I’ve mentioned a few times here on Curbside Classic that I have a great fondness for rental cars. My feelings are directly and proportionally related to my lack of fondness for owning new cars. Particularly as I’ve gotten older, wiser, and poorer (one of these things is not like the others, except in my case) the idea of making a commitment to shelling out good money for a vehicle that will rapidly depreciate (despite its being termed an “asset”) and grow inevitably and increasingly undependable on my dime is not at all something that I find desirable. On the other hand, for a couple hundred dollars, I can have that whole new-car experience for a handful of days; and at the end, I can just fly away with no commitments whatsoever. Many things in life should work this way, but don’t.
In short, I love rental cars. And sometimes they – or at least the rental car companies – love me back.
Like a couple of weeks ago at the Omaha, Nebraska airport.
Arriving on a late flight in from BOS, I stumbled to the Enterprise portion of the rental car garage to pick up what I had arranged to be an entirely unexciting Corolla. This trip was one that would take me on a 300+ mile arc of central and southeastern Nebraska. The logistics – flying in Tuesday night, flying home Friday afternoon (as always, too rushed) – called for me to arrive in Omaha but depart out of Grand Island, Nebraska so that I could make the last Friday night east-bound flight back to Massachusetts. I couldn’t swing a 5 pm flight out of Omaha, but a 3 pm flight out of Grand Island – 150 miles closer to where I was than Omaha – would work. Yet doing this involved a one-way rental, and those are often crazy expensive…except with Enterprise, which has a business model that somehow doesn’t always require an arm and a leg for one-way rentals. I have no idea why, but it works for me.
Upon making my late evening way to the Enterprise booth, I was confronted by Rental Car Dude who immediately inquired if I’d consider something other than my requested Toyota. “Uhhhh, OK. What?” I asked. He replied that he had “too many luxury cars” in his lot and had to send some out, and “Would you like to take one?”.
At this point I realize that this is setting up like the joke about the farmer who has no place for the traveler to sleep other than in the bed with his daughter…but bear with me. It’s actually better in that it lasted three whole days.
OMA Rental Car Dude says that he has a Maserati or a Jaguar. “The Jaguar is newer”. I go with him to see the two vehicles and frankly neither seem familiar to me. This is because I know nothing about “luxury cars” and even less about current luxury crossover/SUV things (other than what I read here on CC by Kyree Rollerson). Regardless, the idea of a Maserati attracts me.
This is of course due to my childhood love of the Flintstones — see the Stonefinger Caper episode, season 6, episode 10, which featured Fred and Barney’s time in a “Maserocki”. There’s also the influence of a certain Joe Walsh song which we’ll get to in a bit.
So, I passed on the F-Pace (I’m fascinated by how Jaguar’s website video spends more time spying on the pretty lady in her window than it does showing the vehicle) and signed off on the 2024 Maserati Grecale GT. For Corolla money.
Maserati has decided to provide drivers on the dashboard display with a nicely-styled profile of the vehicle you’re aiming to drive as you proceed to start the car. This one, as you can see, had only 4828 miles on it as I prepared to exit the lot at OMA.
I will note that “prepared” is the operative word as I then proceeded to spend a good 10 minutes inside the Grecale, sitting in the garage, trying to figure out how to put the vehicle into gear.
I was about to turn in my man-card credentials, go back to Rental Car Dude, and actually ask how to engage the transmission (I checked…there were no manuals in the glovebox, although I later found those in their pristine baggies in the cargo are) when I noticed the row of push buttons below the central LCD. Whew. A push button transmission just like one might have found on this Maserati’s ancient Mopar ancestors. I can do this! And I won’t even get in trouble like I did with Chris Smith in 1967 when we rolled his dad’s Dodge down the driveway into the garage while playing with the buttons as our little sisters sat in the backseat.
Another thing that reminded me of Dexter’s (that would be Chris’s dad) 1964 4-door Custom was the sound of the “blinker”. One of the first things I noticed as I started to make progress out of the garage was how loud this thing was, and how it had that same sound that I associate with a woodblock.
You know, that “instrument” popular in elementary schools back in the day.
In my school music classes, after the majority of students had been assigned instruments such as the recorder, ocarina, or (because we were in the South) the autoharp, those remaining kids deemed to have subhuman musical skills were handed really-can’t-fail noisemakers like the tambourine and the woodblock. The woodblock being the only musical instrument that was just as useful in music class as it was as a shop supply down in industrial arts. I always liked to flail on the thing making the turn signal sound. Anyhow, that sounds just like the turn signal indicator on the Grecale, as played very strongly, by a very masculine 2nd grader.
Thoughts of push button transmission Dodges and 3rd grade music class faded quickly that night in the OMA garage as I proceeded to fall in love with the Grecale’s center-mounted dash clock. This is exactly the sort of little detail that I think is intended to draw one to the Maserati.
I never managed to take a good interior photo of the Gracale. So, this one is from the Maserati website. “Mine” looked exactly like this. So much tasteful black leather goodness.
Boosting the pleasantness was the slick black leather interior. The interior was sufficiently luxurious and plenty plush. Well, maybe “plush” is not quite right given that in this geezer’s mind, plush conjures the Broughamtastic interior of a late-1970s Oldsmobile with that creepy pillowy upholstery that always seems as if it would be impossible to properly clean off all of the cooties it would naturally acquire and therefore just …. yuck.
This is much better. Better like how anyone can feel in an Armani suit.
The controls actually seemed unnecessarily complex. There were lots of them and not all were well conceived. Worst of all were the gigantic…things…behind the wheel that facilitated the entirely pointless (and fortunately entirely optional) manual shifting of the automatic transmission. These huge chromed…things…brought to mind antique obstetric instruments (which I’ll quickly note that I only know of via a brief summer stint at the Smithsonian’s Medical History department as a high school intern). At any rate, these provided an immediate, and not at all pleasant association.
