Please note: For some reason saving this report as a PDF threw a bunch of blank pages in the middle of the PDF file, but you can easily see from the dates that the report picks up correctly and is complete. I've also saved it out as a series of screen shots in case that's easier to read:
There are key questions you ought to be asking of anyone selling a car. I'll try and answer them here, with apologies if there's more detail than you'd like. Better more detail than less, though:
Short answer: I'm trying to simplify my life.
Longer answer:
I've only owned four cars in over forty years of driving, three Lotuses (simultaneously!) and this car. I've only ever driven cars when I need to get somewhere, and want to make sure that I have a good time on the way. I've only ever been interested in driving beautiful, exciting, rare and quirky cars that I find interesting as an engineer - hence the Lotuses (FWIW, a BD Cosworth Super 7, a massively modified Europa and an M100 Elan). I sold the Super 7 to a friend (every petrol head engineer should have a Super 7 before dying), and as I got closer to thinking of retirement and keeping in mind that Lotus owners never really grow up, I thought that it'd be fun to have a bonkers Italian GT supercar when still young enough to appreciate it. So, I sold the M100 Elan to make room in the garage, and got the GranSport. I still have the Europa (in bits). I love the GranSport, but my occasional need to drive to the office got zeroed out by COVID, and I now work completely from home, so I have almost no reason to drive any more. Struggling to be just a little bit adult, I've concluded that my life would be simpler without the Maserati, and I'll be able to focus my spare time, if and when I ever have it, on putting my Europa back together and working on the restoration of my circa 1870 historic home, which has been a bit of a building site for the last 30 years.
I've looked at the prices on the few other GranSports being sold and, bearing in mind that everyone thinks that their babies are more beautiful than everybody else's baby, but understanding that a car is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay, I think that my one is at least as good as the few others on the market, but I suspect that the other sellers are being somewhat optimistic. I'd prefer not to have to haggle over things, and get on with my life. As noted above, there are a couple of (to me) minor cosmetic issues. I've always been more interested in being inside my cars driving them, than admiring them from the outside. I prefer to leave it to a potential buyer to decide how much to care about such things and leave a buffer in the price, rather than inflating the price with cosmetic fixes that may not be valued by the buyer. On a personal note, this is why when I bought my home I specifically bought one whose kitchen had not been remodeled. I had observed that kitchen remodels done for sale are always badly thought out, badly performed, and would just have had to be ripped out to meet my taste.
Although you will doubtless be doing your own research and look at the CarFax report, I'm the third real owner. The car appears to have been bought from new by a couple in Hawaii, and then sold to someone else on the island (though not apparently anywhere near any salt water!). It then got shipped to the mainland and was eventually sold to a dealer in Redondo Beach (kinda part of Los Angeles). I bought it from there and drove it up to where I live in the San Fransisco Bay Area, where it's been ever since, always garaged. This was the only GranSport on the market when I bought it which had NOT been repoed, flood damaged, or both. It would appear that (at least at the time) Maserati buyers often over-extended themselves, and probably thrashed their cars before having them repossessed. This car had no signs of that.
I can't speak to what happened to the car before I got it beyond what you will see in the CarFax report, which shows regular maintenance. It was in excellent mechanical condition when I got it. I had it professionally inspected before I flew down to buy it, and had no fear about driving it up from LA to SF. For my other three cars I had always done all the maintenance - I'm an engineer, and typically don't trust other people to work on my cars. Still, this was to be my first grown-up car, I'm super busy, and so decided to outsource its maintenance to official Maserati mechanics, rather than do the work myself. The following is a list of the maintenance events of note since I got the car. This should give more detail than you'll get from the CarFax report. I hope that it will also convey the correct impression that this car hasn't experienced any major mechanical issues, and has been well looked-after. Still, it's a Maserati, so I think that it's worth knowing about some of the weird quirks I've bumped into. I have all the receipts, of course.
As soon as I got the car home, I took it in to a local Ferrari/Maserati shop to have them look for and eliminate any obvious problems and time bombs. This resulted in only relatively minor tweaks: the center console's gear selector switch was floppy and needed a bit of work, a weeping valve cover gaskets needed to be replaced, and the A/C's refrigerant needed to be topped up. I had the wheel alignment checked/adjusted. Of course, I got the oil changed too and other normal service items taken care of. Life lesson from personal experience: However trustworthy a seller may seem, please never trust anyone you buy a vehicle from enough not to change the oil immediately.
