Maserati Grecale Folgore review: Marque’s first electric SUV impresses

Maserati’s first all-electric SUV is a very decent effort. The Grecale Folgore feels every bit as luxurious inside as its sister petrol-engined model, as it should, and it delivers enough performance and (just) about enough range to live up to the badge.

Best of all, Maserati has also done a good job with the car’s chassis. It’s not particularly comfortable around town, but on faster routes you’ll find the Grecale Folgore an enjoyable creation to stroke along at speed.

Where it falls down is pricing, because for now at least, it’s available in just one spec and costs almost £110,000. That’s not an issue in isolation, but sadly for Maserati, Porsche’s latest Macan is even more accomplished and while it’s a little smaller, it’s also tens of thousands of pounds cheaper.

Maserati is still introducing the Grecale Folgore to the UK, so we had a day with a left-hand-drive example of the vehicle on UK roads. We still managed to drive it over a variety of road types, including in town, along faster country routes and on motorway.

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Independent rating: 6/10

The Grecale Folgore comes with a single, whopping battery capacity of 105kWh, and that’s enough for a decent official range of 310 miles. Based on our experience, you should be able to get north of 270 miles to a single fill in the real world, which is pretty reasonable for a car this big and fast.

Where the Maserati can’t quite keep up with its main rivals is on charging. The maximum DC rate is 170kW, compared with the latest Porsche Macan’s 270kW. But peak rates don’t necessarily always translate into a faster recharging experience (the amount of time you can spend at faster refill speeds is often more relevant), and Maserati claims that the Grecale Folgore can get from 20 to 80 per cent of its battery capacity in just under half an hour. That will be acceptable to many buyers, no doubt.

The Grecale Folgore is at its best at speed - a suitable trait for a car from a brand with such an illustrious performance heritage. The car never really settles around town, with constant fidgeting from beneath as the suspension struggles to deal with the 2.5-tonne weight.

It’s much happier on the open road, where you can use the nicely modulated throttle pedal to feed in the shove from the dual electric motors - all 550bhp of it - and lean on the car through corners, tinkering with the amount of brake-energy regeneration by flicking paddles behind the steering wheel. You’ll find the Grecale Folgore surprisingly agile and keen to respond for such a large SUV, particularly in its Sport mode, although the overall experience is still one of a rapid luxury vehicle instead of a genuine sports car.

The cabin is where Maserati turns on the style, to remind you that you’re in a premium Italian luxury product instead of a Volkswagen or an Audi. As such, you get sumptuous materials in all of the right places, with fabulous heated and ventilated seats up front, complete with 14-way adjustment. All of the switches have a satisfying weight to them as well.

The Grecale Folgore is not a small car, measuring almost 4.9 metres in length. But the fact that it shares its chassis and body with a petrol-engined model brings compromises in the cabin. Four fully grown adults will be comfortable in there, but a significant tunnel hump robs the middle rear seat of valuable legroom, which is a shame.

The boot capacity is a solid-looking 535 litres, but again, packaging constraints mean that there’s no underfloor space - so you’ll have to throw your shopping and suitcases on top of your charging cables.

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Maserati isn’t mucking around on tech in the Grecale Folgore, because there’s a full armada of displays in the front cabin. The first is the digital instrument panel, which measures 12.3 inches across and does a good job of feeding you key information.

Then in the centre of the fascia there’s another 12.3-inch screen that’s dedicated to infotainment and navigation. Maserati says the in-house system uses live traffic info and smart real-world range projections to work out where you’ll need to stop for recharging on longer journeys. In our experience the system is a bit slow and laggy, so we’d stick with the wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay functionality.

Below this system sits a further, 8.8-inch touchscreen that operates functions like heating, ventilation and the heated seats. The interface is a bit fussy - and still not as good as physical switches that you could reach out and touch - but it works pretty well.

The final bit of cabin tech is our biggest regret, because Maserati has swapped out its analogue clock in the centre of the top of the dashboard and replaced it with a digital multifunction device. It’s capable of showing you all sorts of info, including g-forces if you’re cornering or accelerating hard enough - but we’re not convinced any of these details are a worthy gain over a classy, traditional timepiece.

Elsewhere, Maserati has used an external speaker system to give its electric model a distant rumble, in a bid to make you think there’s a V8 petrol engine involved somewhere. It’s undoubtedly a bit contrived but frankly, we’ve heard far worse attempts at this type of thing. And it’s far from intrusive when you’re up and running.

Here’s where things get tough for the Grecale Folgore. At launch it’s available as just a single version, accompanied by an eye-watering price tag of £109,950. Now, you might think that’s money well spent on a sophisticated EV from a luxury brand - but the figures for Porsche’s latest Macan start at a full £35,000 less than the Maserati’s. Even the range-topping Macan Turbo Electric undercuts the Grecale Folgore by £15k. Cheaper versions can’t come quickly enough.

Maserati’s official figures claim 310 miles of range, but in our experience you’ll be getting around 270, which translates into an efficiency figure of about 2.7 miles per kWh. That could make longer journeys a bit expensive if public rapid charging is involved - although Maserati will argue that its traditional customer base has the financial wherewithal to cope.

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On a DC charger you can get from 20 to 80 per cent of the battery capacity in 29 minutes, thanks to a rapid rate of 150kW. A 22kW three-phase onboard AC charger is standard, although most UK homes don’t have this strength of supply. Totally refilling the large battery from empty, on the more common 7kW domestic wallbox, would take just over 15 hours.

The Grecale Folgore is a premium vehicle, but its single price of £109,950 is the biggest stumbling block. A single-motor version, with less power but potentially more range from the same battery, would be a more appealing proposition.

The Grecale Folgore comes with Maserati’s standard three-year, unlimited-mileage warranty. But the company has yet to confirm any specific extra cover for the battery pack.

You could argue that the Grecale Folgore is right on the money for what an all-electric Maserati SUV should be. It feels luxurious inside and certainly isn’t slow. It’s just a shame that it costs so much more than its key rival, the admittedly slightly smaller Porsche Macan.