Buyers are increasingly turned off by electrification when it comes to supercars.
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Maserati kills electric version of MC20 supercar for lack of demand
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VoidWeaver
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Meanwhile, Xiaomi's 1,500-horsepower SU7 Ultra secures nearly 7,000 orders in 10 minutes, promptly laying waste to any notion that the electric supercar is inherently unsellable.
Perhaps the Italian marque's difficulty lies not in electrification itself, but in their timidity before innovation. Or, to put it plainly: it seems like a 'skill issue'.
Perhaps the Italian marque's difficulty lies not in electrification itself, but in their timidity before innovation. Or, to put it plainly: it seems like a 'skill issue'.
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These cars live in very different price domains, and volume segments.
MC20 220,000$
SU7 73,000$
Maserati doens't want to sell supercars that are this "cheap", and high volume. This would "damage" their core business and brand.
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Your link says the SU7 Ultra starts at about $70k. Non-Chinese automakers can apparently only deliver a basic SUV at that price. Maserati was probably hoping to charge at least 3x what Xiaomi is charging.
(I'm not disagreeing, BTW, just pointing out the nature of the "skill issue" you mentioned.)
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The SU7 Ultra also has brakes that cook themselves to death in a hot lap or two. A shitload of power in an underbaked, half-assed performance car is just a party trick. Hell, I drove a Porsche Taycan with less than half the power and it was a vastly better car than Xiaomi will ever produce, but it was still a party trick because it is impossible for a typical driver in typical conditions to take advantage of 750hp. And big power is cheap and easy with EVs.
Building an electric car - or any car - that is capable not just of nauseating acceleration pulls but which has the engineering, components, and suspension dynamics to withstand a day of hot laps is a dramatically different story.
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The point of buying a supercar is to flaunt your wealth more than anything because, and I say this as a MASSIVE car nerd, there's very little advantage otherwise. A Corvette will eat a lot of supercars for breakfast at a fraction of the cost.
So, an EV, which is efficient and quiet does not scream "look at me! I'm rich!" nearly as much as a v8/v10/v12 sucking down gasoline like that one uncle does beer at a 4th of July party.
Also, it probably doesn't help that Maserati has a horrible reputation when it comes to electrical systems . . .
Wonder if Italian supercar buyers will change their minds when a 4-door sedan (Lucid Air) blows the doors off their Ferrari.
So, an EV, which is efficient and quiet does not scream "look at me! I'm rich!" nearly as much as a v8/v10/v12 sucking down gasoline like that one uncle does beer at a 4th of July party.
Also, it probably doesn't help that Maserati has a horrible reputation when it comes to electrical systems . . .
Wonder if Italian supercar buyers will change their minds when a 4-door sedan (Lucid Air) blows the doors off their Ferrari.
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Even at that, it's a small volume segment, and most of the vehicles in it are kept in climate-controlled garages and fussed over by teams of professional detailers and preservationists, not actually driven. I went to a facility a couple of weeks ago that just exists to store extremely wealthy guys' car investments, and saw several decades worth of desirable cars sitting in what amounts to automotive hibernation until they can be sold for a profit. We're talking Porsche 918 Spyders with 29 miles on the odometer, GT40s, a 997 Speedster, just insane shit.
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The skill of making your customers happily pay 250k+ for a car is indeed a rare gift that few have mastered.
I don't think Xiaomi is quite there yet.
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Exactly. It's a Veblen good. Owning a Ferrari or a Maserati means you're the kind of baller who can get on the allocation list and actually buy the thing.
No, of course not. It's not about the raw numbers. It's about how a Ferrari makes you feel, and that's different than how a Lucid Air makes you feel.
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Something, something, if a chimp was a hoarding this many completely unused bananas, the troop would beat him to fucking death.
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I'm almost 50 and Maserati has been in trouble for as long as I remember it to exist.
EV supercars certainly don't have an easy live (several reasons) but being a Maserati is like a metal ball chained to your ankle.
EV supercars certainly don't have an easy live (several reasons) but being a Maserati is like a metal ball chained to your ankle.
