Here's Why the Maserati Levante Just Isn't Worth $80,000

this is the brand-new Maserati Levante it's a luxury SUV and it's fun to drive it's reasonably attractive it's expensive it sounds pretty good and it's the end of Maserati as we know it you see when you think of Maserati you probably think of beautiful Italian sports cars like the Ghibli in the 1960s and the gorgeous birdcage race car from the 1950s or maybe you think of the glorious exhaust note in the Gran Turismo or the ultra rare mc12 you probably don't think of a v6 midsize crossover with flat folding rear seats and child seat anchors but that's exactly what this is and yet that's not why this car signals the end of Maserati as we know it although it is one sign but it's more this Maserati has become obsessed with sales numbers Maserati sold six times more vehicles in 2016 than they did in 2011 and Maserati advertises their lease specials and factory incentives everywhere buses internet banner ads newspapers they're one step shy of buying the naming rights to a minor league baseball stadium and calling it Lisa Ghibli for $6.99 a month field also Maserati has installed dealerships everywhere in the pursuit of increased sales there is a maserati dealer in Appleton Wisconsin there are two maserati dealers in Oklahoma there is a maserati dealer in Coeur d'Alene Idaho and I don't know if you've ever been to Coeur d'Alene but if that dealership sells more than four Maseratis a year we should send them a gift basket which would be delivered by a moose anyway when Maserati came out with the latest Ghibli in the Quattroporte it was sort of in keeping with the brand's historical image after all they've made sporty sedans for years but a v6 powered crossover Maserati is clearly desperately chasing sales and they're adding a lot of new dealerships and Maserati now competes with BMW with Lexus with mercedes-benz the Italian sports car brand is gone that isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's certainly a different thing as of this vehicle Maserati is no longer a brand that you aspire to it's no longer a car you get posters of when you're in middle school and put on your wall and hope you own it one day instead it's a car your mom might actually lease to drive you to middle school so now that we know that Maserati is well no longer Maserati today I'm going to show you around the Levante which by the way I borrowed here in Southern California using Toro which is this service that lets you rent other people's interesting cars instead of normal boring airport rental cars you can sign up for Toro in the description below after I show you all the Levante is Cork's and features I'm gonna get it out on the road and see how it drives and then I'm going to give it a dug score now I'm gonna start on the interior and specifically up front where there are a bunch of interesting quirks some brilliant and some not so brilliant like for example the center console dials take a look at these things there's one small dial mounted on top of another larger dial it's like the Maserati center console dial pyramid of course both of them are unlabeled the top one pushes in also unlabeled are the buttons right above them so you don't really know what's going on in here until you start playing around with them now one of those dials controls stereo volume although I have to admit I don't remember which one right now the next interesting thing in the interior is just to the left of the Maserati dial pyramid and that would be the off-road button yes the Maserati crossover has an off-road button off yes Maserati what this button does I bet you they'll give you this complicated engineering explanation and say I'm ready is the suspension from off-road travel but let's be honest what it really does is it makes people in the suburbs feel a lot more confident about driving in a moderate thunderstorm something in this interior that annoys me too absolutely no end there is no button for the heated seat so when you get inside this car you can't just push a button and have the heated seats go on instead you have to go into the infotainment system and then you're going to climb it they're not there you'd think that the heated seats to be a climate control function but they're not instead you have to go into controls and that's where you'll find the heated seats or you can press the Maserati logo and you'll also find the heated seats although they're sort of randomly arrayed you'll see the heated seat control for the driver's seat is on the passenger side and the control for the passenger seat is on the driver's side that's very interesting Maserati good choices however major kudos to Maserati for doing something right with the interior controls that really upsets me with a lot of cars that would be the steering wheel controls now this car has controls for everything on the steering wheel and yet it doesn't look cluttered and that's because a lot of the controls are behind the steering wheel and unlabelled it takes some getting used to but once you figure out what they do you can basically do everything without pulling your hands off the steering wheel you can set cruise control you can use bluetooth you can change every function in the stereo just because of those little controls behind the wheel every automaker should do this another thing I like in this general area are the needles for the speedometer and the tachometer now Maserati has placed the little lights that light up when you put on the turn signals inside the dials for the speedometer and the tachometer and normally that would mean that the needles would conflict with you being able to see whether your turn signals are on as they go up and down but Maserati has made the second half of the needles clear so they don't get in the way of you being able to see the turn signals it's a really cool idea and it's very functional I like a lot not so well thought out that would be the shift lever which is the single worst shift lever in the entire car industry period not new to quality but simply