As we headed deep into the Jura Mountains through Switzerland into the heart of France, I wondered what Adolfo Orsi would have made of the Maserati Levante. The Maserati brothers—Alfieri, Bindo, Carlo, Ettore and Ernesto—of course founded the automaker that bears their name. But it was self-made industrialist and machine tool magnate Orsi, after buying the company from the brothers in 1937 and moving it from Bologna to Modena, who in 1957 launched its first volume-produced gran turismo, the 3500 GT. Orsi loved racing cars. He loved big, fast, elegant road cars. Could he imagine an SUV wearing the iconic trident badge?
Orsi would have understood the economics of the Levante. The SUV-with-a-premium-badge is a business strategy that’s proven hugely successful for Porsche, which uses profits from the Cayenne and Macan SUVs to fund ongoing development of its sports cars. Premium brands from Bentley to Jaguar to Lamborghini to Rolls-Royce are now following the Porsche model and jumping on the SUV bandwagon; there are even rumors Ferrari is working on an SUV based on next-generation GTC4Lusso hardware.
The 3500 GT didn’t stop Maserati from skidding into financial crisis in 1958 after a $3 million deal to supply machine tools to Argentina fell apart with the ousting of dictator Juan Peron. But almost 60 years later, in a world where demand for big GTs is finite and buyers are turning away from sedans, no matter how exotic the badge, the newly launched Levante is already doing the heavy lifting at Maserati, accounting for 38 percent of sales in the U.S. for the first six months of this year. It’s on track to become the company’s best-selling model worldwide. But is it good enough to secure Maserati’s future?
Read our 2017 Levante SQ4 First Test review HERE
To find out, we start in Modena, where Maserati, operating out of a modern glass-curtained structure in front of the factory built by Orsi in the late 1930s, still calls home. This is where the GranTurismo and GranCabrio—both mildly tweaked for the 2018 model year with a new grille and front fascia, an upgraded interior that includes a new infotainment system, and the adoption of the 456-hp and 384-lb-ft version of the 4.7-liter V-8 as standard—are still assembled. After a perfunctory introduction to the Levante, we head out of the courtyard and into the Modena morning traffic. Our first stop is 180 miles to the west, at the Mirafiori factory in Turin where Maserati’s SUV is made.
The E35 autostrada that runs past Modena is busy and littered with speed cameras, so we run at no more than 85-90 mph, slowing to 80 as we go under the camera gantries. It’s quieter with fewer cameras after we turn onto the E70 toward Turin, and we pick up the pace. The Levante cruises effortlessly at 100 mph, the 424-hp, 3.0-liter, twin-turbo V-6 under the hood of our S-spec version turning a relaxed 2,400 rpm. It’s a deceptively potent powerplant, this engine, building speed with an elastic surge rather than a sledgehammer shove. At one point the big Maserati is loafing along at an indicated 140 mph.
Orsi, whose best Maserati road cars effortlessly ate up highway miles at triple digit speeds, would have approved.
He would have approved, too, of the fact the Levante is made in Italy. That wasn’t the original plan: The Kubang concept that previewed the Levante in 2011 (itself a rework of a 2003 Maserati SUV concept also called Kubang designed by Guigiaro) was originally intended to be based on Jeep Grand Cherokee hardware and built in the U.S. The idea made sense to FCA boss Sergio Marchionne, a razor-sharp financial engineer with little time for the sentimental side of the auto biz. But common sense—and a labor deal with workers in Turin—prevailed, and Levante production was switched to the giant Fiat Mirafiori plant. The Jeep hardware idea went away, too: The Levante rolls on a modified version of the platform that underpins the Quattroporte and Ghibli sedans.
Mirafiori is a steel and concrete metaphor for the decline of Fiat as a major automaker. Construction of the factory was started in 1937 to replace the quirky plant a few miles away at Lingotto, where the production line spiraled slowly upward from the ground floor, with completed cars being tested on a rooftop track. That scene in the movie The Italian Job where the three Minis are chased around what looks like a banked NASCAR oval someone built six stories up? Filmed on the roof at Lingotto.
In its pomp Mirafiori was the largest industrial complex in Italy and one of the largest auto factories ever built. Sprawling across almost 1,000 acres, with 25 miles of production lines, at its peak it employed 50,000 workers and could build 5,000 cars a day. This year it will build less than one-twentieth that number. Large swathes of Mirafiori are quietly rusting and crumbling, but the area of the plant that’s been refurbished to build the Levante, adjacent to the line for the slow-selling Alfa Romeo MiTo compact, is bright, airy, and gleaming—the very model of a modern auto factory.
