Peter Charters is a gracious man, a fact I learned recently when, over an otherwise convivial dinner, I asked him, ‘how do you convince your customers that a 2-litre, four-cylinder SUV is somehow worthy of calling itself a Maserati?’
He is the General Manager of Maserati in Northern Europe and it is his job to adopt a steely smile in the face of such an inconvenient line of questioning and defend the apparently indefensible. His response was a passive aggressive masterclass of concision and deflection. ‘Have you driven the car yet? No? Let’s talk again when you have.’
The following afternoon, by which time I had driven three different versions of the Maserati Grecale, he was nowhere to be found. But had he been, it would have been a somewhat different kind of conversation to that I had initially envisaged. He might even have enjoyed it.
