Junkyard Find: 1984 Maserati Biturbo
Your typical Maserati Biturbo isn’t worth much these days, which means that the cost/benefit analysis of one sitting under a tarp in the driveway often results in a trip to the nearest wrecking yard. In this series so far, we’ve seen this super-rare ’86 Biturbo Spyder, this not-so-rare ’84 Biturbo, and today’s first-year ’81 ’84 Biturbo. All three of these cars were photographed in California, one in Los Angeles and the other two in Oakland, and it’s a safe bet than none of them had driven on the street in the decade prior to arriving in the wrecking yard.
Not even 75,000 miles on the clock.
The hood-release mechanism was broken and I didn’t feel like futzing with it in order to see if some local tuner kid had grabbed the turbochargers.
There are valuable Maseratis, and then there are cars like this one and the Chrysler TC By Maserati.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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There is at least one good use for these cars: Brock Yates, in a Car and Driver column in one of its "Ten Best" issues, declared this to be the perfect car to lose in a divorce settlement. Think about it: Leaving your ex with a Yugo or Hyundai Excel means there's a permanent record that you owned one in your lifetime. The Maserati BiTurbo has a classy enough nameplate, yet is unreliable enough to be a constant headache to anyone who would own one.
This may be a crappy car in every other respect but that looks like one sweet interior, at least in its day. I'd be tempted to take the seats and the arm rest/console lid…not to mention the grill as wall art.