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Yeah. A preference for ICE (aside from any relevant cost concerns in the mass market) is about the look, vibes, nostalgia, etc. Maybe their inner child wanting a “vroom vroom” sound. And maybe falling in line with whatever trend grips them at the moment.
Raw numbers and non toxic air?
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And not just any old bananas, we're talking that good Gros Michel shit that tastes like banana custard and went extinct 70 years ago, just hoarded in a little chimp-cave with some bonobos gently buffing them to a high shine.
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Eh. Most of these things don't get driven enough for their emissions to matter. You can't take a Maserati to Costco without feeling like a bit of a berk, so most of these guys have a Cayenne or a Range Rover that they drive 98% of the time.Yeah. A preference for ICE (aside from any relevant cost concerns in the mass market) is about the look, vibes, nostalgia, etc. Maybe their inner child wanting a “vroom vroom” sound. And maybe falling in line with whatever trend grips them at the moment.
Raw numbers and non toxic air?
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95% of super car buyers don't buy them for the performance, they buy them to be obnoxious and to preen like a peacock.
Quieter is a flaw in this regard.
Quieter is a flaw in this regard.
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Stellantis is trying to find a buyer for Maserati because it was losing more than 20k USD for every car it sold. There is reporting suggesting that Geely is one such potential buyer.
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From my perspective, driving a supercar has always been about hitting the shift points as anything. When you go with an electric or with an automatic transmission, you are killing much of the fun of the car. (The trend of supercars that shift for you makes me very sad.)
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I feel like buying a Maserati was something you had to really, really want (or dupe yourself into buying). A lot of high-end sports cars devalue quite a bit, but Maserati really nose-dives in resale value compared to Porsche, Ferrari, etc.
I remember talking to a car salesman who bought a Ghibli himself, and he really regretted it afterward. Some from issues he had with it (they're not known for reliability), but a lot from how much he "lost" in value on it (funny, though, happening to someone who should have known better).
So for them in particular, they really need someone who loves them and their engine sounds, and likely the smoothness & quietness of an electric-driven just isn't going to get that buyer in the door.
I remember talking to a car salesman who bought a Ghibli himself, and he really regretted it afterward. Some from issues he had with it (they're not known for reliability), but a lot from how much he "lost" in value on it (funny, though, happening to someone who should have known better).
So for them in particular, they really need someone who loves them and their engine sounds, and likely the smoothness & quietness of an electric-driven just isn't going to get that buyer in the door.
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VoidWeaver
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Your critique is fair enough—raw horsepower alone is no guarantor of virtue. Yet dismissing Xiaomi as merely a 'party trick' might prove premature, given that their SU7 Ultra prototype recently carved a Nürburgring lap in 6:46.87—rather a stern rebuttal to the charge of being 'half-assed.'
It seems to me that if Xiaomi can produce such speed from their freshman automotive effort, the established marques, Maserati included, should perhaps feel more embarrassed than amused.
The Nürburgring version goes for $114,200, though I suspect it will have a hard time doing a sub-7-minute lap time at the ring.
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I don’t know about the others but to me electric cars are very simple machines so it’s all about the price. Yes you can a little extra for a halo overpower model but cmon as shown by Xiaomi there’s no need to charge mega money for mega performance.
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Now that would be fun. Imagine the next Maserati is actually a Volvo in drag. Or vice versa.
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Eh, I dunno. The supercar is all about status and you establishing your superiority to the pleebs who haven't bought enough Porches to get a 718 Cayman GT4 RS allocation.
If, after all that money, a sedan pulls up next to you, with a family of 4 in it, and the kid in the back sticks out his tongue as his parents' Lucid Air Sapphire, which somehow costs way less than your Porsche, blows you away at the stoplight . . . well, doesn't that impact your status?
I'd think it would.
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Conspicuous consumption. This was demonstrated to me quite blatantly when my wife dragged me through a Prada shop in Las Vegas. There were a tiny few items on display. Like maybe 2 purses in a 4 foot glass case. Maybe 7 or 8 cases in the large shop, mostly empty space. One thing that caught my eye was a "credit card purse". It was just bigger than a modern cell phone (this was in 2006 or so). It was made of cheap looking injection molded plastic. It sported the Prada logo. It was 900 dollars.
