'Brilliant' Purosangue could be improved with a different engine
So now we know. Contrary to all the rumour and speculation, this all new Purosangue is not Ferrari’s first SUV. It doesn’t have the height, the driving position or the space in the back or boot. It can’t seat five people and its towing limit is 0kg. Before the Purosangue Ferrari had never made an SUV; it still hasn’t.
Think of it instead, and it seems strange to employ a word more commonly used to describe a Nissan Qashqai than a V12 Ferrari costing over £300,000, as a crossover. It’s a bit elevated, it has coupé-like styling, but four doors, a hatchback tailgate and rear seats that fold flat. A bit of everything.
The only available engine is the 6.5-litre V12 from the 812 Superfast, but detuned from 789bhp to 715bhp to benefit low down torque. Ferrari will absolutely not be drawn on other potential engines but nor are they denied, so it seems more than likely that, at the very least, the 3-litre V6 hybrid powertrain from the 296 GTB will be made available at some stage, offering as it does more power, more torque, better fuel consumption, decimated CO2 figures and an ability still to be sold in countries like the UK that ban sales of pure ICE engines from 2030. But it won’t sound like a V12.
Its place in the Ferrari line-up seems as natural as that of all those four-seat Ferraris that it succeeds, a line almost as long lived as its pure sports car models. When Porsche introduced the Cayenne a little over 20 years ago it induced near heart failure in Stuttgart traditionalists. For the Ferrari cognoscenti, the mental leap from a GTC4Lusso to a Purosangue is comparatively a small step.
The cabin has its drawbacks – pressure pads on the steering wheel replace buttons and there’s no built-in navigation system
Mauro Ujetto
Ferrari’s recent four-seaters have all been remarkably spacious and the Purosangue is no different. I am 6ft 3in and could sit behind an only slightly shorter driver in better than reasonable comfort. It’s no S-Class Mercedes – the fully adjustable rear seat is too high and too hard for that – but the rear hinged doors work brilliantly and all by themselves confer a level of everyday practicality upon the Purosangue visited upon no previous Ferrari in history. For the first time, a Ferrari can be said to be a family car. And if you’re looking for reasons to explain the minimum 18-month waiting list (some say two years) despite its price, I expect you’re more likely to find it here than anywhere else.
But it’s not just those rear doors that differentiate this Ferrari from all that have gone before. It’s its weight too. An honest 2170kg at the kerb, it is fully a quarter tonne more than the mass of the GTC4Lusso. It may not look, sound or function like an SUV but its weight is of that order. And because we’re so used to high-performance cars of that kind of mass being powered by twin-turbo V8 engines with enough torque to reverse the rotation of the planet at idle, the V12 feels very, very different. And not always in a good way.
“If you feed it the revs it loves so much it’ll respond accordingly”
Of course if you feed it the revs it loves so much it’ll respond accordingly and with that mesmerising V12 soundtrack, but if you’re just cruising and ask it to dispatch a line of traffic at the twitch of a toe, the response is quite modest. The question is whether an engine designed to deliver the best of its performance in the last 25% of its powerband is the ideal choice for a four-door family Ferrari. For me and for this kind of car, I’d lose a lot of that top-end bite for an increase in low to mid-range urge.
Its chassis is far better suited to the car with clever Multimatic actuators sitting on top of each coil sprung suspension tower, acting like active anti-roll bars and ensuring the car corners flat, fast and with total security. The 812’s four-wheel-steer system makes the Purosangue feel more wieldy than its weight and wheelbase would suggest, and while its considerable width and paucity of steering feel limit both the quantity and quality of available fun relative to other Ferraris, relative to other super luxury family cars, it’s an absolute dream to drive.
But it is not without its flaws. The haptic pressure pads on the steering wheel are a very poor substitute for buttons and switches, there’s no baked-in navigation system so you have to rely on your smartphone for that and hope it’s not lost, stolen, accidentally left behind and that you’re always somewhere with data reception. And if you do want to see where you’re going you’ll have to live without a rev-counter because it disappears to make way for the navigation screen.
In many ways the Purosangue is Ferrari’s cleverest car to date. It has found a market niche for itself where a genuinely usable family car can be positioned, opening a market it has never previously enjoyed while avoiding what would for Ferrari be the doubly difficult position of being late to launch an SUV. The purists will be happy, the pragmatists who just want an all-purpose Ferrari will be happy too and Ferrari will also be happy: instead of being the last major luxury brand to launch an SUV (save McLaren) it is instead the first to launch an ultra-high performance crossover. Others will follow. Me? Fine job though Ferrari has done, I feel the best is yet to come and this will be not with a 6.5-litre V12 motor, but a 3-litre V6 hybrid. Heresy, I know, but such is the world we live in today.
• Price £313,120
• Engine 6.5 litres, 12 cylinders, petrol
• Power 715bhp at 8250rpm
• Torque 528lb ft at 6250rpm
• Weight 2170kg
• Power to weight 329bhp per tonne
• Transmission Eight-speed double clutch, four-wheel drive
• 0-60mph 3.3sec
• Top speed 193mph
• Economy 16.9mpg
• CO2 393g/km
• Verdict School-run superstar.
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