Maserati joins electric charge

Maserati will be the last premium maker to the battery-electric car party, but it insists it won’t follow anybody else’s rules when it gets there.

Instead, its technical boss has hinted that it will be a very low-volume, limited-edition car, one that will allow the historic Italian brand to deliver a focused sports car instead of a cash-generating SUV or large limo.

While the brand’s engineering boss, Roberto Fedeli, has had an order from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles chief Sergio Marchionne to swing Maserati into the BEV fight as soon as possible, he insists it simply can’t happen from a standing start before 2019.

And when it does get there, the technical tie up between the two brands means Maserati will also be paving an electrified engineering path for Alfa Romeo as well.

“I think that we could show something before 2020. Maybe 2019,” Fedeli suggested at the Paris motor show. “We are working to be ready with something that we can show during the next couple of years.

“We will be last (with a production BEV) and we have to arrive to the market with something different. Very different.

“We will find a solution to differentiate us from the others, otherwise if you are talking now for a Tesla fighter probably it’s not a good idea.”

Fedeli reeled off a long list of reasons why Maserati wouldn’t benchmark Tesla, including engineering depth, driving dynamics and the Trident’s desire to march to its own drumbeat. Besides, by the time a BEV Maserati arrives, Fedeli explained, he doesn’t expect today’s pre-eminent premium BEV maker to be a major player.

“I don’t think that Tesla is the best product in the market but they are doing 50,000 cars a year,” explained the former Ferrari technical boss, who also spent 2014 and 2015 at BMW’s technical centre developing i branded electric cars.

“The execution and quality of the products of Tesla in the market are the same as a German OEM in the 1970s. Their solutions are not the best.”

By the time Maserati’s first BEV concept car arrives, though, the segment is likely to be bloated with production players from BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Lexus, Infiniti and Volvo, along with Genesis from South Korea and a horde of Chinese brands, plus Tesla, if it survives the mass-production onslaught.

Even the relatively speedy, largely digital development systems pioneered on the Alfa Romeo Giulia, a production Maserati BEV won’t be likely to arrive before 2020, and a full series production, consumer-friendly model at least a year late than that.

“The main issue is the development of the components and the most important component is the battery,” Fedeli explained.

“The development time of a battery is something like 40 months and that means that it’s impossible to think to sell cars before 2020 or late 2019.”

He confirmed Maserati wouldn’t be chasing big volumes from its first BEV, but would use it as a productive learning exercise for his 1200-strong engineering team, almost half of who are under 35 years old.

“When we do cars it’s not so easy to avoid making mistakes at the beginning, but mistakes are not only mistakes. They are a way to learn and go on to develop the product. In three or four years that mistake can be the most important reason why a carmaker can put in the market the best product.

“On very low volume production we can do some testing and innovate things. We have to go into production to understand if something is a good solution, but in low volume production we can acquire a lot of experience without spending too much money,” he admitted.

Low-volume production runs are nothing new for Maserati, to the point that its Modena plant is the go-to centre for such things for Alfa Romeo, as well as the Trident.

Its enormous race and customer sport operation on the outskirts of the Italian city has already put together the brilliant MC12 off the Ferrari Enzo’s architecture and powertrain, while the headquarter plant near the centre of town built both the 8C and 4C for Alfa Romeo.

Fedeli, whose time at BMW’s i division lead him to swear off full carbon-fibre cars, insists today’s BEVs are simply too heavy to be enjoyable to drive.

“What you feel immediately in the present electric vehicles is that if you are pushing the throttle at a start where there is a stoplight and you don’t need to turn the car, you have a very good feeling,” he suggested.

“Acceleration for three seconds, maximum, and that’s all the emotion that is found. After that there is nothing.

“If you have to have the car on a normal road you feel a lot of weight, more than anything else. It’s weight. Torque and power are interesting for a very few seconds but then the weight does not let you enjoy the car on a normal road.

“That’s inconsistent with the brand we are representing and needs to be solved.

The other core issue to solve for Maserati is how to replace the depth and quality of the engine note, which is so intrinsic to the brand experience that it has a composer from Milano’s famed La Scala opera house on the consulting payroll to fine tune it.

“Sound is not the most important characteristic of electric cars,” he admitted.

“The BEV is something different and we have to characterize the car without having one of our most important parameters.”