‘You need to listen to the market’: Inside Maserati’s plan to go all electric by 2028
The luxury car maker’s chief engineer believes a lull in EV sales is temporary and reveals how the company overcame one of the biggest problems with electric motors.
Maserati’s engineering boss Davide Danesin believes the lull in electric vehicle sales is temporary, with the future of motoring set to continue moving away from the internal combustion engine.
The luxury Italian car maker is making a big bet on EVs, planning to go fully electric by 2028. It’s a big move for the 110-year-old ‘House of Trident’, which was built on motorsport and performance, with the roar of its engines – according to English author Anthony Horowitz – sounding like a “vast sheet of calico endlessly torn”.
But Mr Dansesin believes electric vehicles are more efficient, despite their batteries making them heavier, and Maserati needs to adapt to drivers demanding greener alternatives.
This is despite the EV boom faltering, with the latest new car sales figures showing that the alternative vehicles have lost some of their spark. In Australia, EV sales slumped 5.1 per cent to 6194 units in April.
Tesla, Australia’s best-selling EV brand, delivered 386,810 cars globally in the first quarter of this year, a 8.5 per cent fall on the same period in 2023.
Tesla attributed the decline to the production ramp of its updated Model 3, factory shutdowns and shipping diversions from Israel’s war with Hamas in the Red Sea. But consumers have been wary of making the switch amid concerns about the premium paid for battery-powered cars and the ability to recharge them easily.
All of these are temporary speed bumps, Mr Danesin said.
“We are going through a small period in which EVs are becoming a little bit less growing than before,” Mr Danesin tells The Australian from Maserati’s headquarters in Modena.
“Electrification is providing a challenge to the companies and to the car makers in gaining the amount of money they were getting before. The transition will take longer, but the future is electrification.”
In the past year, Maserati has released three fully electric models, including the GranTurismo Folgore, the SUV Grecale Folgore and last month the convertible GranCabrio Folgore. In the same period, it retired its V8 engine, which it launched in 1959.
In the next four years, its entire range will be fully electric. But the shift hasn’t been without its problems – namely how to excite vehicles with an electric powertrain, which is much quieter than the roar of a V8 internal combustion engine.
As an engineer, the softer sounds make sense. “Electric propulsion is not creating sound because it’s efficient. It’s not losing energy in creating sound,” Mr Danesin said.
But it’s not what consumers expect from a Maserati.
“The electric sound is usually not so nice, not so sexy because there’s a lot of high frequencies.
“From our experience, in everyday life, we connect the high frequencies to appliances for example. People don’t like that sound, so you need to modify it a bit.”
It’s a problem that most car makers have grappled with. BMW hired Academy Award-winning composer Han Zimmer to create a musical score for EV motorists in an effort to simulate the excitement from driving a fossil fuel powered car.
But Mr Danesin and his team at Maserati have taken a different approach, mindful of creating anything synthetic or could be seen as kitsch.
“The way to generate sound from current was invented tens of years ago, and it’s a speaker. You may like it, or you may not like it, but what is creating sound waves from electric is a speaker. And so, having said that, you want to do it in the best way.
“What we did, first of all, we connected the sound to the current going to the inverters. The inverters are very much the electronics which is driving the current to the motor and developing power, so in a way it’s linked to the performance of the car.”
Mr Danesin’s team then added additional waves of sound – which it recorded from its V8 vehicles – to the inverter.
“To be clear we are not generating a V8 sound over the current, the sound is definitely an electric dynamic sound. But when you go to tone, the tones of the sound, we modify it a bit, adding tones that typically come from ICE (internal combustion engine) engines.
“We didn’t try to imitate too much the ICE engines with the super loud sounds. We tried to be a little more elegant.
“When you hear our sound, you actually feel the sound is linked to what the car is doing, but there is a kind of reminiscence of tones that you’ve heard from the ICE experience you had in the previous 30 years, particularly with high performance engines. We think we’ve released a good result. The good news, to us, is 90 per cent of people are providing very good feedback.”
Mr Danesin said there is room to modify this sound technology further, particularly in more sporty models.
“But the risk is, if you push yoo much, and you lose the credibility to respect what the electric propulsion is doing, then it starts to be a fake thing, and we need to avoid that. This is a must to avoid.”
While Maserati chief executive Davide Grasso says the company is “going full throttle to lead change on electrification”, Mr Danesin said it wasn’t rigid in its 2028 target.
“At the end of the day, we made our target because we need to develop a lot of technology in advance but, for sure, everybody needs to listen to the market, so you need to be smart enough to keep some flexibility to adapt if something changes.
“It was a must for us to start the electrification because we are building a way for the future. Then, when this future will really happen in the market, we can be flexible and answer according to it.”
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