Yahoo Autos 2025 Maserati Grecale Folgore First Drive: Roughly translated 'electric Maserati SUV'
LECCE, Italy – Maserati believes its customers should decide if and when they go electric. While it’s building up its range of EVs for motorists who think a twin-turbocharged V6 engine is the automotive equivalent of the horseshoe crab – the next-generation Quattroporte and Levante will notably be electric – it’s still developing and selling gasoline-burning cars for those who are less than enthralled by battery technology.
It launched the Grecale, its smallest SUV and its most affordable model by a significant margin, in 2022 and initially made it available with either a four- or a six-cylinder engine. It’s a bet that paid off: Aimed at the Porsche Macan, the Grecale has predictably become the Italian company’s best-selling model. The range expands later this year with the all-electric 2025 Maserati Grecale Folgore. In Italian, it's name means "Greek Lightning," so that's fun.
Some carmakers, such as Mercedes-Benz, set their electric and gasoline-burning models apart by lumping the EVs into a sub-brand and giving them a powertrain-specific design. Maserati sees this approach as an avenue that’s best detoured, so the Folgore doesn’t scream, “Hi, folks, look at me: I’m electric!” It looks pretty much like the piston-powered Grecale with the exception of minor details. That's intentional.
“In terms of the shape of the car, we don’t want to change the customer’s perception. Our customers know Maserati as a luxury brand, but we’re also known for Italian design. We don’t want to be generic; we want to be timeless. We don’t want to follow a trend. Our mission is to achieve visual longevity,” Maserati designer Andrea Bruno told me on the sidelines of the Grecale Folgore launch. “These trends move fast. One month, everyone loves it. The month later, everyone has already forgotten it. We need to do something timeless.”
Some of the visual changes made to the Folgore help improve driving range by reducing the drag coefficient. Up front, there’s a redesigned grille with a much smaller open area. Out back, Maserati added a redesigned air diffuser. Copper-colored accents also make the Folgore stand out, and the gasoline-powered model’s three fender-mounted air intakes are filled in and fitted with LED lights.
Rame Folgore, a paint color that changes from gray-ish to brown-ish depending on the light that hits it, is EV-specific as well. It's the color you're seeing in our gallery, above. Other colors are also available. Finally, new wheel designs ranging from 19 to 21 inches were created for the Folgore.
The interior layout remains unchanged. The driver faces a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster that straddles the steering column, and the center stack is dominated by a pair of touchscreens. At the top, there’s a 12.3-inch unit that displays the infotainment system, which gains a handful of electric-only menus. Below it, right under a row of clunky buttons used to select Park, Reverse, Neutral, or Drive, there’s an 8.8-inch unit that puts the climate control system’s various menus and other miscellaneous features at your fingertips. The cool, smartwatch-like clock remains positioned in the middle of the dashboard as a reminder that Maserati is constantly balancing its heritage and its future.
Copper-colored details, including the stitching and some of the trim pieces, denote the Folgore as an electric model, and the upholstery you sit on may have lived on a fishing boat in another life. Called Econyl, it’s made using recycled nylon such as old fishing nets, fabric scraps from mills, and old carpet. No, it doesn’t smell like tuna, and no, you can’t tell it was once trash; it manages to look and feel upscale.
While the Folgore rides on an evolution of the Giorgio platform borrowed from sister company Alfa Romeo, calling it a reskinned Stelvio would be cruelly inaccurate. Maserati made significant changes to the architecture to build the Grecale on it, and it then made further modifications to electrify it. The subframes are new, for example, and much of the tuning was done specifically for the Folgore.
Power for the Folgore comes from a pair of electric motors (one per axle) that draw juice from the sizable 105-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack mounted under the passenger compartment. The pack is flat rather than T-shaped like the GranTurismo Folgore’s because Maserati wanted the EV to offer exactly the same interior space as the standard Grecale – and, to its credit, it pulled this off. That’s why there’s no frunk; Maserati considered it but decided there’s plenty of space in the trunk, including a hidden storage compartment below the floor.
