![]() Ferrari is holding triple-figure orders and expressions of interest in Australia, and though it’s not sure how many cars we’ll actually get, a lucky few should see their vehicle arriving before the end of the year. The Purosangue will only ever add to the brand’s sales total, not dominate it. While Porsche could now rightfully be considered the Cayenne company, and the Urus consumes most of Lambo’s total sales volume, Ferrari says it won’t ever become the company that used to make supercars. Helping slow deliveries is Ferrari’s policy of placing a production cap on the Purosangue, with the, ahem, SUV not to exceed 20 percent of the brand’s total production capacity. Global wait times now exceed 18 months on average, and while the brand won’t be called on specifics, we’d expect new customers to be waiting years to put one on an Australian driveway. Making that number even more irrelevant is the fact that you can’t actually get one. Yes, the Purosangue lists in Australia at $728,000, before all on-road costs, but Ferrari says every Purosangue will go through its personalisation, Atelier and Tailor Made programs, meaning no two will be exactly the same, also adding significant cost to the advertised sticker price. Though, to be fair, that last point is largely academic. It was sold out long before the brand had even put a vehicle on the road-and before anyone knew what it would look like, what would be powering it, or what it would cost. It’s impossible to argue that Ferrari has made the wrong decision in making the Purosangue. Add to that a screaming red line of 8,250 rpm, a snarling exhaust note that you don’t just hear but genuinely feel too, and the kind of pulse-igniting acceleration you expect from any Ferrari fitted with a 12-cylinder nuclear warhead, and you’ve got a drive experience that feels like a ticketed event every time you press the engine start button. The letters “S”, “U” and “V”-at least when said in that order-have almost certainly been banned at Maranello, with the brand instead referring to it as an “FUV” (“F” for Ferrari).īut they could have easily swapped that first “S” for “Super”, with Ferrari shoehorning its best and most operatic engine into the Purosangue. That’s about the only time you’ll ever hear someone with a Prancing Horse on their business card mention that term, by the way. One which is not born from ‘we want to make a Ferrari SUV’.” And we end up with the object you see today. ![]() And then you mix all these things together. That’s Ferrari high, not regular-car high. And those properties were good comfort, a decent ride height to make sure that you can get virtually anywhere, and a very high level of performance. “Instead, we sat down and tried to understand the properties we want this car to achieve. But we didn’t want to start from a category that already exists, and then have to take those characteristics as a starting point,” says Andrea Militello, Ferrari’s lead exterior designer, whose fingerprints are all over the Purosangue. But what it’s definitely not, says Ferrari, is an SUV.“When you talk about ‘SUV’, you’re talking about a category with existing characteristics. And, as far as we know, it’s the only family-focused vehicle in existence that’s powered by a screaming naturally aspirated petrol V12 engine. It’s the first high-riding Ferrari, and it’s the first fitted with four doors and four proper seats. But if not an SUV, just what is this all-new Purosangue? The answer, we now know, is of course not. Ferrari wasn’t going to let an SUV-shaped cash cow like that escape, surely? It wouldn’t be a Ferrari.”Fast-forward to 2023, and the Urus is now responsible for more than half of all of Lamborghini’s sales, delivering incredible levels of profitability-and unlocking a new, much bigger customer pool-through an SUV that enraged and excited in equal measure. We can’t make something just because it’s the normal trend. It’s not within our DNA, and it’s not something we’re ever going to look at,” Manzoni said. So much so that three years earlier, archrival Lamborghini had confirmed a high-riding performance car that would eventually be named the Urus. SUVs had already begun their cannibalisation of every other body shape and vehicle type. To the media asking the questions, it was a future that seemed inevitable. The speaker was Ferrari design chief Flavio Manzoni, who, in 2015, was fielding persistent questions about when the famed Prancing Horse would turn its attention to a debut SUV. “Enzo would turn in his grave.” Denials don’t come much more emphatic than that in the hallowed halls of Maranello, where Ferrari’s legendary founder is rightly revered as a cross between a company-wide father figure and a bona fide Italian saint.
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