If you make cars and want to still be in business 10 years from now, you better have a plan to rapidly transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.
Overnight, it seems another automaker, Maserati has seen the light and released this teaser clip on social media, simply with the statement ‘Our future is charged’.
The ‘charged’ reference obviously suggesting they’re going to be making vehicles with electric powertrains.
Maserati is an ultra-luxury brand and it looks like they’ll be among the first at that tier to get serious about EVs. At the launch of the Ferrari SF90 late last year, I had the opportunity to interview Ferrari Australia’s CEO, Dieter Knechtel who was very that an all-electric Ferrari was not in their future.
Our first teaser was a post from back in January, where the company announced they were testing a 100% electric engine.
It’s a big step to go from testing, to announcing your future is electric. There are a lot of internal pressures inside a legacy automaker, specifically the profits created by the vehicles currently on sale. The easy thing and the best thing for your balance sheet today, would be to continue doing and making ICE vehicles, extracting maximum value from the R&D spend to date.
The big problem with that strategy, and no doubt why Maserati is making this move, is that at the end of a vehicle development cycle (4-5 years), your market for an ICE vehicle will substantially fall away and potentially off a cliff.
Of course, Maserati isn’t just about leather seat luxury, performance is also a key part of the vehicle line-up. As we know, electric motors are offering some stunning performance and that’d make the Grand Turismo’s 0-100km/hr time of 4.7 seconds look slow.
The MMXXI is the roman numeral for 2021, which suggests we’ll see the first fully electric vehicle from Maserati released next year.
