At $728,000, Ferrari Purosangue is great to drive, awful to live with
Despite the price, orders are now banked up all the way to 2026. It’s probably the best looking and certainly the most striking SUV the world has ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it’s attractive.
The Ferrari Purosangue, a V12-engined, barn-sized SUV that makes the kind of exploding noises you’d only expect to hear on a battlefield, is a vehicle that simply should not exist. And there are many people, including me, and I’ll wager some Italian enthusiasts who work for the brand, who wish it didn’t.
For many years, Ferrari folk swore blind that the company would never lower, or perhaps raise itself to make something as gauche as an SUV. Indeed, I remember one boss of the company declaring that it would only happen over his dead body (he’s still alive, but no longer with the brand, I wonder why).
I really wish that supercar companies would just focus on their knitting – presumably involving Angora, perhaps with gold threads – and stay away from SUVs altogether, but when Lamborghini’s total sales rose by 300 per cent with the introduction of its ugly Urus soft roader, and even Bentley and Rolls-Royce headed up and outback, this Ferrari was always coming.
The company itself still refuses to call it an SUV, of course, perhaps because it feels some sense of shame, insisting on calling it “a four-door Ferrari”.
To be fair, it’s probably the best looking and certainly the most striking SUV the world has ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it’s attractive.
Many of my colleagues swoon over its low-slung and allegedly sexy design, but not me. In the flesh I just find it too big, too bulgy, too much, perhaps just too wrong. Although I will grant you it looks very pretty from certain angles, overall it just does not live up to the brand. Park it next to a Ferrari 296 GTB, as I did recently, and the comparison looks absurd.
The Purosangue has a lot to overcome, then, as I approach it to go for a drive along a suitably spectacular road in New Zealand’s South Island, one that looks like it has somehow been transported here straight from Scotland.
There’s the fact that I want to hate it, the impossible to ignore bulk and weight of the thing – it’s almost 5m long, 2m high and 1.58m high and weighs 2173kg – and then the laws of gravity and physics.
Any vehicle this big must surely pitch and dive under braking and acceleration – the Lambo Urus certainly does – and, when pushed, will misbehave and body roll in sharp corners. My expectation, then, is disappointment, which is an unusual feeling when approaching a Ferrari.
I should not have been so foolish, of course. What you notice first, and most, is that the 6.5-litre V12 is an absolute engineering marvel, capable of revving freely and with tumultuous pleasure to 8500rpm at which point, in any gear, you will be making “oooph” sounds, if there’s any oxygen left in your chest at all.
This thing makes 533kW and 716Nm and if you engage the Launch Control – at which point you can feel the Purosangue lowering itself to the ground for maximum attack, before everything, including your eyeballs, explodes – you will take all of this considerable mass to 100km/h in 3.3 seconds, or to 200km/h in 10.6.
The speed is less of a shock, of course – Ferrari clearly have that side of motoring nailed – than the handling, which is just absurdly, almost logic-defyingly good. This is a hell of a large sports car, but it feels like a smaller one, partly because the steering is so tight and sharp and perfectly calibrated, but also because the Purosangue simply refuses to misbehave.
Go and stop as sharply as you like and the damn thing just sits flat, with no porpoising or other misbehaviour. This means you always feel like you’ve got steering bite the front end and endless flight and fright at the rear.
Hurl it into bends, which it can approach with radical rapidity, and it simply hunkers down and holds on, much like a proper Ferrari would. It is incredible, and the more you enjoy it, the more confidence you feel to push it, despite its dimensions, yet you never feel like you’re getting anywhere near the limits of its grip, or talent.
There are flaws, of course, like the fact that if you don’t spec up the expensive interior detailing – the versions with lashings of carbon fibre are lovely – you get some nasty, cheap, sub Alfa Romeo-spec plastics on the dash.
Most unforgivably, though, you also get a user interface for things like running Apple CarPlay that is truly awful. Theoretically you can run it though the little touch pad on the steering wheel, but it works about as well as shouting swear words out the window (and believe me, I tried both). You look in vain for some simple buttons on the dash or some more sensible method, but there isn’t one.
If it wasn’t for the price, and the fact that I hate SUVs, this feature would stop me buying a Purosangue for sure. Great to drive, awful to live with.
The price is an issue, of course, at $728,000, as is the fact that orders are now banked up all the way to 2026. You might be able to get one, but you’ll have to promise to spec yours up well beyond $1m (people have spent as much as $1.2m) to get a dealer’s attention, and you’ll still have to wait two years for delivery, and possibly more.
What you would then have, however, is arguably the best driving SUV the world has ever seen and, thanks to that glorious and surely historic V12 engine, something of a collector’s item too.
You can argue that the Ferrari Purosangue should not exist, but what’s not in doubt is that it won’t exist for too long.