Ferrari’s future will include an FUV

FCA boss confirms what we all feared... a Ferrari SUV is under development – part of a sales push past 10,000

We’re in a huge anteroom with horrible carpet in Detroit’s Cobo Arena. Right now it’s FCA and Ferrari boss Sergio Marchionne working the foor. After 14 years at the helm, Marchionne has the air of a war-weary old general, but even as he enters the twilight era as FCA CEO – 18 months to go – he remains as colourful and charismatic as ever.

The room is rammed with several hundred mostly American, mostly business journalists, so the subject matter is chewy. Then we decide the time is right to bring up the Unmentionable. The small matter of Ferrari’s mooted entry into the most proftable of all segments, the SUV. Mr Marchionne, BBC TopGear here. I’d like to ask you about another truck, the FUV, the Ferrari utility vehicle…

“You called it a truck??”

[Several hundred American business scribes chuckle into their beards]

Well, what would you call it?

“I’d call it an FUV. It’s whatever Ferrari thinks a utility vehicle ought to look like.”

Can you elaborate please?

“Yeah, it’s whatever Ferrari thinks a utility vehicle will look like. Look, by defnition it’s going to drive like a Ferrari, it has to. We don’t know how to do it otherwise. There are enough people outside Ferrari who would go absolutely nuts if I tried to do that. Just a utility vehicle. I’d be taken to the shed. I may still be taken to the shed…”

This is an interesting comment, not least because it moves the narrative on from the point where he famously observed, “You’d have to shoot me” rather than sanction a Ferrari 4x4/SUV/FUV, frmly into the afrmative present tense. (It’ll also prompt speculation about what sort of shed he’s talking about. Presumably one made of carbon.)

We know Ferrari is fat-out developing whatever “a utility vehicle ought to look like”, and Centro Stile has worked up a number of proposals. While Flavio Manzoni and his team are a highly talented crew, they’re not magicians.

Yet how long can the most prestigious, and proftable, car brand of all hold out, as the super-luxury SUV axis is tilted further by the Bentley Bentayga, Rolls-Royce Cullinan, and Lamborghini Urus? No more: we’d put money on Ferrari unveiling the, um, FUV at the Geneva show in 2020.

Marchionne went further still. He told Bloomberg that if there is an electric supercar to be built, then Ferrari would be frst. “People are amazed at what Tesla did with a supercar; I’m not trying to minimise what Elon did, but I think it’s doable by all of us.”

An SUV and an all-electric Ferrari, to go with the Dino V6 and hybrids also still in the mix? No wonder Ferrari’s top guys are said to be working 15-hour days, six days a week. Ferrari’s AWD system in the GTC4Lusso is complicated but clever, and there’s no doubt the know-how’s there to create something credible. We’ll have to do more digging on the electric thing, though.

Marchionne will continue to run Ferrari until 2021, two years after stepping down at FCA. He’s spoken in the past about the challenges of balancing Ferrari’s exclusive allure against the current plan to double operating proft to around €2bn by 2022. He seems to have reconciled himself with these expansion goals, and the shareholders demand it, so get set for Ferrari sales to surge past 10,000, buoyed

– or compromised, depending on your view

– by non-traditional models.