Since I fortunately had no babies to deliver and thereby accidentally render pointy-headed, these gigantic chromed…things…could remain attached to the wheel where they manged to get in the way of more common tasks such as turning on the windshield wipers or changing from high to low beam headlights.
The Grecale’s LCD screen is easy to read and can be manipulated to display a considerable amount of information. Much of this, of course, I suspect is entirely pointless and would never be viewed more than occasionally by any real-life driver. One screen had a selection for “Drag Race” mode – something I never got around to trying…a statement that would be downright astounding to Jeff from 30 years ago, but it seems entirely reasonable to me now. Instead, I was more fascinated by the Grecale’s notion that it had “E-Hybrid”.
As it turns out, E-Hybrid is rather uninteresting as well. It’s part of Maserati’s “mild hybrid” mode that basically uses a battery to power the engine’s turbocharger allowing the turbo to kick in faster. Ok. I never noticed it even though I surely engaged the turbocharger multiple times, and therefore bought gas more than once (which impressed me as kind of odd for only traveling 300 or so miles). At some point while flipping through displays I believe that I saw that my Grecale was averaging somewhere around 24 mpg…a number only surprising if one spends any time thinking about the fact that there’s some kind of hybrid system on-board. But really, Yabba-dabba-doo! Fred isn’t driving a Maserocki for its stellar gas mileage.
Joe Walsh’s Maserati went 185 (and now he doesn’t drive). Mine probably couldn’t go that fast. Still, I found that it seemed to be quite eager to go faster than 90, and that was in normal everyday “GT” mode (as opposed to “Sport” mode). Reviews have complained about the lethargy of the GT’s four cylinder engine. Maybe, but I can only imagine the trouble that one would get into with the more athletic Trofeo version’s V6.
Mind you, my daily driver is quite capable of three-digit speeds and from time to time I find myself in that territory. Still, to get over 100 in the E-91 I definitely know that I’m there and am quickly reminded to let off the gas (and let that car behind me who wants 110 or better pass by). The Grecale very effortlessly exceeded legal Nebraska speeds and gave no tactile indication that’s what you were doing. Kinda cool, kinda dangerous (to one’s license at least).
Fortunately in Nebraska, you can just roll miles and miles on ruler-straight roads. The Grecale’s excellent CarPlay implementation showed straight lines on Apple Maps the majority of the time.
I really liked how the driver’s side display picked up essential directional information from CarPlay. This is not something I’ve often seen on other vehicles. Unlike much of the information the Grecale was visually pushing my way – oil pressure was often being featured on the right side of the display — navigational data on the driver’s primary display seemed genuinely useful.
“Unknown” was a frequent attribute for where I was headed. 38 miles until there needed to be (or likely could be) a turn was not rare.
Enough about the car, you may say (I hope), let’s talk about where Signor Grecale took me.
On my first day, it was to rendezvous with Nebraska colleagues and their 2023 (?) Silverado HD crew cab, which often pulls a ginormous trailer. The trailer-pulling activity takes various agricultural education activities to students throughout the region. Husker Harvest Days is an anchor for the year, as are various other fairs, but the real meat and potatoes for the trailer are the many high school programs throughout the state. The lead trainer in my project travels many times a month to teach curriculum rooted in this project’s NSF (National Science Foundation) funding. She acquired her CDL for this project, and so should we ever move up to a full-blown 18-wheeler for this or a future project, she’s all set. I am always glad when she offers to drive wherever we need to go, leaving me to ride shotgun and make inane comments/ask questions about the various things we pass on our way to one destination or another.
This time, the trailer brought the project’s sprayer simulator to the high school in Oakland, Nebraska.
Here I will note that I in fact spent most of my time in Nebraska interacting with many wonderful, motivated and engaged students. So as to preserve their privacy I’m only showing photos of the backs of their heads or otherwise unidentifiable images. So it goes. You should have been there though to see these kids’ faces.
Even in a very rural town, where there are only 180 students in the regional high school (and 11 teachers), at least half of these students have no actual farm experience. On the other hand, half do. So you wind up with this fascinating mix where there are (what you might assume to be) generations-deep farm boys who actually have no farm experience mixing it up with girls who can drive tractor circles around their male classmates because these girls have been helping out on the farm since they could walk. And every combination thereof. It’s not that I don’t regularly see gender stereotypes shattered in all of my work with students wherever they are, but it’s a particular lot of fun in these agricultural education classes.
Anyhow, these kids in Oakland were applicator-sprayer stars and clearly loved the opportunity to either show off their skills or explore new ones. One of the underlying pitches here was to inform these kids that the college that sponsors this activity has a variety of programs – including paid internship opportunities with their local co-ops – that in a few years these kids might be interested in.
I expect that quite a few might bite.
Let’s take a brief break in the narrative to relate a story about why this confirmed, yet jaded, northeastern guy is fascinated by someplace like rural Nebraska. To properly set this up, there are two things to note in the picture above…one is the awning on the trailer that in the photo is rolled up and stowed (on the left) and the other is the fellow in the plaid shirt walking in front of the harvester/combine.
At the end of the day in Oakland, I hit the road in the Gracale while my project folks headed out in the Silverado/trailer. I stopped for gas as well as multiple Oakland photo opportunities, and so the Silverado folks got out of town ahead of me, headed back to campus in Norfolk (rougly an hour away).
A dozen miles or so outside of town, I come upon the Silverado and trailer pulled over on the side of the road. Naturally, I hop out asking what’s wrong. I’m told that the trailer’s awning somehow came loose and broke off over the course of a few miles. I notice another motorist (Green Honda CRV) also pulled off and soon discover that this is the guy whose field we were now parked alongside of. He’s headed back to his place to get tools to help remove the remnants of the awning.
