Giant test: Purosangue vs rivals
THE DEFINITIVE VERDICT
The V12 4x4 Purosangue is a big deal for Ferrari. But does it upend the luxury SUV sector?
FERRARI PUROSANGUE I BENTLEY BENTAYGA S IASTON MARTIN DBX 707
Rewind to the mid-2010s and imagine you’re a Ferrari manager brainstorming Maranello’s first SUV-type vehicle. There’s no platform-sharing and no predecessor, so you and your team have a blank canvas.
Your brain soon aches with the possibilities and potential pitfalls of it all, but ideas start to flow – maybe turbos for flexibility, hybridisation for efficiency, a torque converter for (this is a safe space; there are no sackable answers) towing. It’s all plausible.
Then comes the curveball – why not ditch all that? Why can’t this new Ferrari borrow only a (moderately) raised ride height, hatchback tailgate (although Ferrari calls it a four-door) and all-wheel-drive mechanicals from the SUV playbook? The rest would be stretched from Ferrari’s core like it’s on a bungee cord desperate to ping back.
That’s what we’re looking at here, of course. Purosangue – word-forword ‘pure blood’, actually ‘thoroughbred’ – represents some genuinely different thinking from a manufacturer fashionably late to SUVs and making an entrance on its own spectacular terms.
It’s very much a true Ferrari, as the name implies. You guess just by walking round its aggressively dynamic proportions. You certainly know after the briefest stint behind the wheel – from the fizz of that 6.5-litre naturally-aspirated V12, to handling sharpened by whip-crack steering, fiendishly clever suspension and an engine pushed so far back in the nose you might mistake it for the new V6.
Getting to your ski resort safely, navigating a slippery slope (hill-descent control is a Ferrari first) or dipping a wheel off the road seems the extent of Ferrari’s all-terrain ambitions here, and logically so. (Ferrari does not call it an SUV, by the way, rather pitching Purosangue as ‘the first four-door, four-seat car’ in its history.)
James Dennison was suitably blown away on the press launch. Now he’s driven the Purosangue to CAR HQ, pulling up alongside me and dropping a window. ‘That’s even better than I remember,’ he enthuses. ‘Dynamically it’s astonishing… that engine is just bloody incredible.’
Thing is, SUVs tend to be about more than sparky handling and shrieky revs, so to shine a spotlight on the Ferrari’s strengths and weaknesses, we’re testing it against two SUVs from a brace of British luxury brands. Both have reinterpreted their DNA for the SUV age, and both bring unique if more by-the-book takes on off-road-ready luxury.
Aston Martin fields the DBX 707, which currently moonlights as the F1 Medical Car (a clue that it holds much more stuff t
