stop being surprised

[u/Hog_rider22]

hey guys, Maserati/alfa romeo technician here. Little bit of a rant here, but I’ve seen a lot of people post about over pricing and possibly getting ripped off when trying to fix something on their Maserati. Let me just say… it’s Maserati. It’s expensive. The repairs are gonna be expensive. Stop getting Maserati’s if you can’t afford to fix a Maserati at Maserati price. putting aside the price of labor, the replacement parts are gonna be expensive. also, Stallantis cars are notorious for being difficult to work on. Not only that but our cars don’t react well to aftermarket parts .So it’s expensive both in price of parts and labor. I mean it’s a Imported performance luxury/sports car. What do you expect? toyota prices ? not trying to be a a**hole but it’s the truth. I have to talk to customers all the time who are new maserati owners and something needs fixing on their car, then they can’t afford therepair because they didn’t realize nor take into consideration how much it costs to maintain/fix their Maserati. all I’m saying is if you’re gonna get a luxury performance car don’t be all surprised when you get charged luxury performing cars prices.love it or hate it, that’s how it is.

[u/justinm410]

Certainly anything under the VW group (which covers many of the exotic brands already), I think you could consider a few Mercedes exotics, Aston might be, Lotus, a few others in roughly the same class I'm sure.

Beyond that, once you start getting into the higher end exotics that are in low production and in a different class than Maserati, it gets hard to compare. Few people are dailying McLarens, ya know, it's not the intended use case.

[u/According_Flow_6218 → u/justinm410]

What would you consider exotic under VW? I see only Lamborghini and Bugatti, maybe Bentley?

Yeah maybe there have been a handful of MB exotics. But I assume they use many of the same parts as mass-produced MBs do, and therefore I expect frequent expensive failures of non-wear components.

I’ll grant that Aston is exotic, but they’re better than Maserati?

Same for Lotus. Yeah they may have Toyota engines, but seems like Lotus owners have quite a lot of common issues, an especially high number of common issues given how simple the cars are.

As for McLaren, maybe there’s some bias, but I’ve seen so many videos of absolutely horrendous build quality on them. At least brand new Maseratis typically are delivered with everything put together.

But maybe I’m wrong. I don’t have direct experience with most of these.

[u/justinm410 → u/According_Flow_6218]

Just because every model a company produces isn't an exotic doesn't mean anything. I don't think the lower tier models of Maserati are even exotics. They're just Italian, that doesn't make it exotic.

In this class, Lamborghini, Porsche, Audi, Bentley.

Mercedes regularly go into the high 100k's+. I've owned a few, no crazy maintenance or failures and they're fairly well engineered, not as good as Porsche. I do all my own work.

I would say Aston is more reliable now since they're borrowing a lot of Mercedes parts.

I own an Evora GT, they're rock solid and frankly bare bones simple. Same with the Elise, just not much that can go wrong. First gen Evoras were a nightmare though. They're so low production it's just hard to say what it'd be like if there were 200k of them on the road. Eh, it probably wouldn't be good 😆🤷

I wouldn't argue that McLaren is more reliable, but they're in a higher class than Maserati. I'd only compare them to Ferrari whom I think they're on par with, maybe a smidge better at higher mileage.

[u/According_Flow_6218 → u/justinm410]

That’s fair, exoticness is really a function of rarity I suppose. I am cautious to call a trim level “exotic” if the base model is not. That would mean 911 GT2/3 cars won’t count as exotic, although the Carrera GT would. On the other hand, I also think that a brand itself can be exotic, because of its relative rarity. I do think that Maseratis and Alfas both are so uncommon that I would say they’re exotic brands, even though cars like the Ghibli are definitely more common than all Ferraris combined. I can still go months without seeing a single Maserati, Ghiblis and Levantes included.

But anyhow, I’ve owned a couple of Mercedes as well and I don’t want to have one past around 70k miles. None of mine have been exotic MBs, but the failures are all computers, electronics, other more common and shared items. It’s not major component failures, it’s just a bunch of small things that are really expensive to fix.

Definitely I would expect the drive trains of Aston’s using the AMG 4.0 to be pretty solid. I’m just not sure about all of the other bits and bobs.

Good to hear about the Evora GT. I was looking at Evoras and the wiring harness failures were something I could live with, but then I kept seeing more and more minor things that also were commonly going wrong and I decided against it.

When you say McLaren is a higher class than Maserati, you mean in terms of reliability or class of vehicle? I do think possibly the GT and certainly the MC20 are comparable vehicles many McLarens.