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Maserati Riding High

Topics:  Maserati

Maserati Riding High

Geoff Maxted
DriveWrite
October 17, 2013

It seems you just can’t keep a good car brand down so it is great to see Maserati returning to good fortune. Modern technology has a lot to do with it and the cars are less delicate than in the past. Couple this with the Fiat / Ferrari association, not to mention superb design, and the future is looking good for this legendary name.

Maserati has booked about 22,500 orders for new cars so far this year, as of the end of September. The Italian company had about 17,000 orders at the end of July and 20,304 at the end of August. The car maker said that demand was led by the new €110,000 (£93,000 approx) Quattroporte saloon with about 9,900 orders. The company's new entry-level Jaguar challenging saloon, the Ghibli, received about 7,900 orders and the sporty Gran Turismo and Gran Cabrio models received a total of about 5,000 orders. The brand’s sales record, set in 2008, is 9,000 cars. Last year, the company sold 6,300. Maserati has said it aims to sell 50,000 cars in 2015.

"Our investment is starting to pay off," said CEO Harald Wester, referring to the 1.5 billion euros that will be spent on the brand by parent Fiat Group from 2011 to 2014.

Selling more Maserati cars is an important part of parent company Fiat's return to profit in 2016 in Europe, where it lost 700 million Euros last year in a shrinking market. Wester said last month that he is counting on the upcoming Maserati SUV (below), the Levante (formerly the Kubang concept), to sell about 20,000 to 25,000 annually when it is launched in 2015. The choice features in the Maserati Levante will be a sporty feel, on-road biased driving dynamics, athletic styling and room for five. The cabin is said to be as sumptuous as that of the new Quattroporte.

Maserati originally planned for the Levante to be built at a North American plant for the USA market, but the demand for Jeeps at Chrysler's Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit is now too strong for this to make sense. The Levante will share some of the underpinnings of the American SUV which you can see here.