Maserati’s travails do not get any easier to read about. The brand was already said to be reeling from Stellantis’ decision to write off more than a billion pounds of badly needed investment money; now, partly as a result of that fallout, it has effectively confirmed that the electric version of the MC20 will never see the light of day.
‘The project was stopped due to the current forecast for insufficient demand in the super sports car market for a battery electric vehicle,’ read a terse official statement, neatly summing up the problem with virtually every battery-powered super sports car ever, but also reflecting an issue experienced company-wide, as evidenced by a sales slump that Maserati has blamed partly on China’s downturn.
Broadly speaking, news that the MC20 Folgore has been filed in the bin is a shame - we drove the GranTurismo version in the UK just last week, and quite liked its 761hp extravagance. Based on the fact that the MC20 is comfortably the best car Maserati makes (by about a thousand country miles), the thought of its supercar with similarly gutsy electric motors was not, on paper, an abhorrent one. Even allowing for the usual hefty provisos.
But customers do not deal in abstracts, and the fact that the battery-electric version has seemingly been just over the horizon since Maserati launched the MC20 - and was absolutely a part of its strategy for winding up combustion cars come 2030 - yet has failed to generate much interest among buyers in half a decade of build-up, suggests that cancelling the new model was not a particularly tough decision.
Nevertheless, quite where Maserati goes from here is anyone’s guess. While a comparatively low-volume supercar would never have been the lynchpin of Stellantis’ plan for reviving the brand, its failure to materialise casts a shadow over other future models like the new Levante and Quattroporte. An ongoing lack of interest in high-end EVs is certainly not limited to Maserati, but its current roadmap appears even more at odds with customer demand than its direct rivals.
The first sign that it will join them in frantically back pedalling from its current position is news that it will update the existing MC20 lineup - which ought to excite everyone not interested in battery power, especially if it takes a leaf from the GT2’s book, a swifter, track-biased variant that has enjoyed almost universal acclaim, not least from us. It would also guarantee the presence of the Nettuno V6 under a Maserati badge for the foreseeable future. With any luck, this light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vibe will also be felt by Stellantis in short order.
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