due to operation check out how difficult it is to simply get it into reverse which allegedly lurks somewhere between park and neutral and if that wasn't bad enough oh it gets worse this cars parking brake automatically goes on when you put it in part that's fine but when you get back in the car you put it in Drive you're ready to go again the parking brake is still on you forgot so you take the parking brake off and then you're ready to go you press the accelerator but oh no the car has shifted itself back into park which means that you then must shift them into drive a second time who thought that made any sense another interior quirk that's either cool or uncool depending on your perspective I can always tell whether a car is trying to sell itself based on brand name or actual quality based on the number of brand logos it has throughout the interior and from the driver's seat of this car you can see six different maserati logos as you simply drive down the street one two three four five six all visible from the driver's seat at any given moment read into that what you may about just how much Maserati is trying to sell you this thing based on the fact that it's a Maserati and that's nothing maybe the most ridiculous use of the Maserati logos is that infotainment screen when you turn on the car you'll notice the first screen has the Maserati logo on it then it goes to a second screen that has the Maserati logo on it when you press accept it then goes to the main screen which has the Maserati logo at the bottom and when you go into that screen you'll find that one of the apps that pulls up has the Maserati logo as its logo a couple of other interesting things in the front seat of this car open up the center console and you'll find that it's very deep and that the bottom has two cupholders in it bringing the total number of cupholders in the front seats of this car to four which is very useful and practical maybe a little bit stranger in the center console is this on off switch I cannot figure out what this does I can't even find it in the owners manual normally I think it's for a cooled center console but trust me this part I didn't have a cooled center console it does however have a cooled glove box take a look at this this little dial here allows you to change whether you have air coming in to the glove box so you couldn't cool down whatever you keep inside if for example you've gone to pick up food and you want to keep it cold on your drive home and that is a pretty good idea less of a good idea is the power trunk release this car has a power liftgate and for the last five days and 500 miles I've been driving around thinking there is no way to open it from the driver's seat it's not on the door panel it's not to the left of the steering wheel it's not in the middle I just figured maserati forgot it well it turns out they didn't forget it instead they stuck it in the least intuitive place possible on the ceiling above the driver's head by the dome light if you want to open the tailgate that's where you have to push and is very bizarre it's not like that in any other car but I guess they figured if they put it up there you wouldn't accidentally open the tailgate while you were driving good thinking Maserati now speaking of the glovebox this cars infotainment system is pretty standard there's nothing especially interesting in it and I went through all the menus but I did find one unusual piece and that is the fact that you can lock the glove box from the infotainment system in fact you can super lock it so you can't just open it with the key instead you actually have to go into the infotainment system and enter a pin in order to have access to the glovebox so if there's anything you really don't want anyone to find you can stick it near Levante glovebox and you can keep it cool the only other really interesting thing I found the infotainment system is the owner's manual obviously this car still comes with a paper owner's manual but check this out the owner's manual inside the infotainment system is one of the most useful I've seen it allows you to select various areas in the car and then it zooms in and then it allows you to select those things so you can figure out exactly what some button is if you don't know what it does except of course for that little button inside the center console it says on/off that's not in there but everything else is in there and I swear this is a really intuitive owner's manual it's probably the best I've seen and it makes it very easy to find what you're looking for next up are the back seats which are pretty straightforward I fit reasonably well though it's a bit tight but then again I'm pretty tall and the Levante isn't a giant SUV naturally the seats also fold down in a split configuration like virtually every other SUV maybe the most interesting thing back here is the buttons you'll find on the door panel those buttons control all the doors there just like the lock and unlock buttons in front or on your key fob and I think that's kind of a strange thing to give the seat passengers especially in a family vehicle of kids back here that's not really a power I want to give to children and it's the same deal in the cargo area of the Levante there's not anything particularly interesting or unusual back here with that said there is one little item in the cargo area I kind of like this little pass-through into the back seat so you can see it there obviously this is for skis or something like that if you have someone sitting here in here and you can't put the seats all the way down you can open this thing up and then push this forward and look I can see in to the back seats and yes I realize this is not a new feature in the grand scheme of the car industry but I'm used to Maseratis with tiny back seats and crazy exhaust notes not little pass throughs for extra storage so it's kind of an interesting feature in this car next up moving on to the outside I want to discuss the Levante exterior styling now the exterior styling of this car has been kind of