A handful of miles above Trieste were enough to convince me this is the most intimidating car the trident has ever built, in the best possible wayLiked: Doesn't feel like any EV I've driven. Torque vectoring genius kept me on the road.Not so much: Firmer, crashier ride than the ICE version, presumably the price of the battery. I wanted more time with it than I got.Foot on the brake, Corsa selected, somewhere in the hills above Trieste with Piazza Unità d'Italia and the crowds long gone from the mirrors.There's a particular kind of stillness that only exists in the second before you commit to something you're not sure you're ready for, and that's where I was sitting. No engine vibrations yet the car was very much alive underneath me. The throttle pedal sat under the ball of my foot like the end of a rope I'd been handed and told to hold onto. Somewhere below, the switchbacks fell away toward the city and the sea beyond it. Somewhere ahead of me, the better part of 800 electrically summoned horsepower was waiting for an excuse.AdvertisementAdvertisementI hadn't been properly frightened by a car's performance since I first learned to drive one. Not the pleasant, manageable adrenaline that a fast car on a good road usually deals in, but something closer to vertigo. Press the pedal, and the rope would go taut and then snap, and I'd stop being the one driving and start being a passenger to whatever the car decided to do with all that torque next.It had taken some doing to get to that point. My slot with the Folgore had already been delayed back in Piazza Unità d'Italia by a crowd of photographers who'd found it parked for a walkaround and simply wouldn't leave. Of everything parked in that square that week, this was the one car that gathered the largest audience.Dropped into GT, the default and most restrained of its four modes, none of this is remotely apparent. It rides with the quiet, slightly firm competence you'd expect of any well-sorted luxury EV, steering light, throttle response gentle enough that you could mistake it for something built for someone in no hurry at all. That's rather the trick of it. It doesn't announce what it's capable of until you go looking.What struck me hardest, even in that mild-mannered setting, was how little the Folgore felt like an electric car at all. There's an organic quality to the way it delivers its performance, a warmth and a physicality to it that I haven't found in anything else with a battery where the engine should be. It felt, oddly, as though there really was something being burned under that long bonnet, some prehistoric reserve of energy rather than a rack of lithium cells, even though I knew perfectly well there wasn't a drop of fuel anywhere in the car.AdvertisementAdvertisementWhich brings me back to the hill, and Corsa, and the rope. I pressed the pedal.It didn't build. It arrived. The switchbacks that had unfolded lazily in GT mode suddenly needed dealing with immediately. My vision narrowed to the width of the road ahead. My hands were making corrections I hadn't consciously ordered them to make. Somewhere behind and beneath me, three motors were shuffling nearly a thousand pound feet of torque between the axles many times a second, and doing it with a precision I couldn't have matched with a lifetime of practice. I wasn't driving so much as being kept, gently and very firmly, inside the boundaries of what was survivable.Sight, at that point, had exactly three jobs. Keep the car in a straight line. Spot the next ridge or pothole before the suspension found it for me. Watch the mirrors for anything blue and flashing. Everything else, the actual job of staying upright and pointed the right way through a run of hairpins, seemed to happen somewhere below conscious thought, my internal gyroscope reassigned from balance to something closer to threat assessment, reading lateral slip and rotation and answering with micro-adjustments through my arms before I'd registered asking them to.There's a hum piped into the cabin as the car picks up pace, presumably there to remind you that something dramatic is happening beneath you. It's a nice touch, but entirely unnecessary. The physics of what was actually going on did more than enough on their own to occupy every spare corner of my attention. I'm not sure my senses had room left over to appreciate a soundtrack.I only had the hill for a handful of runs, nowhere near enough to properly explore what the chassis will do at its limit, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend otherwise. But even in that limited window I could feel the slightly raised centre of gravity that comes with a battery pack mounted low and long through the floor. It doesn't sit flat the way a lot of skateboard-platform EVs do. It moves, properly, rolling into a corner and loading the outside rear tyre in a way that felt intuitive rather than corrected for. I trusted, instinctively, that the car knew exactly where it wanted to put that torque. I did not trust myself to provoke it into finding out with only an afternoon behind the wheel. Corsa itself offers three further shades of torque vectoring, Stable, Standard and Agile, and with Maserati flags still visible in my mirrors I'll admit Agile stayed a promise rather than an experiment.AdvertisementAdvertisementI should say, briefly, that I'd spent part of the previous afternoon in a Modena a few miles down this same coast. The two cars share almost every panel. Only the copper badges, the illuminated vents and the entirely different thing happening in your chest give the game away. Where the Modena wants a conversation, feels its way into a corner and waits for your input before answering, the Folgore isn't asking anything. It simply tells you what's about to happen and gives you just enough warning to brace.The numbers, for what they're worth, back up every bit of that sensation. Three motors, one up front and two at the rear, draw on a 92.5kWh battery through an 800V architecture to produce 751bhp as standard, or 818bhp with the boost mode engaged, alongside 996lb ft of torque, enough for 0-62mph in 2.7 seconds and 202mph flat out. All of that in a car that weighs a hefty 2,260kg, some 350-odd kilograms more than the Modena I'd driven earlier that day, and it shows in the way the Folgore deals with a bad edge or a sharper compression.It's firmer and, if I'm honest, a touch crashier than its combustion sibling, which I'd put down to that extra mass having to be managed rather than any shortcoming in the underlying suspension hardware. Range sits at a claimed 280-odd miles on the WLTP cycle, with Maserati quoting improvements for this latest model year that should stretch that further, and the whole car can recover 62 miles of that in around five minutes given the right charger. At a starting price north of £180,000 in the UK, subject to final confirmation for this model year, it's asking a serious amount of money for a car that will get you somewhere in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the range of the V6 sitting beside it in the showroom.None of that touches on why it left the impression it did. This is still, unmistakably, a Maserati grand tourer to look at and to sit in, every bit as beautifully finished as the Modena, just with enough copper trim and illuminated detailing to let you know what's actually under the bonnet before you've asked. But it drives like something entirely different has been smuggled inside that familiar body. I've driven cars that were faster in a straight line. I don't think I've driven one that made the act of simply resting my foot on the pedal feel like a decision with consequences.AdvertisementAdvertisementI let go of the rope eventually. I'm still not entirely sure it let go of me.Maserati GranTurismo Folgore specsMotors3x electric (1 front, 2 rear), 92.5kWh batteryPower751bhp (818bhp with boost)Torque996lb ftTransmissionSingle-speed, all-wheel drive0-62mph2.7secTop speed202mphWeight2,260kgRangec.335 miles WLTP (MY27 update, up from 280 miles via new Wheel End Disconnect system)Basic pricefrom c.£180,000 (2026 figure, UK pricing for MY27 tbc). US price cut for MY27 to $141,995, down from $199,690
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