Ferrari’s ‘practical’ choice, the GTC4 Lusso
The GTC4 Lusso is nearly double the price of a Bentley Continental GT. Can it be twice as good?
Stick a square body on the back of a coupe and, inevitably, it’ll get called a breadvan. Curious. The Ferrari GTC4 Lusso — facelift of the five-year old FF — is Ferrari’s take on the theme.
Ferrari likes having a front-engined, four-seater in its range. By default it has been a V12, and so it is here. Until the FF arrived, replacing the 612 Scaglietti, what it never had was four-wheel drive.
The FF did, and the GTC4 Lusso still does now. But the Lusso also has fourwheel steering, thanks to a development of the system that appeared on the F12tdf last year — an actuator on the toe-link on the rear suspension can give a little positive or negative lock, to increase either agility or stability.
That’s the most notable mechanical thing in a raft of changes that Ferrari thinks warrant an entire name change: FF out, GTC4 Lusso in.
Here are those changes in no particular order, then. There’s a restyling of the outside — the rear in particular, where twin tail lamps each side replace single ones. There are some aero and rear roof profile changes too. The design at the front has the Lusso appearing lower, wider and more aggressive than the FF, because engine changes demand more cooling, and the grille opening has been widened as a result.
And what demands more cooling? Why, a more powerful engine, of course. Because 660hp is never enough, but 690hp is just about right. The GTC4’s 6.3-litre naturally aspirated V12 makes its peak power at 8,000rpm, runs into the limiter at 8,250rpm and it drives all four wheels via a sevenspeed dual-clutch automatic.
There are big changes inside. The steering wheel is new, and Ferrari has vastly improved the ergonomics of the buttons on it. And then there’s the new infotainment system. There’s a screen. A wide one. Neatly, it’s covered at the corners by the swoopy bits atop the dashboard, so it looks nicely integrated and rather classy.
On the passenger side, it’s augmented by a wide, short touch-screen panel so the passenger can fiddle around with some settings, too. Nice touch.
The GTC4 genuinely seats four, while there’s a 450-litre boot, which is wide, though far from flat. But the upper halves of the rear seats split/fold to increase the volume to 800-litres.
Fire up the GTC4 and although it makes a rich noise, it doesn’t make a deafening one. This is, for a car of this type, a good thing. It has a supercar engine, but instantly the modest noise that it makes suggests it knows its place.
Sure, it mooches around amenably enough at low speeds, at which point the gearbox shuffles ratios cleanly and smoothly and the ride is fairly composed. But this is an engine that ‘only’ makes 697Nm of torque and makes it at 5,750rpm. So if you want to make progress, you will have to exercise your right boot.
Do so and the noise hardens, response quickens, and the whole 1,920kg caboodle finally takes off. Throttle response at any revs is good, but the strength of acceleration just grows and grows as you wind around the rev-counter. Upshifts feel instant and downshifts nicely brapped if you’ve got revs wound on.
That’s something the GTC4 remains good at, too, by the way. Adaptive dampers mean the ride/handling balance is always a good one. I can’t think of a road situation when you’d really want the dampers in their sport setting. But even if you put the drivetrain into sport, you can push the dampers back into a softer ‘bumpy road’ setting.
Ferraris steer quickly which can make some feel too lively, but the GTC4’s measures around 2.2 turns lock-to-lock, and it’s stable at speed — yet responsive to turn-in. Doubtless the rear-steer helps in both of those situations, but you don’t really notice it working, unlike in the massively aggressive F12tdf on which the system made its debut. Here it’s honed, and more suited to giving a bit more agility on turn in, yet a bit more stability on the highway. In the end, could I honestly sit here and say to you that what you really need is a four-seat pseudo estate car that doesn’t have back doors, has a smallish boot by the standards of things, and has a supercar engine that will return you 350g/km of carbon dioxide? No, of course not.
Especially bearing in mind that it costs nearly twice as much as a Bentley Continental GT or an Aston Martin DB11. It is not twice as good as the former and I doubt it’ll be twice as good as the latter.
And most likely, none of that matters. This is the only place you can get four seats, a decent boot, a naturally-aspirated V12 engine that revs over 8,000rpm, and that is all wrapped in a quirkily appealing body. There’s a reason it’s the only place you can do that.