Rumours of a Ferrari SUV have been doing the rounds for years. You didn’t need to be a marketing guru to know that any such car with a prancing horse logo on its bonnet would sell like ricotta hotcakes. And after all, the other big players in luxury motoring — Porsche, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini— were all doing it. But the word coming out of Ferrari HQ was that SUVs were trucks. And Ferrari doesn’t make trucks.
Watching other brands enjoy soaring sales can’t have been easy. Old rival Lamborghini has handed over the keys to approaching 25,000 of its Urus since 2018. But the official reason Ferrari is launching the Purosangue now is technological. Only now, it says, is Ferrari in a position to produce a car this big that still drives like a Ferrari. Oh, and the Purosangue isn’t a SUV anyway.
It’s less immediately an SUV as we know them and more a GT car that has been weaned on creatine and power shakes. You can see Ferrari’s point about why the distinction matters. Yes, it makes the kind of noise that turns every mountain tunnel into an opportunity to wind down the window just to hear the echo but, allowances aside, an MPG number in the early teens feels a little like drawing the curtains while the climate emergency plays out in the garden. A hybrid will surely come down the line.