Owner Profile: John Rexford, Selective Style

Ask 48-year-old business executive John Rexford why he bought his Maserati Quattroporte, and he answers without hesitation: style. Ask him his favorite thing about the car, and it's the same reply: style. His impression of Maserati? You've guessed it - style.

Don't worry, our conversation with John, a Dallas resident, went well beyond the style of his car. We discussed everything from the importance of exclusivity to the parallels between driving a Maserati and riding a Vespa - both icons of Italian style, both make him feel good.

Winding time back a year, however, and the exclusivity worked against him. Dropping by Park Place Maserati in Dallas, John was prepared to buy a car he saw there but it was already sold, and John didn't want to go on a waiting list. Six months later he bought a Neiman Marcus special edition Quattroporte, part of the limited run of sixty which sold out in only 3 minutes when offered as the store's Christmas Car. "The real nifty thing about this particular version is that it has three colors to it. In one light, it's a brown car, in another light it's a burgundy car, and in another, it's ruby red. That really struck me as you moved around the car, different colors came off it."

Of course, there's more to John's Quattroporte than Maserati's signature deep, lustrous finish. "On the performance, it's not the top-end speed of the car, it's the acceleration and the handling," he explained. "I get my fun on pulling away and in the curves, I don't do 100mph down the highway, because that's very short-lived fun. The noise the car makes, the purr - that's something special."

"There aren't too many opportunities to make use of the handling around here, as the roads are pretty much all flat and straight," John went on. "There are a couple of long, sweeping highway ramps where I can really lean on it, but if I were up in Connecticut, where I used to live, or out in the suburbs of Chicago, I'd be able to find some country roads, and some different environments."

John can think of some things on the car he'd like to see improved: even more toys. He wonders if Maserati has considered a rear-view camera for the video screen and slightly revised seat heating and ventilation switches. "Of course", he says, "I know that the real toy is what's under the hood, it's the engine." It is worth noting that because Maserati pays close attention to its clients, the latest Quattroporte has a new display in the instrument cluster screen related to these controls, improving ease of use.

A few years ago, singer-songwriter Chris Rea wrote a song titled Texas; it included the lines "They got big, long roads out there" and "A road that goes on forever". Bizarrely, they're the reasons John doesn't see himself doing high mileages in his car. "Texas is big - Houston is a four or five hour drive," John explained. "Frankly, if I'm going any distance, I'll hop on an airplane, as Houston is a 45-minute plane ride, with the airport five minutes from my house." Change the scenery, and things might be different: "If I still lived in Connecticut, I could see me taking the car upstate, up into the Berkshires for more of a cruise, but here it doesn't make sense."

Asked what he thinks the car says about him, and John says it's changed his image - for the better. "I caught people off-guard, because I try to be low key, flying under the radar," he said. "All of a sudden, I have a little bit of a spotlight on the car side, and it's about the only spotlight I have. I tell people I've done two crazy things in my life; one was building a house in northern Michigan, and I love it, and the other was buying the Maserati, and I love it. I wanted to do something for myself, to make me feel good, and it happened to be the car."

Feeling good is one of the Quattroporte's great attractions. "You get a lot of looks - at the car, I'm sure, not at me," John laughed. "That feels good when you get the looks. You get a lot of compliments, you get thumbs up when driving down the street, from motorcyclists and teenagers. It makes you feel good when you're driving the car. I never really had that feeling in a car before, where it just makes you feel good to drive it."

Asked to compare the quality of his Maserati to other cars he has owned, John found it rather difficult. "There is no comparison - it's off the scale," he told says. "If it's off the scale on price - it's almost double what I've spent on any other vehicle - the quality goes hand in hand with that. I just can't compare it with the Mercedes CLK430 convertible, which is what I replaced, or the S- Class, the quality is so much higher in the Maserati. It's changed my perceptions - I never thought I would spend that much money on a car, but now that I have, I think it's definitely good value."

Altered perceptions were mentioned again when we asked John about whether the Quattroporte had spoiled him for other cars. "It has trained my eyes a little differently to the type of car to get, so there will now be things I look at a little differently when I'm buying a car. There's going to be some things I will look for, such as the noise it makes; the transmission, as I'm better attuned to transmission now. And color - I keep on going back to that, but there's a lot more to life than just a white car or a black car."

Of course, such altered perceptions sometimes have a price, and in this case it will be a severely limited choice whenever it comes time to choose a replacement. "In terms of where I would go to look for a car, I used to think of Mercedes or BMW; now, I don't know that I'll ever buy one," John explained. "My guess is that I've now moved to a different class of performance and style that I don't know that you'll find in a BMW or Mercedes. They're more a mass-production vehicle. In fact, there's no one in the class; I wouldn't put a BMW 7-series with a V12 engine in the same class - it's a different car. Mercedes - again, it's a different class."

Not that such things are much of a concern right now. "I tend to keep cars for a long time, mostly because they're low-mileage and I keep them in good shape; it'll be a while," he said. "Of course, I was thinking about that the other day, and I thought, those two-door Maseratis are pretty neat. At the moment it wouldn't make sense, but I could see myself buying something like that once my son has gone off to college."

Strangely enough, when we asked John what was cool about the car, style didn't get mentioned. "The coolest thing? The color," he told us. "Having it clean, and looking at it from different angles, because it really does change color. After that, it would be the sound under acceleration. I love the noise it makes going from 5mph to 60mph, taking it to the red line." We also asked John to describe his car in five words - he didn't let us down, coming up with a list which is near perfect in summing up the experience of owning a Maserati: "Stylish, fast, intriguing, great, fun".

John Rexford

His drink: Mountgay rum and orange juice
His meal: Mexican food
His TV show: Mission Impossible
His movies: Either The Thomas Crown Affair or Ocean's Eleven (the remakes)
His book: I love reading Carl Hiaasen books, I'm reading Skinny Dip right now
His music: Pink Floyd
His hobby: Golf
His vacation spot: Michigan beach
His next new adventure: For history and culture, China. For pure pleasure, south Pacific - Tahiti, Fiji, Bora Bora
His living heros: Self-made people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs
His historical heros: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin
His preferred alternate profession: Architect, house designer
His intended future accomplishment: A terrific retirement

His Maserati: Quattroporte Neiman Marcus Special Edition.