Maserati Karif from 1988 it’s not the prettiest car ever sold, and its performance after more than 35 years is nothing to write home about. Despite this, only 221 units were produced Is quite scarce. Just ignore the whole where thing Maserati he reportedly planned to build 250 of them and couldn’t find enough buyers. This is a scarce and unique car that has been built to the highest standards for the most demanding luxury sports enthusiasts. After all, if the sales brochure says it, it must be true, right?
As our friend Car Brochure Addict recently shared on Twitter, the official 1988 Karif sales brochure states: “This is a car with a sturdy personality and an innate vocation to make driving a pleasure, an expression of sensuality and sturdy emotions guaranteed. for anyone who knows how to experience them.” The text later reads: “From the moment of its inception, there was no doubt that the Maserati KARIF would become a collector’s item: a two-seater with an aggressively styled front end and an extremely generous engine under the hood.”
Sure, it only produced 250 horsepower and 284 pound-feet of torque, but remember this was the tardy 1980s. A world where you could buy a 300-horsepower Toyota Camry didn’t exist yet, so we won’t criticize Maserati too much for pushing the Karif. We will focus on how scary and strange things are in another paragraph:
Maserati KARIF: a unique road “animal”, an electrifying driving experience, an invitation to feel like a racing driver again or for the first time; the subtle pleasure of feeling the pulse of so many beating horses and knowing you can control them. Although the car looks up-to-date overall, it exudes the classic style that has cast such a powerful spell on us, while still keeping up with the “state of the art” that up-to-date technology has accustomed us to.
Those were different times, but come on. Someone must have read this and at least thought, “You know, maybe we should remove the part about ‘feeling throbbing’ and being beaten by horses,” right? At least one person? NO? Nobody? They literally read “the subtle pleasure of feeling the throb of so many beating horses and knowing you can control it” and thought to themselves, “It’s a perfectly normal thing to publish our company name,” all the way back to when it was actually published. In the official UK sales brochure.
To be fair, especially since the rest of the copy is a bit unclear, it’s quite possible that it was just poorly translated into English. Perhaps words like “throbbing” and “pounding” don’t have such sexual connotations in the original Italian. On the other hand, we’re talking about a Maserati from the 1980s here. If you told us that this piece was written while a marketing executive was taking a miniature break from snorting fatty Cokes and sexually harassing his teenage secretaries, we’d probably believe you. After all, those were different times.