With 13 available exterior colors, 28 interior color combinations, three available engines—345-hp and 424-hp versions of the gasoline V-6, plus the 271-hp VM Motori 3.0-liter V-6 turbodiesel—wheels ranging from 18 inches to 21 inches, and various market-specific pieces of hardware to meet regulations and customer preferences in markets as diverse as Shanghai, Seattle, and San Marino, Maserati says it is possible to build 1,583,090,535,606 different variants of the Levante. With production currently pegged at 140 a day, it’s going to take them a long, long time…
The St. Bernard Pass, north of Turin, near the top end of the Aosta Valley, is sports car country. The tarmac squirms and wiggles up and over the third highest mountain pass in Switzerland, placing a premium on grip and agility, power and torque. The Levante is no sports car, but it has 50/50 front to rear weight distribution and what Maserati claims is the lowest center of gravity in its class. As the road twists and turns, our S model, on the 20-inch wheel/tire combination, offers decent levels of front end bite, and the mechanical rear differential, working in combination with the all-wheel-drive system that sends 100 percent of the torque to the rear axle until front wheel slip is detected, helps punch the big Maserati out of tight corners. With 428 lb-ft on tap from 1,750 rpm to 5,000 rpm, the twin-turbo V-6 makes impressively light work the Levante’s 4,650-pound heft.
If the Levante cost the same per pound as Beluga caviar, it would be priced at almost $20 million. I only know this because our dinner in Geneva after the run down from the St. Bernard Pass, hosted by Caviar House & Prunier’s Jean-Pierre Esmilaire, featured some of the company’s finest Beluga, straight from a 4-pound tin that apparently retails for about $17,000. That’s a lot of money for fish eggs, no matter how rare the fish or how tasty the eggs. A Levante S specified to a similar level as the one we’re driving would retail for about $95,000 in the U.S., or roughly five-and-a-half 4-pound tins of Caviar House & Prunier Beluga. In that context, it’s a value. Back in the real world, it’s merely competitive, retailing Stateside for about the same money as a similarly configured Porsche Cayenne S.
Whether it’s caviar or cars, much of what makes a modern luxury brand is carefully managed scarcity combined with a compelling backstory. Maserati has the compelling backstory, starring legendary cars such as Bora, Khamsin, Kyalami and the original Ghibli, with supporting roles from Wilbur Shaw’s back-to-back wins in the 8CTF at the 1939 and 1940 Indy 500s, and a World Formula 1 Championship in 1957 with Juan-Manuel Fangio at the wheel of the glorious 250F, still one of the most beautiful front-engine racing cars ever built.
It should have the scarcity, too. Even with Levante in full production – right-hand drive markets are only now just getting the gasoline engine versions, and a V-8 powered model is reportedly in the wings – company boss Reid Bigland says there is no plan to retail more than 75,000 Maseratis a year. We’ll see if that number holds. Sergio Marchionne certainly won’t back away from the opportunity to sell more high-margin Maseratis if sales of low margin Fiats and Dodges stutter, and given the fact Porsche last year sold more than 237,000 vehicles worldwide, it would seem he has plenty of headroom to expand the Maserati brand’s footprint without compromising its exclusive image.
It comes as no surprise to learn Porsche’s Cayenne was the benchmark against which the Levante was developed, and as we switch back and forth between backroads and autoroutes through Switzerland and France, passing through the heart of Champagne country en route to Calais, there’s time to reflect on how close the Maserati team came to its target.
The Levante is an inch narrower than the Porsche, but it rolls on a 4-inch longer wheelbase. That doesn’t quite translate into the interior room the raw numbers suggest, however, because the Maserati’s dash-to-axle is much more extravagant than the Porsche’s. The Levante doesn’t feel quite as big inside as you’d expect.
The Italian twin-turbo V-6 has near identical power and slightly more torque than its German counterpart, and it delivers both with a touch more brio. Both cars have eight-speed automatics with paddle shifters, and here the edge goes to the more maturely calibrated Cayenne transmission. In Sport mode the shifts in the Maserati thump home hard, simply, engineers admit, to impress customers who think that’s how a sports car should be. It’s unnecessary. So, too, is the overly melodramatic snarl from the exhaust.
Maserati opted to make air suspension standard across the Levante range, and it was the right call. It enables the ride height to be raised..
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