controversial but personally I like it I like the fact that it's sporty it's low it's fairly restrained it isn't dramatically over styled like some modern practical luxury cars with that said I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't report the facts and in this case it is a fact that from some angles the Maserati Levante looks just like the infiniti ex35 which is now called the QX ex35 here's what I mean take a look at the Infiniti and now take a look at the Maserati you can't tell me there isn't some similarity between those two vehicles which is a shame for Levante owners because this thing costs like double what that infiniti costs but aside from that I do like the design I like the aggressive front end especially when the car is on the running lights are on it looks like it's about to pounce no I don't think this is the most beautiful car but I know a lot of people hate it I'm not in that camp although personally I would get larger wheels than these these wheels look like they're for teens inside this cars giant wheel arches now around back there are a couple of interesting things about the Levante number one is the fact that this car has real quad exhaust that's right for real exhaust pipes they don't quite line up with the actual exhaust of the car but they're a lot better than most automakers who are just faking those things openly in the exhaust comes out down here and they have giant pipes going across to make the car look more aggressive and the other benefit of these quad pipes this thing sounds pretty good take a listen [Music] okay no it doesn't sound like an exotic supercar but for a v6 crossover that sounds good it's a lot better than your family's Highlander so there are some pros and cons to the Levante but I couldn't do this review if I didn't mention the biggest drawback and that would be simply the fact that this car is just really overpriced this is a base model Levante with only a couple of options and the sticker price is just a shade over $80,000 that's $20,000 more than a base level bmw x5 underneath the hood you will find a 3 liter v6 with only 345 horsepower it's not exactly maserati territory and in fact this thing has less horsepower than the nicest version of the Audi q5 for $80,000 and then there's the interior this just isn't an $80,000 place to be take a look at the window switches once again Maserati is simply using the exact same window switches from a Dodge Dart except they have a little chrome tip at the end the turn signal stock which is also the wiper stock is identical to the one and the Dodge Durango and the Grand Caravan a lot of the buttons and switch gear on the steering wheel little buttons I like on the back of the steering wheel are pulled straight off chrysler products that cost 1995 after manufacturer rebates in an $80,000 Maserati with all that said I am happy to report that the panel gaps in the interior of this car are smaller than they were in the Ghibli I don't have a tube of toothpaste handy but I can promise you one would not fit in between the panel yet for the door and the interior and you can't even see the exterior paint through that panel gap so at least Maserati is improving slowly and then there's the stuff that this one doesn't have now I admit this is the base model but this car still costs 80 grand then it doesn't have blind spot monitoring it doesn't have radar cruise control it doesn't have rear cross-traffic alert it won't automatically stop for you or slow down speed up it doesn't have lane departure warning or lane keep assist it doesn't even parking sensors for $80,000 so there are some benefits and some drawbacks to this car but that is a huge drawback in the end maserati really entices you to spend money on options as a lot of luxury car brands do but this cars starting price is just too expensive to justify that you could add virtually everything that I complained this car doesn't have back in through options but then you've spent $90,000 and you're still driving around in a base-model Levante with only 345 horsepower the value proposition simply doesn't add up so the Levante has some interesting quirks and features and some drawbacks but there is an upside to this car and it comes when you get behind the wheel so i'm gonna take it out on the road and drive it and as always for more of my thoughts on the Levante click the link below to go to autotrader.com slash oversteer where i've written more about it and where i've compiled a list of the most interesting maserati models currently for sale on auto trader driving the Levante i've been a little bit critical of some Maseratis lately including this one obviously but i will say that the thing i like most about this car is the way that it drives for one thing just drive it down the street here i'm going 25 miles an hour on a residential road and it sounds great i love the sound of this car it may not have the power of maserati you know but it has the it has the engine note even though it's just a v6 and it's sort of like a family SUV the ride quality is pretty good it isn't all that harsh which is kind of surprising to me because the thing i like most about this car is the way that it handles i think this car is one of the best handling suvs i've driven it's benefited by a low center of gravity it's a fairly low vehicle and it's reasonably wide through corners it feels really flat I took it on those big circular highway on-ramps at speeds I probably shouldn't have been going and it felt it felt great and it felt stable and it felt like I was completely in control at one point I was going so fast that it did start to get a little squirrely but I never felt like I was gonna spin out or anything I felt like I was very predictable in my new where it was going and what was gonna happen I guess what I'm saying is I really really like how it drives feels a lot quicker than 345 horsepower v6 I'm in sport mode now and sport mode really holds the revs probably way too long but the benefit is you really do feel it feels quick and it's acceleration is