We have all manner of STEM supplies in the Precision Agriculture Simulator trailer, but sadly not a regular toolbox. This will soon be remedied, I’m told.
I go back to find and retrieve the bulk of the awning from a mile behind on the highway…but the Maserati is no match for carrying what turns out to be about 15 feet of rolled awning. So I head back up the road to the Silverado/trailer, where by now the tool-guy is back. While one of my colleagues attacks the awning remnants, I chat up the tool-guy. Because chatting people up is what I do. Whether or not I’m getting paid to do so.
Tool-guy turns out to be the farmer/owner of the fields we are next to. He relates his story of finding the awning pieces in the road – he pulled over and tossed them on the shoulder saying “I figure that someone would come back for those”, and then says how he came upon the pulled over Silverado and trailer. He indicates that of course no matter what he’d have stopped to help (that’s what he does…and anyway, these folks are on his property more or less), BUT he also stopped because he noticed the name of the organization on the trailer. And in fact (here’s the clincher), that’s HIS NEPHEW in the picture on the side of the trailer.
Yup. Nebraska is the kind of place where in 2024 you can still randomly run into people who are related to other people in what you might imagine (although you’d be wrong) are stock photos.
Tool-guy has some discussion with the project folks about the uncle and nephew and who’s up to what nowadays. But there’s not too much of this since there’s work to be done, and massive sections of debris to be retrieved.
The rest of the trip is not quite as rich with vehicular mayhem and local color, but is still immensely satisfying. The next two days on the road do not feature the sprayer simulator (and therefore we can leave the trailer back on campus), but instead are all about the project’s created curriculum for introducing drones as an example of precision agriculture.
Kids love drones.
These drone lessons are a terrific combination of engaging material along with focused reflection on how technology is used in modern agriculture. The material involves some truly interdisciplinary activities that require students to call forth stuff from math class (e.g. the Pythagorean equation for finding the length of a hypotenuse of a right triangle) along with coding along with practical applications for all of this.
It’s a wonderful thing to see a student slowly realize that “kind of guessing” the square root of 7200 is not going to get his drone back from the Northeast corner to its starting point at the Southwest corner of his 60″ square “field”. Point is, details matter, and there’s nothing like hands-on work to embed the notion that very often the most satisfying kind of success is one which involves carefully using your brain and your hands to achieve a synergy that the use of just one of those things cannot possibly achieve.
Speaking of details, I suspect that they might also matter to those who are interested in spending roughly $70,000 on a Maserati Grecale. Although why you might purchase one when you could just rent one for a few days is entirely beyond my ability to comprehend.
Maybe purchasers just miss their woodblock playing days in elementary school. Yes, I was usually assigned the autoharp or recorder. But 50+ years later, I can’t afford a Grecale, and they can. Oh well, go figure.
All things considered, life’s been good to me so far.
Some of the Maserati’s details I found helpful. There was something about the shape of the large side-view mirrors that was particularly pleasing. The asymmetrical shape of the mirror glass seemed particularly well-suited to displaying a comfortable and proportioned rear view.
I don’t know how to better describe this, but it just worked in a very pleasurable and reassuring way.
Other details, such as the word “Maserati” embedded in the sidelight/headlight housing were cool although totally non-functional.
Perhaps owing to the fact that relatively few Americans even know what a Maserati is (unless they are Flintstones or Joe Walsh fans), the car is keen on displaying the legendary Maserati trident often. It’s featured four times on the exterior of the car, and at least as many times inside the car.
I’ve already mentioned the very cool led-made-to-look-analog clock. When the car is off, that display simply turns into an image of the trident. It may well be the coolest detail on the Grecale.
Then there’s the Grecale’s most annoying “feature”…the giant key fobs. For some reason, Enterprise chose to give me both of the Grecale’s key fobs chained together. This meant that I was carrying close to a full pound of fobbage every time I left the vehicle. For comparison, each of these things was about 25% larger than a classic Zippo lighter (as I recall from the days when I used to carry a Zippo) and about three times as heavy. We’re talking about something that you could actually hurt a person with if you hurled it at their head and had good aim. As far as I could tell, these things did nothing more than hold four buttons (lock, unlock, open the hatch, and sound the panic alarm) and encase the chip necessary to start the car. As is the fashion nowadays, there was no facility for actually tethering the fob to the car. So, you just had to keep it in your pocket or let it slide around the slick, leathery (not “plush”) interior.
I’ve had flip phones that were slightly bigger than the Maserati remote. Of course, they didn’t have a cool trident emblazoned on their side.
Rather oddly, there was no trident on the rear of the Grecale.
The only other ergonomic complaint I had with the Grecale is that the central touch screen wasn’t very touchy. At least that was the case on the example that I had. The screen was a bit lacking in sensitivity and often required more than one jab at the screen to activate a function. This was most apparent in trying to dismiss the mandatory “You shouldn’t be looking at this screen while driving, and if you do and something bad happens we at Maserati are not responsible. Caio!” warning that showed up each time the ignition was switched on. One is supposed to punch the “Accept” button on the screen, except in my case that only worked about half the time. I drove most of the way from Cedar Rapids (NE) to Kearney with that warning screen on the display because I couldn’t get it to dismiss.
Speaking of Kearney (pronounced “Carnie”, as in Circus folk, nomads you know; smell like cabbage…small hands), that’s where I wound up on my last night in Nebraska.
In keeping with nearly everything that happens to me on these trips to the heartland, I discovered Kearney is so much more than I would have imagined. Not only is it the site of the largest annual Sandhill Crane migration (I missed this 2 month long event by about a week), but it’s also famous as one of the major way stations on the Oregon Trail.
Many readers of a certain age may recall stocking up on oxen and provisions at Fort Kearney while flogging their Apple II’s across the virtual country via the classic Oregon Trail educational game.
