run.
A man in Colorado was so frustrated with his car breaking down, he decided to capitalize on the “Cash For Clunkers” program. That’s nothing unusual — except his car was a rare Maserati.
The 1985 Maserati BiTurbo has 18,480 miles on the odometer and its interior is nearly new. Yet the owner said he couldn’t drive the car more than 10 minutes without having to call his mechanic.
The Maserati, like all “Cash for Clunker” trade-ins, will soon be crushed. The man said the engine frequently had problems and he’s been trying to the Maserati for months. By trading it in, the owner got $3,500 of government money, roughly the same as he was trying to sell the car for privately.
CNN 1:40 video
That Colorado owner’s experience was apparently pretty typical. The Maserati Biturbo made Time Magazine’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time:
“Biturbo” is, of course, Italian for “expensive junk.” At least, it is now, after Maserati tried to pass off this bitter heartbreak-on-wheels as a proper grand touring sedan. The Biturbo was the product of a desperate, under-funded company circling the drain of bankruptcy, and it shows. Everything that could leak, burn, snap or rupture did so with the regularity of the Anvil Chorus. The collected service advisories would look like the Gutenberg Bible.
Your tax dollars at work. Nobody would buy this dog, but Barack Obama did, using your money to do it.
Larry Sheldon
The $3500 did NOT come rom Barack Obama!
(Probably didn’t come from anybody yet.)
The money, when it comes, comes from your children.
And there are several idiots here. I’d have paid the $3500 out of my own pocket (if I were the dealer) to keep the car from being destroyed.
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Dom
I have known two persons who once bought this model. Both complained soon after they bought it-and they were brand new.
The first brushed death on a highway on a rainy day when suddenly and inexplicably he lost control of the car while riding on a straight line-the car got into an endless spin and got totally out of control. The owner-who was a good drivers-was so afraid that he didn’t want to drive it anymore until he sold it.
The second person got many little petty mechanical troubles with it, which owed mainly to the presence of two turbo compressors on its engine.
This model was built after the heydays of Maserati-I’m making allusion to the Ghibly and other Bora models-when this brand seemed to be in quest for itself, somehow wandering and looking at random for a new pool of customers-the prestige attached to a sport’s brand, but with a more practical and less fancy coach for an everyday’s use, maybe.
As far as I remember, another problem was that it was a small car whose performances were not really impressive, but which guzzled fuel like a big one, as the gas tank had too little a capacity! As a result the owner of such a car had to go to the gas pump more often than normal.
For worse, the interior design of the Maserati’s belonging to this generation had been hastily done, with-between other little things-this eye-catching anachronism of a strange and prominent almond shaped old fashioned style clock with a gold platted frame put in the middle of the dashboard that pleased to no one.
I owned a Maserati SM for a couple of year and it is true that the engine of this car required a particular and dedicated care to work properly at the best of its performances. Wholesome, it was rather poorly reliable.
So…
Larry Sheldon
Some people complain if you hit them with a brand new hammer.
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