No baby Maserati SUV

Maserati has ruled out going after Porsche’s booming Macan mid-sized SUV with a smaller soft-roader of its own. Instead, says CEO Harald Wester, the Italian marque will concentrate on getting its full-sized Levante SUV to the Geneva motor show next March.

Rumours had been circulating in the Italian motoring press that Maserati would take the seemingly simple and obvious step of putting a unique bodyshell and interior on top of the all-wheel drive architecture being developed for Alfa Romeo.

Giving the rumours extra credence was that Alfa Romeo’s architecture-engineering skunkworks (which developed the modular architecture for the upcoming Giulia as well as Alfa’s own mid-sized SUV) continues to be based inside Maserati’s Modena headquarters. The heavy hitter Giulia Quadrifoglio Verde also uses the Maserati Ghibli’s biturbo V6, so the architecture is pre-engineered to accept Maserati’s existing powertrains.

Repurposing the Alfa Romeo architecture would have given Maserati a short cut to join the profit-rich segment and combat its heavy hitters, like the Macan, Audi Q5, BMW X4, Mercedes-Benz GLC and the Range Rover Evoque.

But Wester and other Maserati sources have ruled it out a smaller SUV, even though they admitted to running the numbers on the speed and cost of bringing a baby SUV to market.

“We want a certain kind of volume and our volume targets for 2018 remain the same at 70,000 cars globally,” a Maserati source said.

“But we also want to remain relatively exclusive, so we don’t need that [Macan] kind of volume. It’s not where our customers want to be.

“That (Alfa) architecture is not needed by us,” Wester stated.