I didn’t see any oxen (in Kearney at least), but if I needed to resupply myself with Sheltie dogs I was in the right place at the right time. I ran into someone at the hotel who was on her way to the American Shetland Sheepdog National Specialty convention in St. Louis. At least that was her excuse for having by my count 10 of these guys wedged into her 20 year old Plymouth minivan. I probably couldn’t have gotten half as many dogs into the Grecale.
I didn’t try to find out.
Kearney definitely seems like a place to return to for what would appear to be several days worth of attractions. I’m sure it’s rather hokey, but the “Archway Museum” – both a figurative commemoration of the Kearney’s role as an archway to the west, and as a literal archway over Interstate 80 – looks promising. It appears to feature quite a few manikins dressed in historical garb…always a bonus creepy museum attraction in my book.
I also have to go talk to whoever is in charge of this operation, which is apparently still a viable business with a bunch of great old neon.
I’d love to see it actual lit at night. Next time I suppose.
I’m sure they don’t want to sell any of these signs. I’m also sure they get asked about this several times a week.
I do hope to get back, and I know that I will. Although somehow the odds of my returning again in a Maserati seem rather slim.
No, next time I’m hoping that Rental Car Dude offers up a Porsche Macan. I might as well try the Grecale’s competition…if only for a few days.
Shame you never got to chuck the Grecale down soime more challenging roads – I read that it is supposed to handle very well. Our Levante is really surprising, very rear biased which makes it much more agile (and fun) than one would imagine.
The Grecale interior is nice, but current Maserati interiors really start to pop when contrasting colors are specced. Ours in the saddle brown leather with Zegna silk(!) always gets comments and feels “special” in a way that the German competitors don’t…
I saw that interior online while looking up background info for this article. It does indeed pop! It’s always hard to accurately judge leather color online, but I think that looks a lot like the “Terra Dakota” color I have on my own car and I love it. I can only imagine how much nicer it could be in a Maserati…where the leather has a much nicer texture than in my BMW.
Believe me, it’s really nicely done and the leather is very supple. Even the headrests have a nice sewn Trident. This “saddle” color contrasts nicely with the dark blue exterior on ours. The red interior looks great, as does the off white, but the latter could be less than hard wearing.This interior feels “special” in a way that X5s and Cayennes (which I love), don’t, even though some parts (the power window switches, for example), are carry overs.
I also love rental cars and loaner cars, allowing me to try out different stuff I otherwise might never experience.
Around 2014 I got a newly redesigned Mazda6 and was so impressed with it I nearly bought one (but was driving a string of Suburbans at the time, kids were smaller).
More recently I was upgraded from a “Maxima, Impala or similar” car to an Audi Q7 3-row SUV w/ Supercharged V6 and fell in love over the course of nearly a month with that sweet beast. I remembered that experience when we were about to buy a Volvo EV SUV last year and after loving it on the test drive (at an Audi dealer), decided to also sample an e-tron. BLOWN AWAY at the quality, features and creamy goodness – so bought that.
And always remember: “What’s the fastest car? A rental car.”
🙂
Yup. “What kind of car can go over a speed bump at 100 mph? A rental car.” 🙂
Your experience with the Mazda and Audi are exactly to the point. So much so that I’ve actually recommended “go out and rent one for a week” to various people who ask me if “they’d like” (always a risky proposition, IMO) a particular vehicle to own.
Indeed, “What they’d like” could be very different than what I’d like or you’d like. Reminds me actually of another rental experience, probably well over 10 years back- A Nissan Cube of all things, AND I LOVED IT! Just thought it was great. I owned several finer vehicles at the time but really wanted to buy one of those goofy things. Kids and Wife were NOT in favor :rolleyes:
Great article! More than a few random thoughts:
1) Renting a Maserati: I realize I’m stuck in the 20-years-ago mentality equating rental cars with Chevy Malibus, but still this surprises me. Back when I traveled for business, I also had a fondness for renting cars, just because I enjoyed road testing different vehicles, no matter how banal they may be. In those days, my biggest aim was getting upgraded to a Grand Marquis.
2) Maserati, In General: I’ll be honest… thinking about Maserati (and to a certain extent Porsche) kind of makes me sad. It used to be such an evocative brand of rarely-seen supercars. Then was a brand of deeply flawed but still neat cars that folks still associated with supercars, and held on to that elusive Italian mystique. Now I see them as being cars for rich people whose egos exceed what can be quenched by an Audi. Maybe my mentality is clouded by living in an affluent coastal metro area, but still, it makes me sad. I realize not everyone sees the brand this way, and that’s fine.
Amusingly, a few years ago a friend mine visited from North Carolina, and he and his wife (not car people at all) saw a Maserati in a parking lot. They took a selfie with it, because they considered it so unique. I credited their Maserati fascination with the Joe Walsh song, which was likely many folks’ main association with the brand decades ago.
3) Better than a Corolla: Despite what I wrote above, I’d have made the same choice you did, and spring for the free upgrade to one of those overstocked luxury cars. Someone at the Grand Island Airport was in for a big surprise at the rental counter after you dropped it off there.
4) Autoharps in Elementary School?? Sorry for the tangent, but I don’t know if I’d love to see an elementary school concert featuring autoharps, or if that would terrify my senses. I’ve read that autoharps are rather easy to play, but still… I wouldn’t put them on the level of recorders for little kids. Fascinating tidbit there.
5) Interesting Car Review: Thanks for reviewing your days with this car. It’s all very interesting, and I suspect I’d have some similar reactions. One of the reasons I miss rental cars is for the opportunity to get accustomed to newer features that my own cars don’t have.
