I’m always looking for ways to entertain myself and be distracted from the tedium of travelling. I’ve found that the best way to do this is to answer the call from The Sunday Times asking me to drive the new Maserati Quattroporte for the weekend.

Now discerning readers may be saying to themselves, “Hang on a second, hasn’t Jimmy Carr already reviewed the Maserati Quattroporte?”, and if they are, they’re right. I have indeed reviewed a version of this car, but this one is different, and better; we’ll get to the how and why a bit later.

First, though, here’s what I said about the Maserati last time: “When looking for the perfect woman, men often say they would ideally have a whore in the bedroom and a chef in the kitchen. When it comes to cars, we want one that’s comfortable for the motorway, and exciting for tooling around country lanes. The Maserati Quattroporte is, quite frankly, a gourmet slut – Nigella Lawson with the moral compass of Abi Titmuss”.

All the above still stands. The car still looks great, handles beautifully . . . and for a while I even felt like Vincent Chase, the lead character in Entourage. Entourage, for those who don’t know, is a very cool American TV series concerned with the heady excesses of Hollywood’s celebrity lifestyle. It’s like a boys’ version of Sex and the City – just imagine the sex is an incredible three-way session with two supermodels, while the city is LA. The reason I felt like Chase is that the Quattroporte is the car at the centre of Chase’s own entourage, driven by his manager.

Normally car advertising doesn’t do much for me. If you’ve seen one 30-second ad with a car going at high speed round tight corners you’ve seen them all. But product placement in a movie or a TV show such as Entourage is a different story. The psychological schtick gets me every time. If I see James Bond in an Aston I think, “I want one of those”, because if I had one of those Aston Martins, I would be that much more like James Bond. So if I see Vincent Chase and his crew rolling in a Maserati I think, “Maybe if I had one of those I’d be a super-cool leading man”.

A boy can dream, after all, and that was the very dream I was having as I drove the Maserati to Middlesbrough and Sunderland for the weekend. When I keyed the Middlesbrough destination into the sat-nav, I was amazed it didn’t object or give me directions to Bath instead, hoping I just wouldn’t notice.

On my trip I discovered that Middlesbrough has been piloting a new scheme to cut antisocial behaviour. Some of the city’s CCTV cameras are hooked up to loudspeakers, so when someone is spotted doing something they shouldn’t (for instance trying to climb the lamppost on which the camera is mounted), they get a telling off from said loudspeaker.

When you first hear about this scheme, it sounds like a reasonable idea. But the reality is quite different, because what has developed from it is a competition among the town’s yoof to get the speaker to . . . well, speak. And there are bonus points for creativity. In terms of crime prevention ideas this scheme is right up there with attaching disco lights to grannies, which go off if they get mugged.

With this in mind I didn’t think the Maserati would stand much of a chance in Middlesbrough. The indicators flash if you so much as brush against it, and I feared this might be incentive enough. Middlesbrough is the kind of rough and ready place where a very expensive Italian car stands out almost as much as I do.

I was, I’m ashamed to admit, worried about leaving the car parked on the street overnight. If it had been a Ferrari I’m sure it would have been keyed (budget engraving, as I like to think of it). Fortunately the Maserati engenders only warm and fuzzy feelings from other motorists and the public at large. People didn’t stop and stare at it, but tended to do a double-take, and I can understand why it demands a second look: at first glance it appears to be just another four-door saloon. It’s only with the second glance that you pick up on what’s a bit special about it.

I thought for sure that the Maserati would coax a negative reaction from my next destination, Sunderland. This is the town where, as one local female in my audience remarked, “Men are hard and woman are easy”.

At the services outside the city I returned to the car park to find the Maserati blocked in by a group of about 20 bikers. Now if I’d been driving a Bentley or a Ferrari I imagine they might have taken their own sweet time getting out of the way. They might have even stayed put and made the “ponce” in the flash motor wait a bit. But with the Maserati they couldn’t have been more courteous. Clearly it’s a car that brings out the best in people.

But why? I guess because it’s an understated beauty, beautiful in the same way that Tom Cruise’s wife Katie Holmes is beautiful – you know, girl-next-door beauty. You do a double-take when you look at her, and think you might be the only one to notice that she is actually stunning. The Quattroporte has that kind of beauty.

The only little problem I had with it was the CD changer, which is located under the steering wheel. I mention this only because you’d never think of looking there for it – I had to phone the nice lady at Maserati to ask. Its location determines that you have to crouch down face to face with the dashboard in order to load a CD; this will lead to accidents, though fortunately the airbag will deploy directly onto your face, so you’ll be able to have an open casket at the funeral.

That small inconvenience aside, it is basically a perfect car. When you drive it you feel better looking and thinner. You feel you have a full head of hair. You don’t worry that people will be thinking you’ve bought it to get you through a midlife crisis or to compensate for small genitals.

All of this was also true of the previous Quattroporte I drove. But this one is better because it has a gearbox that works. Previously I had driven the Executive GT DuoSelect, featuring a manual six-speed gearbox with gearchange paddles at the steering wheel. Although this looked quite flash it was really horrible to use, each change throwing me violently back and forth, making me look like a learner driver bunny-hopping down the road. The car was also available with an automatic transmission option, but this was even worse.

I wasn’t the only one to notice the bad gearbox: the commonly held view seems to be that this was a great car ruined by its transmission. To their great credit, Maserati listened and installed a new automatic gearbox. The Automatic Executive GT now has the smooth six-speed automatic that a car of this type deserves (you can switch it to manual if you like, although wafting in auto mode is habit-forming). At a stroke the Quattroporte is changed from flawed genius to the real thing.

At this point I should probably turn to the environment, as we must these days. This is where the Maserati begins to make sense, despite the fact that it only manages around 15mpg. And here’s why: the most environmentally friendly thing you can do is buy a car you really love and keep it for the next 40 years. This is because the damage done by motoring is done only partly by driving. Incessantly building cars simply because we want to keep replacing them with very similar models – probably different only by virtue of iPod compatibility – is what most contributes to the “inevitable destruction of our planet”.

But buy this Maserati and it will be all the motor you’ll ever need. So you can feel like a Hollywood leading man and save the planet at the same time. And you can’t be much cooler than that, not even in Middlesbrough.

Vital statistics

Model Maserati Quattroporte Automatic Executive GT

Engine 4244cc, eight cylinders

Power 396bhp @ 7000rpm

Torque 339 lb ft @ 4250rpm

Transmission Six-speed automatic

Fuel/CO2 19.2mpg (combined) / 345g/km

Acceleration 0-62mph: 5.6sec

Top speed 167mph Price £77,090

Rating 5/5

Verdict A supermodel with brains