After a while, the battery died, so I got that replaced. This actually proved to be quite a palaver. The new battery was completely DOA, and the car was completely dead as soon as they took the battery minder off. The battery was immediately replaced by the dealer, of course, but in the process the car got completely powered down with nothing to keep the electronics powered up, as is usual during a battery change. I didn't notice the down side of this until I took the car in to be smogged some time later. It turns out that in every car's electronics these days you'll find a collection of emissions-related "readiness monitors". When there's a problem with these, they don't show up on the dash with a "check engine" light. So, you will generally only discover that there's a problem with one of these when you take your car to get it smogged since, even if you have an OBD2 scanner you won't have any idiot light to tell you that you should use it. Even if your car's emissions are objectively perfect, under current California law you can't pass a smog check unless these readiness monitors say the right thing. These monitors are effectively switches which start in the "not OK" state and switch automatically into the "OK" state when the ECU detects that things are fine for the particular issue it's monitoring. That happens for most of them just as a result of powering up the car. However, one of these is supposed to set into the "OK" state after the car has been driven around, typically in way less than fifty miles. I spent countless hours driving around to try to get this monitor to trigger, as did mechanics from both the local Maserati dealer and independent Ferrari/Maserati mechanics, and nothing made the monitor trigger. This left me with a car that I couldn't get smogged for months. I kept being told that there was a problem with the exterior temperature sensor, which lives in the driver's side wing mirror, but this was clearly no the case and futzing with that had no effect. The Maserati dealer claimed that not even they could override the monitor so I was kinda stuck. Eventually, the people at the Maserati dealer must have looked at some sort of factory maintenance notice because at last they just reflashed the ECU's firmware with the updated version. This totally fixed the problem - permanently.
A while later, I got an actual fault code that appeared as a "check engine" light. This was a non-generic fault code (P1554) and, as is the way with Ferrari/Maserati proprietary fault codes, one couldn't get any details about it from a non-Ferrari-branded scanner, but I was able to track it down to the cam variator sensor. All I had to do was fix the connector for the sensor, whose spring clip to hold it connected had failed.
Another fault light came up after a while, this one claiming to be a problem with the evaporative system. This turned out to simply caused by my not having clicked the fuel filler cap a few times when putting the filler cap back on. This was my first car with (reasonably) modern emissions equipment, and it turns out that my general engineer's inclination not to tighten anything more than seems necessary to get the job done was wrong in the case of fuel filler caps. So, pilot error on my part. I just click the filler cap properly now. Lesson learned: If you ever get an evaporative system fault code, clear the code, and check the filler cap before panicking.
One day, just as I was pulling in to a parking spot the oil pressure warning light came on. I immediately stopped and had the car towed to the Maserati dealer. It turned out that the problem was just the oil pressure sensor failing, not an actual problem with the oil pressure - big sigh of relief. The dealer then complained about an oil leak around the cam chain/timing cover gasket, and persuaded me to let them fix it. When they opened it up, they found that the cam chain tensioner was on its way out, so that whole assembly got a fix (at ridiculous expense!). This was just a few hundred miles ago. On a more general note, this oil pressure sensor failed purely electrically, and wasn't weeping oil at all. In two of my wife's cars I've had oil pressure sensors fail, so this seems to be a common issue. In both of those cases, though, the sensor started to weep oil and the problem was visible on the garage floor well before any idiot light came on, or before the oil pressure or level got too low.
In my opinion there are three cosmetic issues worthy of note:
It's worth noting that in some of the pics on the driver's side low down behind the door it looks like there's a big white mark. This is NOT a cosmetic problem. If you look at the high res image focusing on this area you'll see that this is just a reflection from the "Giugiaro" design badge. It was a sunny day, and the close up manages to avoid the reflection.
All of my cars have shared a theme for their license plates. My Super 7 was "XDOTDOT", my Europa is "ROMEGA2", my M100 Elan was "FOVERM", and I transferred the latter to the GranSport when I sold the Elan. If you're a nerd, or remember your middle/high school physics you should be able to get these. Living in Silicon Valley I've always had a lot of people pulling up beside me at traffic lights telling me how much they love each of these plates, and how appropriate they are for the cars. I like FOVERM enough that I've also got the foverm.com domain (I had xdotdot.com, too, and sold that with the Super 7). I'm rather emotionally attached to FOVERM. More people understand it than the other two, and I always thought that F/m would be a great name and logo for a techie startup. Still, if I'm being realistic I probably won't ever found a startup for which it would be a good match. So, if you like the car, really like the license plate, and want the domain too I could probably be persuaded to part company with them. If you want the car, but don't want the plate (or live outside California), then I'd probably prefer to keep the plate and swap it onto my Europa, since that one's license plate spelling doesn't really capture the superscript for the "2". Incidentally, I do sometimes get people admiring the FOVERM plate who aren't nerds. They think that it's a signal of girl power, which was not my original intent, but I rather like that interpretation too!