6) Agricultural Curriculum: In the late 1990s I worked for an education & economic development consulting firm. Programs like the one you describe here were just coming into their own, and seemed to be the wave of the future. But in my experience, the trend has largely come and gone in most places, including mine. That’s a terrible shame, because these are the kinds of programs that students find very engaging, and can stimulate their interest in careers at a crucial point. These kids who you visited are very fortunate to live where they do. I feel that my own kids’ education is pathetic, particularly given my background in the field. It’s a pity. I know that my daughters would love to be introduced to something like this. I’ve actually looked at college and community college ag course descriptions and programs with one of my daughters, but it’s pretty overwhelming for people with no actual ag experience.
7) The Awning Incident: I’m pretty sure that those crappy 1980s Biturbos came with toolkits in the trunk. So, take that, Grecale! Great story about the guy and his nephew’s picture on the trailer.
8) Nebraska: I love central and western Nebraska. I end up there every few years or so (admittedly, on the way to somewhere else), and always look forward to it.
Thanks for the article!
Eric – Re. point 2: Ouch!
Thank you Eric. So many good connections! I’ll just pick a couple.
Either Joe Walsh or the Flintstones. Or worse, the various low quality and catastrophe-prone models from the FIAT years. I think/suspect that it’s a whole other story nowadays, but for a niche car – which surprisingly still seems to have a solid, albeit tiny, foothold in the US market – it still has recognition.
It’s kind of off topic, but I’ll say that while I seldom see a new Maserati in my home area (home to pretty much anything…I see Lamborghinis several times a month), I much more often see new Alfas. Like, several times a week. To me, that ought to be as rare as a Maserati.
It’s funny – I didn’t realize there was a Flintstones / Maserati connection until… well, today.
And now I’ll have to pay attention to my local Maserati and Alfa populations. I actually feel that I see more Maseratis around here – Alfas seem pretty uncommon. Now I wonder if that’s accurate, or just my perception.
Kearney is apparently the midpoint of I-80 between the coasts. I too have spent time there, but usually just of the overnight variety and no, never stepped foot on the bridge. The city is vastly bigger with a nice little “old town” featuring real brick streets as I recall once one gets a couple of miles north of the interstate and over the hill, until then it looks just like the typical offramp conglomeration of fast food franchises and gas stations.
In my (semi?-) official capacity as the CCer that is keeping track of these things, by my reckoning your score of the Maserati Grecale puts you firmly atop the charts of the Rental Car Lottery winners here at CC. Stellantis clearly saw your last review of the Charger and said we like this but that model was just discontinued, let’s push a Grecale or two into the fleet and see if we can juice the sales with a Jeff Sun review of it.
That being said, while I completely see the market for making “luxury” cars available for rental and am very onboard with the idea of exposing people to cars they might not have thought to be appealing to them, I always considered it a better idea to offer an attractive/appealing version of a Chevy Traverse or Ford Fusion rather than the most stripped out version thereof, i.e. give the weary traveler something that they can delight them compared to whatever their own hum-drum ride may be and it may be something they’d consider the next time they buy their own, especially back when the car companies owned stakes in the rental car companies and were loading their cars into the programs.
Yet a Maserati in a Nebraska rental fleet? What’s the point, commercially speaking, I mean. Sure, Stellantis moves another unit (through their fleet unit along with millions of white ProMasters ?), yet now whenever I see a random dude in a Maserati I’ll be wondering if it’s from Avis. Not that the car necessarily makes the man (or woman), but it rather takes a bit of the bloom off the marketing rose and overall makes the car less desirable as an object. Really, if you’re going to offer it as rental, make it expensive, DO NOT sub it in for anything else not in its category, and if it needs to be moved back from point A to point B have the company do it and pay for it rather than a random Corolla-reserving person, you know, how it would be if you actually wanted to reserve a Maserati as a rental. After all, once you lose the exclusivity and unattainability aspect of the car, it’s just a fancier Jeep Compass or whatever (I know it’s not remotely a Compass, but you get my point). Or maybe that’s what keeps the rental game going just like the lottery, i.e. pay the small monetary amount and hope for the big payout. I’ve noticed the last few times I rented that it is virtually impossible to actually get the small fuel efficient economy car I wanted, and the upgrade to something else is often less appealing when it’s your own money paying for gas (last two were a brand new Chevy Colorado ZR2 with ridiculous knobby offroad tires and a 60,000 mile Honda Ridgeline with a rattle and poor economy on both., both when I reserved a Kia Rio “or similar” on purpose)
Yeah, my last rental was a 52,000-mile 2019 Nissan Rogue Sport with a CVT you could “shift” or let pretend-shift on its’ own but could NOT make act like a proper CVT and a stubborn electronic parking brake that sometimes didn’t want to let go and the button did nothing to help, and a 25mpg thirst thanks in part to (totally pointless in Florida) AWD that is just not good enough in an appliance car that size.
If nothing else it made me appreciate my own 48,000-mile Honda Fit with manual trans and parking brake when I got home.
I reserved a Toyota Camry or similar a couple of weeks ago in Houston and received a ’24 Escape ST-Line. A lot of people would perceive this as an upgrade, for the increased ride height…but the 1.5-liter turbo I3 is ill-suited to driving in Houston. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll understand what I mean.
I ended up swapping it for an EV a day later. I need to write Rental Reviews of both.
But you’re right that renting a car is a spectacularly imprecise experience unless you rent a specific example on Turo, or something. Last year, I tried to rent a Grand Wagoneer from the airport Avis specifically to see if Stellantis’ Escalade-fighter was worth the money. They waited until I got all the way to the counter to tell me that location didn’t carry Grand Wagoneers, or even the Wagoneer. And when I was in Munich and had reserved an “S-Klasse or Similar,” they originally tried to stick me in a GLE 350d, until I complained and they found a 750d xDrive.
