An expensive mistake

Some say there are now 1.3 million potholes. And that, using tabloid newspaper maths, is "nearly two million!".

It's hard to know what can be done. The cost of not repairing them could be huge as motorists can claim if their car has been damaged by a yawning chasm in the road. But the cost of actually sending workmen out there with some cones and a vat of bitumen could be even higher. The bill for all the high-visibility jackets alone could run into billions.

Needless to say, I have a solution, which I have nicked from the German village of Niederzimmern. There, local officials are selling potholes at ?50 a pop. In return, the pothole is fixed and the name of your company is written on the repair. Apparently it's been so successful that the roads now look like the Yellow Pages. I have no idea why such an idea could not be tried here. We have sponsored roundabouts and petrol pumps, so why not potholes?

I'm losing the point. The fact is that even if councils do get round to fixing the potholes, it won't happen for a long time. Which means all of us are going to be more uncomfortable than usual. And that's a problem because there's a trend in the motor industry to make cars more firm and unforgiving. The people we have to blame for this are Germans.

German engineers are very interested in how fast their new car can go round the Nürburgring. They want it to be faster than the car Dietrich is making at Porsche. This makes them feel all gooey and proud. But to make a car fast round the Nürburgring, it must remain composed in the corners. This means rock-hard suspension. Of course, that's okay in the Fatherland because, apart from a few pothole-ravaged villages in the east, German roads tend to be very smooth and completely perfect in every way. Rock-hard suspension, therefore, doesn't matter.

But it sure as hell matters in Third World countries such as Britain, where government money is spent on other things, such as inquiries and apologising to the Iceni for crimes committed by the Romans. When I asked the boss of AMG if he tested new cars in Britain before putting them on sale, he looked genuinely surprised. "No. Why would we?"

Well, because the M40 between junctions 8 and 9 is bumpier than the main street in Port-au-Prince and because the rest of it was utterly destroyed by the perfectly normal winter we've just had. And because city centres have potholes so deep that if you drop a stone into some of them, it will emerge after a few days in downtown Sydney. That's why.

Of course, you might think that the solution is to buy a non-German car. But no. Jaguar, Aston Martin, Nissan - even the bloody French - are also obsessed with how fast their new cars go round the Nürburgring. It's become a unit of measurement, like football pitches and Wales and double-decker buses. This means the Jaguar XKR is as absorbent as an RSJ (that's a rolled-steel joist), and even Citroëns, famed for their duck-down ride, glide like crashing skiers.

Against this background of back injuries, punctures and broken axles, Maserati should be in a good place. It is the only car company in the world - apart from Rolls-Royce - with specific instructions from its paymasters not to fit its cars with suspension components made from bone.

Maserati is not allowed to make a responsive car that can tackle the Carousel on the Nürburgring at 645km/h because, in the Fiat empire, that is the job of Ferrari. Maserati's job is to make lovely-looking grand tourers that, above all else, are comfortable.

So, in our pothole-ravaged country, the Maserati GranTurismo S, with its new automatic gearbox, should be the obvious choice for anyone after a nicely badged coupé. Cars that are useless on the Nürburgring but perfect on the M40.

Sadly, however, they have ballsed it up. Yes, the new GranTurismo S automatic rides more smoothly than most of the cars with which it competes: the Aston Martin DB9, the Jaguar XKR, the Mercedes CL and the Bentley Continental GT. But they appear to have achieved this by disconnecting the body from the wheels.

Even at normal speeds it feels loose, and if you do hit a pothole - which you will - the whole car shimmies like a pony that's seen a plastic bag. This, then, is not a car that encourages you to go quickly, and that's a good thing, because it can't.

The 4.7l V8 makes all the right noises but seems short of torque. On a drive up the Fosse Way recently, I became engaged in a convoy with a Porsche Carrera 2S and an Aston DBS, and pretty soon I was not engaged in any such thing. I was about 25km back, sweating as I struggled to keep the slow, frightened horse from sidestepping into a hedge. I pushed the "sport" button but all this did was make everything louder and the ride hard. So I pushed it again to turn it off and slowed down. Right down.

Part of the problem may be the gearbox. It's a new six-speed auto, which is fine - Merc and Jag use them - but in manual Maseratis the box is mounted at the back. In autos, it's in the front and I have a suspicion this affects torsional rigidity.

Now all this might be all right if the car looked good. But it doesn't. It's a bit like Malta. Your mind says it's good because it sounds exotic but when you analyse the details it just isn't. It looks heavy. Possibly because, at 1.8 tonnes, it is.

Inside, things are worse. Yes, I will admit there is a lot of space in the rear but this has mainly been achieved by not allowing the front seats to go far enough back. If you are tall, you will never get comfortable behind the wheel - a wheel, incidentally, that appears to have been lifted from a galleon. It's enormous.

Then you have the dials, which looked like I'd done them, and the switchgear, which appeared to have been fired at the dash from a blunderbuss. Haphazard doesn't even begin to describe the ergonomics.

Now I'm not going to suggest that the dashboard in an Aston Martin DB9 is a model of common sense, but at least the interior feels special. The Maserati's doesn't. Pity. The GranTurismo S automatic should have been perfectly in tune with the times. It should have been a great car. But it is not. It's not even a good one. - ©The Times, London

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