Produced 丨 Tiger Sniff Car Group
Author 丨 Li Wenbo
Edited 丨 thoughtful
Head image 丨 Maserati
On March 22, Italian sports car manufacturer Maserati unveiled the Gregale, a new SUV model that was supposed to be unveiled in November 2021.
Whether the four-month wait will make Maserati fans hungry and thirsty is still unknown, but the micro-businessmen who are waiting in line to take pictures must be broken. After all, the pricing of the new car is likely to allow them to no longer have to pull the banner to rub the exhibition car to take pictures, but finally hope to stage the real car to the big drama!
But even with the budget in place, the majority of Martha fans still have to wait for a 126-day lead time. Maserati's official statement is that "due to the global shortage of semiconductors and chips, there are problems in the supply chain of key components in the production process." In fact, Maserati did not have to bother to compile such a difficult explanation, just one sentence can block the channel of all doubting voices: "We are a pure Italian brand." "After all, Maserati's long delivery of new cars has a long history.
In 2020, the successor of the supercar MC12, MC20, debuted in the ancient city of Modena in northern Italy, where Marasati originated. The sales quota for the model was quickly wiped out, but the delivery was not so painful. Until today, the MC20 has only been delivered sporadically in China, and there is still no certain date when the majority of car buyers will be able to drive the car.
As a new generation model with the least difficulty in getting started with the supercar MC20, the Grecale is not only a hope for Maserati to return to the track of competition, but also the most unshakable load-bearing wall in the overall revitalization plan of the brand. Grecale is to Maserati what The Macan is to Porsche: the skepticism can be loud, but the sales must be bigger.
Maserati Grecale — Turning Alfa Romeo into treasure
When it comes to the Gregare, people habitually think it's a new car. Just look at Maserati's many phrases on it: elegance, exceptional performance, synonymous with innovation, pioneers in electrification... Which is not full of sincerity, which is not eye-catching?
First of all, in the interior style and power combination, the two most easily perceived obvious indicators, Grecale is indeed very "new".
Grecale has Maserati's largest screen combination to date: a digital dashboard, a 12.3-inch car screen, an 8.8-inch comfort control panel, a rear seat touchscreen, for a total of 4 pieces. If you include a digital clock, it is 5 blocks.
By counting electronic clocks into screens, Maserati has made new history and created a new metric for car screens. In the era of smart cars, it's hard to see brands that divide the cockpit experience so thinly with so many small screens.
According to Maserati's design director Klaus Busse's vision of this in-vehicle interactive system, Grecale central control is divided into three areas: the upper half is used for in-car information and entertainment functions;
The central area is placed with physical buttons for vehicle gear shifting, while the lower half is responsible for comfort functions and vehicle control, temperature, air supply angle and driving mode. Digital clock, responsible for the old bank: telling the time.
The number of on-board screens is not synonymous with the content of fresh technology. Nowadays, the more popular practice in the industry is a piece of oversized "fish screen" to unify the attention in the car.
This approach began with Byton, which had long since withdrawn from the car-making game, and under the unremitting education of German luxury brands, high-net-worth people began to tend to judge the advanced nature of the car by screen size rather than number. You know, a Ford Mondeo with less than 220,000 is equipped with a 27-inch giant horizontal LCD screen with a length of more than 1.1 meters, and a Maserati screen of more than 500,000 ultra-luxury cars is only given 12.3 inches, which is obviously unreasonable. Not to mention, multiple screen sizes will bring a huge adaptation workload for the cockpit software team.
In terms of smart cockpit atmosphere and screen construction, Grecale is clearly lagging behind. Fortunately, Maserati tried to pull back a city through the engine.
Maserati set four power levels for the Gregarte, namely: GT version: 300 hp four-cylinder 48V light hybrid engine, "to meet the needs of modern urban travel"; Modena version: 330 horsepower four-cylinder 48V light mix engine, "to impress the hearts of outdoor sports enthusiasts"; Trofeo version: 530 horsepower V6 engine from MC20, 3.8 seconds acceleration from 100 kilometers, pry the wallets of high-performance ultra-luxury SUV fans;
There was also a Folgore version launched a year later: the pure electric version, with unknown horsepower, peak torque of 800 Nm, battery capacity of 105 kWh, and a vehicle 400V platform.
