Maserati GranTurismo Folgore - long-term review

My three months swanning about in a 750bhp Maserati GranTurismo are up, and as I hand back the key… I’m full of conflict. There are so many positives to this car (I’ll get into those in a bit) so I’m genuinely sad to see it go. Question is could I, hand on heart, recommend anyone to buy one of these new? Um, no, but let’s start with the good stuff.

It handles beautifully, with real delicacy given its near 2.3-tonne weight and doesn’t fall apart on track either as we discovered in the last report. There’s an understated elegance to the styling, too - something that’s long been Maserati’s USP – which makes it a brilliant everyday car. Not so shouty and flashy to cause embarrassment on the school drop off, but glamorous enough to turn heads wherever you glide up in it. The reception among friends, family and random bystanders on how it looks inside and out was unanimously positive. Until you let slip it’s electric and confusion reigns.

“Why?” They ask. “Well, because it’s got 750 instantly-accessible bhp and absolutely rips, there’s torque vectoring across the rear axle and it’s cheaper to run (if you charge at home in the middle of the night),” I reply. “But it doesn’t make any noise and probably runs out of battery every five minutes, doesn’t it?”

Both fair and crucial points – let’s take them in turn. The fact that it zaps along silently is both a joy when you’re on a mundane errand or killing miles on the motorway, but also its undoing. It has supercar acceleration, but lacks supercar soul. Besides squeezing the throttle, feeding the (admittedly rather lovely) steering and flicking between the regen levels with the paddles behind the wheel, there’s a distinct lack of mechanical interaction. Its performance feels like a book you read once, then put to the back of the shelf because there’s no need for it.

I know this because Maserati loaned me the twin-turbo V6 Trofeo model (the red one above) as a courtesy car for a few days while I had the tyres swapped from winters to summers, and it instantly had more about it. Paddling up and down the gearbox, feeding in the throttle, waiting for the turbo surge, listening to the gravelly exhaust (recently updated on all UK cars as customers complained about a lack of decibels) it all enhances the experience and brings the price tag into the realms of reality. And this is far from a great-sounding or ballistically fast engine, it just brings vitality and texture to the process of rolling down the road.  

And then there’s the dealbreaker – the fact that we couldn’t achieve more than 2.2mpkWh – roughly equivalent to a 180-mile range. Naturally, that will improve a bit as we move towards warmer weather, but in reality we’re talking under 150-miles before you’re tweaking to find a charger. On a car that’s set up for road trips and so capable of devouring big miles, it feels criminal that it’s limited to either short hops, or far-too-regular public charger stops. There’s nothing wrong with the way this car operates, but the battery tech simply can’t keep up.  

And that’s not all. Maserati’s problem for some time now has been getting themselves on people’s consideration lists. Levantes, Grecales, Quattroportes – they all square up against superior (mostly German) opposition. To buy a GranTurismo you first have to walk past a Porsche. Then, to buy the electric version, you have to ignore the practical and emotional advantages of the V6. But to pay for a new one of those, you have to overlook the fact that you can buy a last-gen GranTurismo, a good low-mileage one, with the infinitively more sonorous 4.7-litre V8 from about £30k.

You can see why, according to howmanyleft.co.uk, only 28 Folgores (including the GranCabrio version) were registered in the UK in the last couple of years. This is a deeply impressive car in so many ways, but one that appears to have been launched at precisely the wrong time.

Good stuff: this isn’t acceleration, it’s teleportation, and the styling gets better the more time you spend with it

Bad stuff: the buttons to select drive and reverse feel unresponsive and a bit cheap, and yet it’s massively expensive