Maserati Bora
Why 3.4: Maserati's first mid-engine road car and first steel unibody, styled by Giugiaro, with Citroën-sourced hydraulics running the brakes, pop-up headlights, driver's seat and an adjustable pedal box. It traded for used-Camry money through most of the 2000s, and only 524 were built — the ownership pattern is only now catching up to the rarity.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €26k (1974) → €133k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
The long version
Citroën owned Maserati when this was developed, and it shows in ways no other Italian exotic of the era can match: the brakes, the pop-up headlights, the driver's seat position and a pedal assembly that slides backward and forward are all run off the same hydraulic system Citroën used in the SM and the DS, an elegant idea in period that today makes Bora ownership as much about finding a hydraulics specialist as a Maserati one. Underneath the Citroën plumbing is a genuine mid-engine first for the brand — Maserati's first unit-body chassis, replacing the tube frames of the front-engine Ghibli and Quattroporte — styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign into one of the cleaner wedges of the era. Only 524 were built across the run, 289 with the 4.7-liter V8 and 235 with the stroked 4.9 fitted mainly to US-bound cars from 1973 onward. That rarity did nothing for values for three decades; clean examples traded for used-family-car money well into the 2000s, overshadowed by Ferrari's contemporary mid-engine V12 and by Maserati's own better-known Ghibli. Recent sales have finally caught up — good 4.9s now clear well over $100,000 — but the split in the current market, rough examples still finding buyers under $10,000 against clean ones pushing six figures, shows how much of the fleet is still driven by people who bought in before anyone else noticed.