If you are poor, or fairly poor, life is full of exciting choices. Eating out, for instance. You’ve got KFC, Wimpy, McDonald’s, Burger King, the local Indian, the Chinese takeaway and, for those special occasions, the Harvester. Things, on the other hand, are pretty bleak for those who have a substantial disposable income. Because where are you going to eat? I know of several hundred towns in Britain that have no decent restaurants at all.

It’s the same story with houses. Those struggling at the bottom end of the property ladder can choose from a seemingly endless selection of starter homes. Whereas a completely tumbledown house near where I live went on the market recently for £500,000. And the last time I looked it was up past the £2m mark.

I can stretch this argument to cover clothes, holidays, haircuts, everything. And I can especially stretch it to cover cars.

If you want to spend £15,000 on a new set of wheels, it’s like you’re looking at the marketplace through a kaleidoscope of colour and choice. But for those looking to spend between £60,000 and £120,000, things are considerably more tricky.

“Pah”, you might think, if you’ve just bought a second-hand Vauxhall Astra. You could buy a Ferrari for £120,000. And indeed you can. It’d be an F430 as well, which comes with just about the best chassis of any car made today and an engine that doesn’t roar or purr. It howls.

Unfortunately, none of this matters because you won’t actually be going anywhere in your Ferrari. It’s too much like hard work, and after a while you will become bored with chiselling a dried-up fountain of phlegm from its flanks.

So, a Porsche 911 then? Of course, this has much of the Ferrari’s appeal and performance but none of the Latin histrionics. It really is a car you can use every day. But it earned a reputation in about 1986 as a car for onanists, and even today some of that image still lingers.

To begin with, you might be able to convince yourself that other drivers are trying to dry their hands, for some reason, as they go by. But after a while you have to face up to the fact that they’re not. They’re calling you what Jonathan Ross referred to when interviewing David Cameron recently.

Yes, sure, you could buy a cheaper Porsche. A Coxster perhaps. But then you would be seen as someone who couldn’t quite afford a 911. Or maybe you could buy a Cayenne. But then you would be seen as someone who has no taste or style.

This brings us straight to the door of Aston Martin, whose current and extraordinary success is, I’m sure, largely because of Porsche’s image failings and the phlegm magnet that is a Ferrari.

If you buy an Aston Martin, you will not be spat at, you will not be given the bird, and you will have a very pretty car. Something you will have many hours to contemplate because, as a general rule, Aston Martins have a habit of not starting if you leave them alone for more than a couple of minutes.

I’ve lost count now of the number of people I know who bought a DB9 and then, having spent a few months watching it being ferried back and forth from the dealership, sold it again and rang to ask what they should buy instead.

It’s a genuine problem. All Mercs, BMWs and Jaguars are seen as too downmarket, too common, too everyman. And all supercars are seen as being too daft, too difficult and too daunting.

Sure, there are people out there who would offer to exchange some of your money for something they designed in a wet dream and built on an industrial estate. But really, I cannot recommend that you take them up because the cars they make will spend all their time either breaking down or crashing.

Bentley? Well yes, sort of, but each time I drive a Continental GT or a Flying Stirrup I can never quite get it out of my head that I'm in a Volkswagen Phaeton. It’s like having a Bang & Olufsen stereo. You know that behind the Danish exterior beats a Philips heart. And that sort of spoils the moment.

The Range Rover Sport provided a brief respite, a place of refuge for car enthusiasts who wanted somewhere unusual to run and hide. But now we’ve noticed that a) it’s even uglier than a Porsche Cayenne and b) that every third person in the Prestbury, Wilmslow and Alderley Edge triangle has one.

In desperation, some of the country’s super-rich are turning to the Americans for help, wondering out loud how life would be with a Corvette Z06 or a Roush Mustang. Or even a gigantic pick-up truck of some kind. Horrid, obviously, but what else is there to do? Buy a Bristol? Yes. Right. And then spend all day inside it, licking the windows.

I was considering the problem of what the rich might buy the other day while reading a copy of The Week. And there, on page 23, was an advert that seemed to provide the answer. It was a simple, profile shot of a Maserati Quattroporte under a line that said “What price exclusivity?”.

Hmmm. Now, in the past there was a very good reason why Maseratis were exclusive. Because they fell apart long before they ever reached the door of the factory. They were handmade, and handmade is just another way of saying the door will fall off. But the Quattroporte (it means four-door, by the way) was designed by Ferrari and is mass produced by Alfa Romeo. That’s good.

Bonio has one, too, and while I’d rather saw my knees off with a rusty Stanley knife than meet the man, I will admit he’s cool. So that’s good too.

It is also ferociously good looking. Not from every angle, you understand. From some quarters it’s too like a Vauxhall Cresta, and from the front it’s too narrow. But from the side, especially on its new alloys, it’s an absolute gem.

So I telephoned Maserati and asked if I could borrow one of the new £80,000 Sport GT models that comes with fat 30-section low-profile tyres that I thought would ruin the ride. They did. But they looked good, so I didn’t mind.

Other irritations? Well on a hot day, with five of us on board, the air-conditioning couldn’t maintain a temperature without the fan constantly switching itself off. And then almost immediately on to full blast. And the sat nav wasn’t very intuitive. And there were so many buttons it felt like I was at the helm of a nuclear power station.

But all the while, I couldn’t help thinking: “Yes, but this is it. This is the holy grail. It’s the car the discerning car enthusiast can buy.” And it is, except for one thing. The bloody gearbox.

You probably think I’m becoming a bit of a bore about these flappy paddle boxes but you really need to drive a Quattroporte to see the problem. Changes take for ever in auto mode, they’re jerky in manual and if you try to time a shift at the red line, chances are you’ll pull the lever at the precise moment it was going up anyway, so you’ll go from second to fourth.

I haven’t finished yet. If you try to pull away smartly from a junction, the car feels like it’s going to fall in half, so violent is the jolt.

So you’re sitting there in your U2mobile, swathed in leather as rich as you are, and you’re spluttering down the road like you’re trapped in the mind of a politician who’s been caught lying on Question Time.

In a list of the five most rubbish things in the world, I’d have America’s foreign policy at five. Aids at four. Iran’s nuclear programme at three. Gordon Brown at two and Maserati’s gearbox at number one. It is that bad.

What makes this so hard to bear is that I liked so much the rest of the car. I loved the silken clobber of its 4.2 litre V8 engine, the four-door practicality, some of the detailing and the ungoverned top speed of 167mph. I liked the brakes, too, and the handling. It is, truly, a lovely car to drive quickly.

And, of course, it looks absolutely wonderful in the underground car park at your office.

If you don’t like the idea of the paddle shift you can quietly phone your local Maserati dealer and tell it that you know an automatic version is in the pipeline. That’s not an easy engineering job because it must go at the front, as opposed to the manual, which is at the back, but I know they’re working on it. And in so doing, they may well end up with the only car the rich can realistically drive.

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