I’ve had a Maserati this Maserati Ghibli Spyder at my shop for several weeks now and I’ve been fixing all the minor issues I found before having the car shipped out to its new owner.

One of the issues it had was a non working headlight motor. I don’t normally work on Maseratis, so everything was a learning experience. The first thing I learned was the pop up head lights were operated with one central motor and gearbox that turned a rod that actuated both headlight doors. The motor was the same three wire electric window motors I found some Ferraris.

After removing the motor from behind the front grille, I found one of the reasons why things weren’t working. The internals of the motor were badly burned from overheating. Luckily, I had an old motor from a Ferrari window mechanism that I could install in place of the burned out unit, but the headlights still wouldn’t move. I studied the wiring diagram I bought from the Maserati Parts supplier, and tried to figure out what was wrong. I learned there were two types of wiring harnesses, a 4.7 and a 4.9 harness. From my investigation, this 4.9 liter Ghibli SS had a 4.7 harness that was modified to work in a 4.9 car!

After a few days of head scratching, I figured out there had to be a missing set of relays hidden in this car. I traced the wiring to behind the center console and found what I was looking for.

There were the missing relays, with a blown fuse hidden in the center console! After replacing the 30 amp fuse, everything started working again! What must have happened, was the old headlight motor started to struggle to move the headlight doors, but the limiting switches in the mechanism kept feeding power to the motor, overheating it. Even with the motor stopped, current continued to feed the motor until the everything burned out, and the fuse eventually blew. I was really happy when I finally figured it all out.

Here’s the video to my fix!