Turning Dreams into Reality
Vehicle Integration a key step in developing new cars

In the previous issue of Maserati Monthly, we brought you an interview with the people responsible for the design of both the Quattroporte and the GranTurismo – the team at Pininfarina who designed both the exteriors and interiors of the two ground-breaking cars. To follow on, we thought it would be interesting to talk to the man who is responsible for turning Pininfarina’s well wrought dreams into reality, and for doing something even beyond that: ensuring the inherent "Maseratiness" of each new Trident product. Benedetto Orvietani is a manager within the Design and Engineering department at Maserati – he is in charge of the Vehicle Integration teams at Maserati SpA - the factory in Italy.

We began by asking him to explain what is meant by Vehicle Integration. “It is the trade-off between all the performances of the car – the standard performances that everyone knows, such as 0-60, top speed, fuel consumption – and performances such as the cooling system, chassis sizes, pressures and so on,” he explained. “All the trade-offs between the different areas are managed by Vehicle Integration. The design of the exterior and interior of the car is outside my area; the designers are given a brief which sets out some specifications they need to follow – for example the size of the intake for the cooling system, the surface of the frontal area for aerodynamics. We give inputs to the designers, which have to be incorporated into their design. Then, we begin to create the plan of all the tests to verify that the product reaches the targets we have set. So we have planning meetings where we decide whether verification can be done by calculations, on a CAD system, by bench testing or on the road. After all the tests have been done, and all the performances verified, the vehicle can be released.”

In a nutshell, that sums up what Vehicle Integration is all about – taking the design of a car, checking that it performs as required, and then ensuring it makes it through to the production line. This is part of every good car's development, but Benedetto and his colleagues in Vehicle Integration are doing something else as well: they are making sure that each Maserati feels like a Maserati, that it benefits from and displays  the considerable dynamic and design "DNA" evolved through over 90 years of  grand touring, sports and racing car development by the Modenese manufacturer.  It may sound simple; but it’s a complex and fascinating part of the development process, one which doesn’t attract much attention apart from the mules and heavily camouflaged cars which show up in all the ‘spy shots’ of cars under development. Alot of work goes in before that stage is reached. “The whole process begins with Product Planning, who investigate the market, look at what other manufacturers are selling and what they are believed to be developing, and they try to predict where the market will be in three years’ time,” explained Benedetto. “After that comes the styling phase, where the major ‘hard points’ are determined, which is where Pininfarina are involved. We then have an internal design phase – but we are designing all the components rather than the bodywork, and we’re ensuring that we hit all our targets for safety engineering, torsional stiffness and so on.”

“Once all that is done, we start to build prototype cars, and we can begin to verify all the performances – we can compare what we see on the road with what we calculated, or what the computer simulations predicted,” he went on. “What comes next is called ‘advanced series’ – the factory uses this phase to prepare the production line to produce the car, and to fine-tune the processes used in assembly. When production begins, there will be a month or two of ‘pre-series’, where changes are still being made to some small details and to the build processes. After that, production begins for real, with ‘Job One’.”

As Benedetto explained all the steps involved, and what each step entailed, it became clear that developing a new Maserati is not the work of a moment – or even a year. He told us that the length of the whole process depends on how much new content there is in the car. For the Quattroporte, which was completely new, it took about five years from devising the concept to ‘Job One’. “It’s a lengthy process because you have to develop, test and verify literally everything – the chassis, the suspension, the engine. For a car such as the GranTurismo, the process can be much shorter; two or three years – although for the GranTurismo we did it in eighteen months, which is a record for us. We’re very proud to have achieved that – but we’d like a bit more time for the next one!”

With many of the performance targets having been set right from the concept phase, we wondered how much actually got changed during the Vehicle Integration work. “We’re pretty good at getting the balances close in the concept requirements, so we don’t have to make big changes later – but there are always some changes,” Benedetto told us. “It could be fairly small things, such as looking at how much power is being used by the compressor for the climate control system, or it could be looking at having to compromise on aerodynamics to give a greater intake area for the cooling system. We also have to work on engine mappings, because obviously they can’t be decided at the concept stage. There, the balance is between comfort and performance – and the Sport button allows the driver to alter the balance, too. Product Planning sets the major lines to follow, and part of my job is to establish exactly where the trade-off should be. We create various different maps, and we have a ‘jury’ to evaluate which mapping offers the best compromise.”