I definitely DO get your point, and was actually thinking at one point that while the Grecale was nice, it was in some ways a lot like a very much fancier version of the Compass Trailhawk I was given once to replace a broken down rental Buick Encore. I actually like the Compass…and recommended it to someone looking for a similar vehicle based on my experience with it. To your point, I’ll probably not be recommending a Grecale to anyone. Not because it’s a bad vehicle, but because anyone that I know who receives a “Well, maybe you should consider a Maserati.” recommendation from me will no doubt die laughing.
I am pleased that I have at least temporarily won the CC rental lottery (I never win anything!). Keeping my position gives me something to aspire to. I have another Corolla reserved for June…we’ll see what actually exists in Omaha at that time.
I’d gladly subscribe to the notion that Stellantis has some hand in pushing these things my way. 😉 There are a number of their vehicles I’d write up.
Which no doubt means that I will get talked into a Promaster at 11:30pm in some parking garage at some airport somewhere. (not that I don’t actually request them from U-Haul when necessary…but that’s a whole other story).
Downtown Kearney was nice. Although I was kind of sad that they turned one of their original movie theaters into a dental office.
That made me laugh (yes, kind of sad, but it is better than tearing the place down). Takes the concept of “adaptive reuse” to a whole new level.
I think I’ll skip this month’s featured show though:
“Which no doubt means that I will get talked into a Promaster at 11:30pm in some parking garage at some airport somewhere. (not that I don’t actually request them from U-Haul when necessary…but that’s a whole other story).”
As long as they’re offering the requisite Free Candy to get in the big white van, how could anything go wrong?
We’ve already done the U-Haul Promaster thing…:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/new-car-review/future-classic-2017-ram-1500-promaster-cargo-136-wb-low-roof-u-haul-traded-in-my-transit/
Yes I got a chuckle out of the Kearney dentist’s office too. I didn’t notice if the work was at a reduced rate if you were there early enough though.
The way Toyota’s straining to meet demand, the absolutely last thing you’ll probably get is a Corolla. A Nissan Sentra on the other hand…
In 2016 I needed to rent a one-way car from Ft. Lauderdale to Atlanta. I wound up getting the best price from SIXT, a European car rental agency that is slowly making inroads into the US.
I’d reserved “Hyundai Accent or similar”, because I’m cheap and I had a lot of driving to do but didn’t want to spend a lot on fuel. The desk agent, who I suspect was the Location Manager, said to me, “I have a MINI Cooper that nobody wants to rent. You’d do me a favor to get it out of my fleet.” I really admired his candor! Turns out I probably would have been better off with the Accent, but It was fun spending a week in a car I’d never buy.
Not me being specifically called out for buying a string of ridiculous premium cars no one needs. I’m flattered! Two more have joined the list since my last COAL.
As far as the Grecale, somehow I had it in my mind that it was transverse-FWD, like the Alfa Romeo Tonale (and its Dodge Hornet sister). So I’m pleased to see that the Grecale is actually on the longitude-RWD Giorgio platform, which is pretty spectacular.
I think people are upset with Maserati because it’s mostly been decoupled from Ferrari, since FCA spun Ferrari off as a separate entity. Now, Maserati shares its electrical and platform development with Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge. The electronics/control panels look like the same ones you’d find in the current WS Grand Wagoneer and WL Grand Cherokee, and likely the upcoming ’25 Charger models. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing, though.
Maserati also finds itself in an interesting place, because of its historical versus current perception. In theory, Maserati is intended to be premium-plus, like the Range Rover sub-brand or Porsche. It’s *supposed* to be the case that Alfa Romeo is Chrysler’s mainstream premium brand, while Maserati is a tier above that. Its cars are supposed to command premiums versus other luxury cars, but the transaction and resale prices do not reflect that. For the most part, a 2014 Ghibli, which my aunt now drives, will transact for *less* than a comparable A6 “3.0T” or 535i.
As far as those paddle shifters–which I also agree are gratuitous in size for this application–were they affixed to the steering wheel, or to the column? Typically, if they’re that big, they’re affixed to the column; that way you know they’re always in the same place regardless of which way the steering wheel is pointed.
I’m just glad that Maserati now makes a product that has a competitive level of quality and durability, whilst offering something distinctly different in character to the default luxury brands. Their used resale prices have not caught up with this yet.
Kyree, your question about the position of the paddles (or whatever these things are) is a good one. I really believe that these were attached to the wheel and not the column.
This in fact is what was so surprising and jarring to me. I have no issue with paddles if they’re small. I had similarly silly paddles on a 4-series coupe BMW loaner recently, and while they were as useless as those on the Grecale, they at least didn’t get in the way of anything.
A Maserati in Kearney. It’s not the early ’60s anymore, when we used to overnight there on our annual summer vacation treks to the Rockies.
I’m pretty sure it was in Kearney (maybe Holdridge?) when I stopped there in the early ’70s that there was a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer whose showroom was full of “new” cars he had chosen to keep and not sell. He picked the most awesome model from each year: a 300 with the cross-ram induction, a 383 Barracuda, a ’67 hemi GTX, and so on. It was quite amazing.
And that’s one reason – but maybe at the top of my list – why I’d not be able to own a car dealership. I’d do the same thing as that guy and no doubt never turn a profit.
How fun! I felt your pain at trying to figure out how to shift the thing into gear. I can remember a time when I knew how controls worked on virtually every brand of car. Now I have to spend far longer trying to figure them out than seems reasonable.
I love the menu item for “consumption history” – does it measure rust? 🙂 Also, my first thought about the touch screen – the car is Italian, so if you are going to poke it in the screen, it expects you to really poke it like you mean it!
There was a time when most controls worked the same way. The advent of electronically controlled transmissions (if they can even always be called “transmissions”) means that there are just so many possibilities. I’m trying to remember the rental thing I had recently that had a dial instead of a lever or buttons to switch gears. It’s just all over the place it seems.