That's right, it's 400V. It should be known that Bydir, Extreme Krypton, GAC Aean, Lantu and Xiaopeng and other Chinese car companies have successively launched 800V high-voltage platforms last year. Not to mention the Porsche 800V high-voltage platform, which was put into service in April 2019.
Admittedly, this hard-working, wet-pan V6 engine has something to offer: it can reduce energy consumption by shutting down the three cylinders on the right, and reduce exhaust emissions with the support of dual spark plug pre-combustion chamber technology. It has nothing to do with Ferrari, 100% Modena intellectual property.
But how sleek Grecale's engine is, how old is its car-making platform.
Ancient times arrived, and we must travel back to 2015, when memories have begun to blur. This year, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) boss Sergio Marchionne spent 1.5 billion euros to develop a new platform planned for 15 models: giorgio. Ultimately, however, it was only used in three models: the Alfa Romeo Giulia, the Stelvio, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
In January 2021, FCA merged with PSA to form a new car company: the Stellantis Group. Three months later, Giorgio's original developer, Alpha Romeo, announced the complete deprecation of the architecture. There are two reasons: first, Giorgio was designed to go head-to-head with the BMW 3 Series in terms of handling, but never considered the expansion of electrification; second, the group's new STLA architecture is built for electric vehicles, which is more in line with the background of the times. In response, Maserati's two pillars, Ghibli and Levante, will also take advantage of the replacement to live on the STLA architecture.
But Grecale is not only building fuel cars on Giorgio, but also electric cars.
This is absurd, putting a car-making platform designed for fuel vehicles and abandoned by Alpha Romeo, with a Maserati shell, interior and battery, to forcibly "change oil to electricity". I don't know, I thought it was the platform master Volkswagen Group that put it here to turn waste into treasure.
Maserati must have known about this, otherwise it would not have pulled the Gregare to the Cassino factory in Italy, rather than the Promised Land of the MC20 in Modena.
Remember, Maserati's pillars, Ghibli and Quattroporte, have been producing at the Grugliasco plant and only last year were transferred to the Mirafiori plant in Turin to join Levante.
Grecale's manufacturing at the Cassino factory is not much good news. Built in 1972, the Cassino factory has only built Lancia, Fiat and Alfa Romeo. Its experience in the production of ultra-luxury cars is zero.
Porsche Macan, you can't learn
Ultra-luxury brands make SUVs, and many people have scoffed at it, believing that this is a deviation from the purity of the brand. But after the porsche Cayenne came out in 2002, that rhetoric dissipated. Subsequently, the lower-priced Macan became the "most profitable" car in Porsche's history.
According to Porsche's financial report released on March 17, in 2021, the company delivered a total of 301,915 new cars to the world, of which the Macan delivered 88,362 units, accounting for nearly 30%. The second bestseller was the Cayenne, with 83,071 units delivered. Together, the two SUVs account for 57% of Porsche's overall sales.
According to the Volkswagen Group's financial report, Porsche's profit margin in 2021 was 16.5%, ranking first in the group. In the five years from 2016 to 2020, Porsche's profit margins were 17.4%, 17.6%, 16.6%, 15.4% and 14.6%, respectively.
Everybody was spraying Porsche SUV, but everybody wanted to build a Porsche-like SUV.
Since its launch in 2014, the Porsche Macan has delivered 600,000 units worldwide, with about 80% of Macan buyers being new Porsche customers, making it an uncompromising cash cow for the entire brand. At the product level, Cayenne is Macan's big brother. But in the matter of making quick money, Macan was Cayenne's dad.
Macan's popularity is attributed to three aspects:
First, the strong appeal of the Porsche brand. As a sports car manufacturer, Porsche has always wanted more consumers to realize the dream of a sports car, and even SUVs have been endowed with sports car attributes at the performance and brand level.
Second, although it is on the same platform as the Audi Q5, although it was initially under the banner of "Trumpet Cayenne", it does not affect the control essence that Macan should have as a Porsche. After all, the Audi Q5 itself is a luxury car, and the Macan, built on its platform, was officially crowned "GTS" by Porsche, which is a testament to its driving performance.
Third, the Macan is produced at Porsche's leipzig plant in Germany, where Porsche's flagship car Panamera is produced, with rich experience and craftsmanship in luxury car production and pure pedigree.
If you want to successfully build a low-end model into the biggest cash cow of the brand, in addition to looking like the brand, you still have to have some real skills.
