Editor's letter: How to get Maserati out of its rut

The demise of the middle market has been a trend of the automotive industry over the past decade, as volume brands have attempted to move mostly up (Ford, Peugeot, Volvo) and occasionally down (Citroën) in their positioning to ensure they stand for something more than just pumping out cars at volume - sharpening their styling and often simplifying model ranges in the process. There remains another middle market in the industry. It’s between the premium players like BMW and Mercedes-Benz and luxury brands like Aston Martin, Bentley and Ferrari, and it includes car makers capable of making genuine supercars (or super-SUVs) as well as diesel family cars. Jaguar, Land Rover, Maserati and Porsche are among those that can claim residence here, and their respective plights show just how hard it is to compete in this most unusual part of the market. Go too low in your pricing and positioning and too high with your volume and you risk damaging your brand allure and harming prestige and profitability. Go too high and you can alienate your existing customer base while failing to attract new customers from those brands that you’ve matched in pricing but not necessarily quality. Land Rover and Porsche have been standout success stories over the past couple of decades in rising upwards with cars out of this upper middle market, and their successes are there for all to see. What they’ve done so well is ensure that there's an integrity and a consistency to their cars that are traceable no matter what segment they’ve gone into. The existence of a £40k Range Rover Evoque doesn’t undermine the £200k Range Rover SV, for example, and the spirit of the 911 is felt across everything Porsche does. Conversely, Jaguar moved down but failed to establish itself as more of a volume player before performing a handbrake turn and planning to go ultra-exclusive in a brand reinvention – although not before openly criticising the models that it has to sell in the meantime. Still, at least there is a bold, clear plan at Jaguar for the future and there remains a great interest in it. Maserati is following more of the Jaguar blueprint than Porsche’s yet with seemingly no big bang in front of it to get it out of its malaise. Over the past decade or so, it tried to compete with the German premium brands with diesel executive cars that were even less successful than Jaguar’s, and now it too is all in with an all-electric future. Yet while Jaguar is coming up with new models in new segments, Maserati’s focus has been on electrifying its existing range and nameplates, which haven’t exactly set the industry alight in their previous guises. Maserati’s sales halved in the first half of this year to just 6500 (UK sales mirrored this performance, halving to less than 300 – barely any more than Fisker) and it fell into the red, with an operating loss of €82 million. While some mitigation comes from the brand ending production of some models, sales of its recently introduced Grecale SUV also dropped sharply in just its second year on sale. Even after a supposed reinvention and relaunch, Maserati is drifting and failing to capitalise on the momentum of its quite brilliant halo car, the MC20. A £220k-plus supercar that’s as evocative as anything launched in that market this decade, the MC20’s sparkle and lineage clearly isn’t resonating with prospective buyers of the brand's other models. The financial results prompted Stellantis CFO Natalie Knight to suggest the group might consider a sale of Maserati in the future, while CEO Carlos Tavares said that if brands don’t make money, “we will shut them down”. Stellantis has since denied that Maserati is currently for sale and said that, like all its brands, Maserati has investment secured for 10 years and a chance to prove itself. Maserati has a large amount of autonomy within Stellantis, and under the leadership of Davide Grasso – who prior to joining Maserati was in charge of the Converse plimsoll arm of Nike – is the only brand broken out in its accounts. With that will always come greater scrutiny, and you don’t need to read too far between the lines to work out who Tavares’s comments were aimed at, with some very public pressure applied. In Tavares’s terms, the way out for Maserati is to become profitable and make more money. Under the meritocracy that is the automotive industry, that can at least be achieved by making truly desirable cars that people want to buy. Maserati must go again to escape the middle market that it's seemingly lost in.