I wondered whether “Consumption History” may have referred to tuberculosis. But….I take a test for that annually in order to work in some schools. 🙂
Jeff – Thanks for this. I like Nebraska – and all of the high plains. I am smiling at the concept of a Maserati, with Wisconsin plates, in rural Nebraska. On I-80 in Wyoming that would be very suspicious to the WHP; they are triggered by out of state exotic vehicles and have frequent publicity displays of what they find when a stop under some minor violation pretense is made.
I’ll be going through Grand Island and Norfolk soon on the way to Vermillion, SD. I’m going to try to count how many Maserati (and Porsche) SUVs I see out there on US 30 and US 81.
Well, I didn’t notice any other Maseratis on my trip, but I wasn’t (for long at least) in Omaha. Outside of Omaha, it’s for the most part what you’d expect — truck things with bow ties, sheep heads, or blue ovals; and a lot of car things from Kia or Hyundai.
Omaha, it should be noted, has a Maserati dealer. Even so, its “Pre-Owned Inventory” strangely shows a Taurus, lots of Toyotas, and even a Subaru.
This is my own mantra when renting a car. Always reserve the Corolla, and always take the upgrade. It’s always cheaper than reserving the upgrade in the first place.
You sir, as Jim Klein pointed out, won the rental car lottery big time!
I’ve hit the rental car lottery twice, but not nearly as big a prize as you. Ironically, the upgrade from the reserved “Corolla or Similar” were both large Mopar sedans…. a 2015 Charger and more recently, its sister car, a 2021 Chrysler 300. Ironically, both of these were white, had the 292hp V6, and were quite nice to drive.
The upgrade to the Charger at the Hertz counter at the Fort Myers Airport was a modest increase in price, but from Enterprise, there was no increase in price* for the Chrysler 300… it’s just what they had handy at the store closest to the body shop where I had my Civic serviced. *Maybe there was a price difference, but I didn’t see it, as my insurance company was footing the bill.
Your mention of your insurance company footing the bill reminds me of the conversation I had with the very nice young lady who drove me (in the Grecale that I’d just returned) from the Enterprise office in Grand Island to the Grand Island airport.
The Grand Island airport has only 2 rental car companies on-site (Hertz and Thrifty?). And for that matter, only 1 airline. It’s a great airport of you like flying to/from Dallas Ft. Worth as that’s the only place both flights a day come from/return to. Anyway, the Enterprise place is about 5 miles from the airport, but no problem, they’ll very kindly drive you to the airport.
So Grand Island Enterprise lady is kind of happy to be driving the Grecale, but notes that the LAST guy she remembers (mind you, I think she was about 20, so I’m not sure how far back that memory goes) who had rented one of Enterprise’s Maseratis did something that managed to blow up the engine (perhaps it was Joe Walsh himself?). But even with the Enterprise damage waiver that he’d taken at Omaha, he was liable for damages since there are “special rules” applied to “luxury cars”. And his personal insurance didn’t cover the damage either. Apparently, this guy was screwed. Or at least that was her fascinating story that I heard on the way to the airport.
I suppose that’s something to think about (or know more about) if one takes a luxury car upgrade and just assumes that the regular rules apply.
So much to love about this. The Flintstones reference that played into your choice. The unbelievable and free upgrade. The momentary challenge with getting the transmission figured out. The kids getting their simulated agriculture on. It’s all so excellent. Thanks for this. Has me thinking about the most exciting rental I’ve ever had… It must not have been exciting, as I can’t think of what that might be.
Thank you Joe!
I try never to underestimate the role that after-school tv cartoons have played in forming my adult life choices.
😉
A fascinating read.
Not keeping up with modern cars, I was unaware of the Grecale. Should be popular with the Hellenic community. Rental upgrades can be… interesting. Especially when you wind up trying to deal with unfamilar controls, or a larger vehicle than you really wanted.
I loved reading of your experience with those kids and the simulator!
Do folk in Nebraska even notice a Maserati these days? In my high school days it would have been “Wow – wonder who’s driving that?”, but this one kind of hides its Maserati-ness. But it’s very well-proportioned; I was expecting it to be a medium hatch but it’s actually an SUV. I’m surprised
Thank you Peter.
I too had never heard specifically of a Grecale before encountering one, so it’s not just people from Nebraska. And yes, no one in Nebraska seemed to find what I was driving to be remarkable. I think that’s really because it looks kind of externally generic (very much in line with what was being said earlier here in the comments about a “kind of fancy Jeep”). It doesn’t stand out, and looks enough like much of the more pedestrian vehicles on the road so that it’s not even remarkable. I’m not sure if this is genius or a fail on the part of Maserati/Stellantis.
Thank you for also pointing out that the name means “the wind”. I think that’s something else that entirely sneaks by most folks and even owners.
The sprayer simulator is a great thing. We ran it from about 8:30am until 3:30pm…with its 3 LCD monitors and another monitor/computer playing promo videos…on less than half a tank of fuel via a smallish inverter generator in the trailer. A great educational resource.
Jeff, I read this quite early this morning and have been thinking about it all day. Yes, you won the lottery.
In a way, this has me excited. We are going to Tampa in the near future and renting from the same company, and this rental is also a one-way affair, dropping it off in Orlando. While we reserved a “Malibu or similar” here’s hoping for something with a bit more panache than a white Chevrolet.
I told Mrs. Jason about your Maserati. She thought it was great. She also reminded me of our decent luck with rental cars upon our honeymoon in 1998. We had flown into Salt Lake City for a trip to Yellowstone. The rental company (Alamo? I don’t remember) had a “Grand Am or similar” waiting for us – but they had ran out of cars. So we climbed into a 700 mile Chrysler Sebring convertible. It was awesome for seeing Yellowstone, other than getting our scalps sunburned.
Nebraska is an interesting state, in a good way. Somebody once told me the population is low enough, and the stadium at the University of Nebraska so large, that 5% of the state’s population could gather for a Cornhusker’s (I think that’s who it was) game. Plus 2/3 of the state’s population is in the eastern 1/3 of the state.
The Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha is also a good place (or it was 20-odd years ago); I would recommend it if you have a few hours to spend.
Jason, best of luck on spinning the rental wheel….of…..FORTUNE! on your trip to Tampa! That rental company is a good choice for trying your luck. They used to have a thing (not sure if this is still the case) where they had a section of the lot at the airport where you could just walk up and take any of the cars parked there. Sometimes that resulted in some nice rentals.
In line with your honeymoon experience, about 10 years ago I wound up with a Mustang convertible via that “select what you want” policy. That was on a very memorable trip from Phoenix into the Whiteriver Apache reservation (to evaluate a federal education grant). 200 miles each way through landscapes that looked like a Roadrunner cartoon. In a car that was essentially designed for driving through that landscape (assuming you remembered to bring a hat). We had a great time winning the lottery that time too.
The Henry Doorly Zoo sounds excellent. I tend not to spend a lot of time in Omaha on these trips, but I’ll check it out the next time that I do!
I have been the recipient of some interesting upgrades from Hertz, where I’ve been a Gold member for at least 25 years. They are my go-to rental company. I do remember renting from Enterprise once in St. Louis, though and the two remote keys cabled together with the laminated car info turned me off. On a training trip to Anaheim in the early 1980s, I asked at the Hertz counter if they had any cars with manual transmissions. (My personal cars have all been manuals since my first car in 1961.) They gave me a Ford Escort GT. Back when Hertz would assign cars to gold members, I flew into Phoenix in 2008 to visit family in Tucson. I always reserve compact cars, and I was walking down the aisle of Chevy Cavaliers and there in my assigned stall was a Nissan 350Z. My suitcase barely fit in the back. I was warned that the road from Phoenix was heavily patrolled, so no thrills on that drive. While in Tucson, I drove to the top of Mt. Lemmon. That road is full of sharp curves and switchbacks, and I wasn’t too far up the road when the patrol car went past me going downhill. Then I had some fun!
About 7 years ago, I had flown into San Diego for some family affair, and I was planning to return home from San Francisco. I reserved a car one-way from Hertz and they had too many in San Diego, so they gave me a $99 one-way rate and 3 days. I got to the airport early for the pickup and there was some sub-compact SUV thing in the space they sent me to. I went back to the office and said a cousin was riding with me and she had 3 suitcases, plus my suitcase and backpack. The counter guy grumbled a bit then gave me an almost brand new Camry. We went by way of Yosemite. With a little additional sightseeing and then visiting my daughter an hour south of San Francisco, I returned that $99 rental car with almost 1000 miles more than I started out with. The Camry is certainly not a luxury car, but it was not a base model and it was very good.
Still with me? One more: In the mid2000s, I flew into Miami for a one week training course in October. I had reserved my usual compact class car. I was the only one on the Hertz bus with my midnight arrival and the driver told me I should ask about the new Mitsubishi Spyder convertibles that they had available, so I did. They had a Mustang ready for me, but the counter person told me they had some Spyders available. He told me they were an additional $59 a day. When I said that would never fly on my expense report he upgraded me to a Mustang convertible. October was the perfect time of year for a convertible in Miami.
Thanks for a fascinating story, Jeff.
As for the Maserati being available
Excellent stories! I have found that the best shot of getting consistently good rental cars is to rent in large markets such as Arizona, California, or Florida. The worst experiences I’ve had are in small, Southeastern US cities where the lots are inevitably full of low-spec, often heavily beat upon, cars. Everywhere else, it’s just a spin of the wheel to see what you wind up with.
A nice way to write up the car, Jeff, as much landscape and people and your experience in Nebraska as the machine itself.
(As an aside, I feel obliged to pint out that “chatting up” someone means “hitting on” them in the UK or Oz, and, for a second or two, I did wonder what was going to happen with tool-guy, but I digress).
Does anyone really know know is this car named? Is it ‘greek-alley’ (which sounds ever so slightly ribald): or ‘greek ale’ (surely then, ‘ouzo’ would have sufficed): the ‘grease-arly’ (which sounds like a dirty look): or the ‘grek-arly’ (which sounds like a boiling pot)? I certainly, and immediately, thought that the Alfa variant was called the ‘Toenail’, and have been unsuccessful in removing that from my mind whenever I see one. (I don’t think the owners who’ve paid rather a lot for that not-very-well reviewed car would find this funny, but then, that lack is possibly also why they bought such a thing in the first place).
Seems odd for a Maser to be only a four-pot – not that that means much in today’s world of reliable and fully warrantied 300bhp fours – but then I recalled they won F1 races in the ’50’s and made a sports car (200S) with a four then as well, though it looked a bit classier than the Greek bearing obstetric gifts, it did.
This.
Thanks Justy. And I did not know the Britishism re. “chatting up”. I’ll have to watch out for my use of that.
Good point about the four cylinder engine. I too thought that was strange, primarily in how it delivered relatively – at least to me – poor economy for a modern small(ish) engine. On the other hand, the Grecale seems to be a rather hefty vehicle, and I guess that relatively small engine is working pretty hard.
Looking at the Fobs brings up a question- How smart is it really to lasso the 2 together, assuring that ONE lost remote is BOTH lost remotes????
I guess they need to stick tridents all over to reinforce the idea that this is a $70,000 Maserati and not a $50,000 Audi or Nissan or any number of other things this could be mistaken for. The problem with 2 box crossovers is that design has convergerd so most look vaguely the same. One would never mistake a Maserati Ghibli for a Corvette or even the od Merak for a Fiero but this could easily be a Jaguar by changing the badging and massaging the grille.
There is only so much you can do with styling this type/shape vehicle (without getting really weird at least)…..
Some end up looking better than others for sure, but boiled down they are all pretty similar.