Obviously, even the ability to learn these real skills, Maserati and Gregare do not have.
Maserati, has not been good at learning
Since 2015, ultra-luxury brands have scrambled to join the SUV camp:
In 2015, Bentley mass-produced Bentayga; in 2018, Lamborghini mass-produced Urus, Rolls-Royce mass-produced Cullinan; in 2020, Aston Martin mass-produced DBX; in 2022, Ferrari will release its first SUV, and Lotus will release pure electric SUV Type 132...
At this pace, Maserati's movements are considered very early. In 2016, Maserati mass-produced the Levante, the first SUV in the brand's history.
Then, it's a constant tinkering: adding color, adding trim strips, changing leather; co-branded editions, special editions, customized editions, one after another. In the past six years, the matter of product replacement has never been mentioned.
Levante accounted for 59% of Maserati's global sales of 24,269 new cars in 2021. Honest and old are old, and their combat strength is still explosive. Correspondingly, the other two big brothers, Ghibli and Quattroporte, have been holding out for nine years. A few more stitches would break GranTurismo's glorious record of retiring after thirteen years.
Maserati's ancestral artistic ability is not only "not fond of generations". The interiors are outdated, roughly worked and of unstable quality: Maserati's "sins" are so deep that it is difficult for St. Paul's Cathedral to exceed them.
For example, below is the interior of the Maserati president for 1.62 million. Covering the logo, the look and feel is not even as refined as the Mercedes C-Class. A sentence to sum up: look at 1 million from a distance, look at 500,000 from a close distance, and sit in and only want to pay 100,000.
The old school of painting style can still endure, the quality is not too good to really be forgiven, all kinds of small hairy diseases will always inadvertently jump out to brush the sense of existence. On the third-party automotive quality platform Quality Network, there are a variety of complaints about Marasati's problems: screen cracking, seat rail rust, sunroof leakage, transmission noise, engine noise.
Some people even asked the concatenation of the century 8 years ago: When will Martha's workmanship catch up with Geely? This is a question that Maserati may have to answer for a lifetime.
The brand appeal is not as good as Porsche, and the system operation is not as good as the public. To replicate The Macan's route, Grecale's probability of success is marked with a big question mark.
Unless, a proud Italian, is willing to frame the starting price within the groundbreaking 500,000 yuan.
Can't be so bad micro-business
For car brands, it is a good thing that their models are highly likely to be mentioned by users. But as Maserati has been repeatedly mentioned by a large number of micro-businessmen, it is difficult to say that it can promote the brand image.
"Congratulations to Mr. X, the general representative of XX Asia Pacific, on a Luxury Maserati Luxury Car. Mr. X joined the micro-business for three months, the left hand career, the right hand family, enthusiastic and generous, passionate, bought a Martha is to make the micro-business team can run faster. Similar chicken blood brainwashing copywriting, with several high-paste picture quality car pick-up scene photos, a set of "minutes up and down" high-net-worth people set up in 2018 in China.
When the slogan of "do micro-business, open Martha" began to go viral, Maserati was laid out as a vivid background board for leek scythes from a racing car manufacturer with a heritage, a history and a niche.
How much of an impact has this trend had on Maserati? Large dealers also followed the trend to launch the official activity of "welcome micro-businessmen to take photos, 200 yuan once".
How much has this trend hurt Maserati? According to publicly available data, Maserati's total sales in 2017 were 48,700 units, fell to 35,300 units in 2018, fell to 19,300 units in 2019, and continued to fall to 17,000 units in 2020, less than half of Porsche's fraction.
The chaos of terminal channels has also helped micro-merchants to deal a fatal blow to Maserati. Mike Manley, the former chief executive of FCA, once lamented: "Maserati is now like a mass-market brand, and it is also sold in the same showroom as Alfa Romeo, and Maserati is actually a luxury brand." ”
As Baudrillard wrote in The Society of Consumption: "People never consume the use value of the thing itself, and people always use it as a symbol that can highlight themselves." ”
Maserati, which sold for more than 2 million yuan in 2013, was once a shiny symbol of Italian high-end life. But when the cheap Grecale is embedded in the Maserati brand, will micro-merchants also begin to "dislike" the brand is not high-end enough? After all, his money is also saved by fission in the circle of friends. From cutting leeks to being cut off, no one is happy.
After all, to make money by taking photos, isn't it nice to put your arms around the Porsche Macan?