ready to go now I'm going around some corners here and it just it grips in fact as soon as I picked this thing up from the airport I texted my friends and I said I wish I had considered this when I was getting my AMG waggon I'd later found out how much this car costs and I no longer wish that but in three four years as a CP oh and the 40s 50s this car is gonna be a little bit difficult to resist I actually like the way that the deeply drove I thought that it was okay in terms of driving experience I didn't think it was best-in-class this I would say is definitely up there with the best in class in fact on a personal level I think the Cayenne the steering in the Cayenne has gotten a little bit too numb and too over assistant and I actually think this car steers better than the Cayenne unfortunately the driving experience side when you look down it's just not all that nice it's not as nice as it could be it's not as nice as it should be the interior materials are simply not there nothing none of it is there's too much plastic there's too much if there's some of the stuff if it is leather it's cheap there's no hand stitching like you'd expect like you'd get in a lot of cars at this price range I mean this car and any thousand dollars you can lose the base model this car is as expensive as and the nicest x5 and with that you get just all of his stuff and it's fully loaded and I mean I don't even have garrotting sensors in this car it's it's unbelievable to me that an $80,000 SUV so designed for you know family use in suburban neighborhoods we are often backing in the driveway all it has is a federally mandated backup camera no parking that high-speed sweeper curves is where this thing sabatham in it just it just loses the road and I feel like I could go as zillion miles an hour the car inspires a lot more confidence than you would get in most other luxury SUVs in the end I think this car has flaws but I think that the driving experience is not really one of them I think this car has flaws from a quality perspective I think it has flaws from a value perspective however from a driving perspective I think this is a really impressive car and if I could grab one at a pretty substantial discount or cpo at some point in the future you could start to ignore some of these flaws I can't lift an $80,000 car doesn't have that well if it's up fifty five thousand dollar car it's like it dries better than almost any other luxury SUV and maybe some of these things don't matter as much so that's the new Maserati Levante in the end I don't think this is a bad car it's just the end of old Maserati and the beginning of can you match my payments on my x5 but if you get past the brand name and everything associated with it I think I find this pretty decent car I had fun driving it around San Diego and Los Angeles for the last week with that said I don't think it's worth $80,000 but I do think it could be a good deal in a few years maserati certified pre-owned warranty once it drops in value or try your luck at a maserati dealer I've heard that they are so obsessed with chasing volume numbers and sales targets that they are offering massive discounts on these things just to get them out the door and hit another sales figure and if your local maserati dealer won't work you can always try the maserati dealer in Coeur d'Alene Idaho desperately trying to reach their annual sales quota of five total units and where the sales manager is a moose and now it's time for the Doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling I think the Levante looks fine but no one's calling it beautiful except maybe the guy at infinity who designed it in the first place and it gets a 5 out of 10 acceleration is good especially for an SUV it does 0 to 60 and five point eight seconds and on the dug scored acceleration scale that gives it a four out of ten handling is strong and I debated this one for a while that I ultimately gave it a six out of ten which is really good for an SUV tied with the Lamborghini Countach but the Levante is really sharp the steering is excellent and I think it deserves this big number cool factor is above average this one really depends on who you are as most car enthusiasts think a Maserati crossover is uncool but this is the hot car in the suburbs right now and it gets a six out of ten importance is roughly the same story it's certainly more significant than an average car but it's not like these are limited production and it gets a six out of ten bringing the total weekend score to twenty seven out of 50 next up are the daily categories starting with features in the grand scheme of things the Levante is pretty good earning a 6 out of 10 but it's weak for a car at this price point that figure is lower than the Jaguar F pace s I drove which was much cheaper comfort is good and the Levante gets a 7 out of 10 quality is fine acceptable but not stand out and it gets only a 6 out of 10 practicality is strong as the Levante offers 57 cubic feet of cargo space giving it an 8 out of 10 finally value this is a good car but at $80,000 it's a ridiculously overpriced one the Maserati brand name definitely helps its case which is exactly what Maserati intended but I just can't give it more than a 4 out of 10 add it up in the total daily score is 31 out of 15 add up all the scores and the total Doug score is 58 out of 100 which places at one point below the Jaguar F pace s and Volvo xc90 excellence I already reviewed the Levante has a higher weekend score than those rivals but its daily scores lower mainly on account of its price tag the Levante is simply too expensive unless you're buying used or you get a big discount from your local desperate Maserati dealer I also can't help shake the fact that the Jeep Grand Cherokee track Hawk I already reviewed is more fun and it has roughly the same amount of equipment for about the same dollar value and plus the track heart gives you all the same switches you'll find in the Levante anyway [Music] you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 2,010,613