One of the areas which most interested us is the use of ‘mules’, and how the department goes about testing new cars and new ideas on the road without the magazines getting clear photos of what they are doing. “The contents of each prototype are chosen very carefully; for example, initial engine development was carried out using a Quattroporte,” said Benedetto. “We needed the correct wheelbase, so we cut the Quattroporte in half, and shortened it by 125mm. But to disguise it, we designed a fake door for the rear, so it still looked like a normal QP. That let us test the engine and transmission, with a weight balance very close to what we wanted – but from the outside, it just looked like a Quattroporte. Those are the mules, then comes the prototypes with the first bodies in the actual style of the car. We have to pay a lot of attention to that, because it’s very important not to reveal the final style. It can be funny – we do a lot of testing at the Nürburgring in Germany, and at the Nardo high-speed track in Italy. Well, other manufacturers use those tracks, too – sometimes you can find yourself sharing a restaurant, and chat with your competitors. Or we go to the track, and find that we’re just one amongst several. But what’s more important than ensuring our competitors don’t see the car is making sure our customers don’t see it!”

Even a project like the GranTurismo S, where the entire chassis and interior were already well developed, presents challenges to the people in Vehicle Integration. “That was not easy at all - even though the GranTurismo product was already well developed, the modifications that had to be done to turn it into the GT S were pretty invasive,” said Benedetto. “We know how to build cars with a transaxle at the rear, because the Quattroporte was originally developed with that. But we had to check all the new specifications of the engine, and the specifications of the MC-Shift. The MC-Shift is faster, which means the mechanical stresses are higher. To cope with that, we had to make a lot of modifications, so we have to modify the whole product to the new contents.”

Given his role, Benedetto obviously has ‘inside information’ about the cars which are under development. Plainly he wasn’t about to talk openly about what we can expect to see in the future, so we took a lateral approach, asking him how difficult it is to maintain the necessary torsional stiffness when a coupe is turned into a convertible. “It’s always difficult, because the car is always designed principally to be a coupe; however, in our past we have a lot of experience of this, because Maserati always had an open-topped model,” he explained. ” So one of our checks was to see what happens when you take the roof off. It’s very difficult, when you open a car up, to give it the same stiffness – that’s important, because it has a big effect on handling. But I am not saying that we will bring out a convertible; we have a lot of ideas, some of them will be in production, some of them will not. Expect something coming from Maserati in the future - it will be better and better. We will have to wait and see what the future will bring.”

We spoke to Benedetto in the Maserati showroom, at the front of the factory on Viale Ciro Menotti in Modena. There were production cars on show around us, so we asked which car is his favorite. So, of course, he picked the one which wasn’t there! “I have been fortunate enough to drive the MC12, and in my opinion it is one of the most enjoyable cars I’ve ever driven,” he told us enthusiastically. “It’s incredibly easy; I always felt secure, the car was very predictable, impressive on acceleration, braking, cornering. But it’s not always like that – last week, I think I spent 80% of my time in meetings! Seriously, if it was my own money, I would choose the GranTurismo; I think the best compromise was achieved for this car. We are trying to repeat it for the new Quattroporte - we are still evolving, we are getting closer and closer to what we have to do.”

It was fascinating to hear just how much effort is involved in translating a Pininfarina design and Maserati heritage into the reality of a car which can be put together, reliably and repeatably, by the technicians at the factory, meeting the expectations of our harshest critics and greatest supporters: Maserati owners. It left us looking forward to the future models that are (we assume) already going through the same process; since then, each time we have driven a Maserati, our meeting with Benedetto has made us appreciate all of the time and hard work his department has spent in ensuring each car has all the performance that Maserati is renowned for, combined with excellent safety features and enviable reliability. Our thanks go to Benedetto Orvietani, for taking the time to explain it all to us.