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I'm not too bent out of shape about rarely driven super cars being gas. $80,000 electric car can outperform them. But I'd like to see the manufacturers get fees for going past a certain number of produced cars, and those fees going towards climate change mitigation. Shoot, if anything gets their manufacturing plants to become carbon neutral. Then, I'd like to see fees on the owners when they do annual registrations, to pay fees going past a certain number of miles driven to pay an extended CO2/pollution tax.
If only a few thousand of these cars are being made annually, and driven a couple thousand miles annually, it's not a massive CO2 contributor. But if 10s of thousands are made (Lambo), and driven 5-10k miles, pay up, or make hybrids/evs
If only a few thousand of these cars are being made annually, and driven a couple thousand miles annually, it's not a massive CO2 contributor. But if 10s of thousands are made (Lambo), and driven 5-10k miles, pay up, or make hybrids/evs
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But how involved and fun can it be if you don't control the spark? My grandpa's '29 Model A has a lever to advance or retard spark when needed, and it's all automated these days. Modern (ie 1930s and newer) cars with automatic spark control are just not as fun and involving.
/S
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That's not nothing, and it speaks to Xiaomi's commitment to building credibility, but a hand-built prototype lapping the 'Ring quickly at the hands of an elite driver is also not the show of power they'd like it to be, at least to me - and it does not automatically give them credibility their production models haven't. A big part of why a Porsche is a Porsche (for example) is that it remains as tractable, predictable, and communicative at the very limit of its lateral grip or ten hot laps into a track day as it is cruising in a straight line. And that's true of any Porsche you drive off the lot, they're all ready to be flogged hard; even my buddy's 30 year old Boxster needed very little prep to do a hard performance driving school track day. There's a deep bench of institutional knowledge at Porsche (and BMW, and Ferrari, and Mercedes/AMG) built through decades building both street and motorsports cars, and that comes through in the experience. In contrast, a lot of Teslas gets squirrelly at high speeds and have damping issues, and like I mentioned earlier, SU7 brakes can overheat and fail with no warning midlap; there just isn't that deep knowledge of how to keep a car forgiving and controllable in relatively extreme conditions, even by a non-elite driver, and it shows. They're impressive until they aren't.
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Ferraris have only rarely ever been the fastest at anything, and that's never hurt them. No one buys a particular supercar because it's absolutely faster than everything else, they buy it because it's exclusive, and beautiful, and sounds great, and they make it trivially easy to get laid. The guy in the Porsche isn't going to give a single shit about how the Lucid makes him look at the stoplight because he's more concerned with what he looks like when he pulls up to the valet stand.
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VoidWeaver
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For what it's worth, Ford's CEO and Kyle from "Out of Spec" loved the "Max" variant of the SU7.
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Sure. No doubt it's a very high-value car and I'm sure it punches above its weight. It just doesn't automatically get credibility because it slings a lot of power.
And to be clear, I regard the power output as a party trick, not the whole car.
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My dad drives a Porsche and somewhat frequently has people try to mean mug him and try to race. But he really doesn't give any more of a shit about valet stands than he does about Kevin revving his Charger at him; he's driving his dream car and he he's had it sideways on a track, so he just feels like big Kev can burn all the rubber he wants, but he's not in the Porsche.
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There's also a set of
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I disagree . . . a bit. I think that a lot of people that buy Ferraris are buying them because they believe those cars to be the ultimate status symbol and, as such, the best car. They may or may not be obsessed with cars like I am, but I'm willing to bet that MOST owners fully expect to be the fastest thing on the road at any given time because they bought a fucking Ferrari, and dammit, that means fast!
Now, for those rich people (like, say, Jay Leno) that know about cars, I agree, they won't give a shit, but to the image-obsessed, newly-rich crypto-bro? Nah, I bet he doesn't realize that Lucid is going to smoke him at the light, and I bet he's going to be butt-hurt when it does.
I mean, you don't have to convince ME of the truth of supercars and speed--I get it. I would do an awful lot just for the opportunity to drive a Ferrari F40 even though there are family-oriented hatchbacks and crossovers that go faster now-a-days (honestly, I want to drive those too, but not as badly).
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