Rating: 4.675374 out of 5

Keywords: maserati levante, levante, maserati suv, maserati 4wd, maserati crossover, performance suv, maserati kubang, doug demuro, demuro

Id: RdunXzNNfqk

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Doug-DeMuro]

I later discovered, after filming this, that the Levante is one of the few luxury SUVs left with hydraulic steering (the only one left, probably), which is likely why the steering feel is so nice.

[u/TheWanderingSuperman]

Why do I get the feeling this is going to be a (well-deserved) 24-minute beating-up of Maserati. Cuz if so ... MRW

Edit: He is not nearly as harsh as I expected; though he is definitely on point that it is way overpriced. $80K and it is missing key features other cars in its class have and lacks an upscale interior? Insane! One thing I noticed as well is the black plastic body molding over the bottom of the body (around 12:15), that molding should've been body-colored, in my opinion.

[u/ckingfournier]

Hey Doug

[u/KingRodric]

Man, you're not lying about that gear shifter. I've been a valet for 3 years now and I had one of these come through about a month ago and its the first time I can remember being genuinely stuck because I couldn't get the thing into reverse. I can't imagine how frustrating this would be if you were in a real rush.

[u/draginator]

Oh man another maserati video by doug, let me grab the popcorn.

[u/bbpresident]

Good lord the infotainment looks like a second-gen android phone

[u/Owe-No]

Doug mentioned my car! I'm famous!

Edit: Ha, my EX has parking sensors and radar cruise.

[u/blue_bomber697]

Noting a trend from Doug. Don’t buy a Maserati. 😂

[u/ExplosiveMachine]

So FCA has now reappropriated Maserati as just another of it's "luxury but not really kinda" brands. Kinda sad.