Customization program Maserati Fuoriserie: Feels like Beckham

With that you would attract attention even on the Düsseldorfer Kö or in Munich’s Leopoldstraße and you wouldn’t even have to look like ex-soccer star David Beckham. His brand new Maserati MC20 alone is enough. The 630 hp mid-engine sports car with the huge butterfly doors is an eye-catcher – and even more so when it has been refined into a unique specimen, as in Beckham’s case. The world star even avoided using bright colors or extroverted decors. Instead, he expressed his love for his adopted city of Miami and his local football club, Inter Miami. In addition to a lot of black, pink is worn there. And so Beckham’s MC20 got a color mix of glossy and matte black and a small, but quite noticeable pinch of pink. That should probably also please wife Victoria.

Whether everyone likes it remains to be seen. One should not argue about taste. And certainly not when it comes to vehicle customization, which has gained massively in importance in recent years. What used to be reserved for more or less reputable tuning companies is now what manufacturers of luxury vehicles prefer to do themselves: the margin that would be wasted is too large. A hint of a special color, a few additional carbon applications and a wheel design advertised as exclusive – many customers are already willing to pay significantly more for this appearance. Manufacturers such as Porsche and BMW have been making good money from this for years, while brands such as Rolls-Royce and Ferrari even produce one-offs with their own bodies at the customer’s request and for a generous fee.

Maserati doesn’t go that far with its newly introduced Fuoriserie department. The term means “not off the peg”, i.e. made to measure. It’s all about stylistic aspects: about colors, decor and materials – not about independent bodies, even if project manager Vittorio Gabba doesn’t want to rule it out for the future: “We only started with it last year, and there’s no need for something like that only the competence and capacities, but also the corresponding customer requests.” After all, there should already be body modifications for changed aerodynamics in the foreseeable future.

But even without these options, Maserati’s Fuoriserie business is going well. Last year there were already 800 vehicles that were personalized by customers. This year there will be twice as many. The series production of the MC20 super sports car, which has meanwhile started, plays an important role in this, because with base prices of over 200,000 euros, customers’ money is looser anyway. Logically, with the sports sedans Ghibli and Quattroporte as well as the SUV Levante, it is more the top engines where customers are willing to dig significantly deeper into their pockets. Gabba knows: “If the vehicle is designed completely freely according to the customer’s wishes, the vehicle price can double.”

In addition to David Beckham, the youngest star chef in the world, Massimiliano Alajmo, also had a Levante designed according to his own ideas. Kitchen star Missimo Bottura, who gave his SUV a look as if a few buckets of paint had been poured over the car and in the interior, drove it particularly wild. What all three have in common is that they not only had the wherewithal, but also that they were in close contact with the Maserati design center in order to implement their ideas on the vehicle. Even Beckham pondered between three different shades of pink until the very end before making his decision.

Not all customers can and want to invest that much time and energy. They often only have a certain color direction in mind without having thought about details or accompanying measures. The situation is comparable to bespoke tailors, whose customers have a specific material or color in mind, but know nothing about the shape of the bag, lining or head design. To accommodate these customers, the Maserati designers created a kind of color and pattern catalog that can serve as a source of inspiration. The whole thing is divided into “Futura” with modern-futuristic colors and decors and “Corse” with designs reminiscent of old racing cars. Within each line there are predetermined, stylistically appropriate options. The customer is taken by the hand and guided through the jungle of possibilities. The design process takes place at home on the computer or at the retailer.

Of course, this approach is reminiscent of an extended list of special equipment. Nevertheless, this Fuoriserie offer is in a completely different league in terms of price. For example, a metallic finish for the Levante costs around 1,200 euros, while the three-coat finish is on the price list at 3,200 euros. If, on the other hand, the customer opts for a Fuoriserie finish, 20,000 euros are due. A matching decorative strip is then called for another almost 10,000 euros. On the one hand, this is due to the price of exclusivity, for example, so that you don’t see a Ghibli in the flashy “Hypergreen” color on every corner. But there are also technical reasons. “Vehicles from the Fuoriserie program are painted by hand and have to be removed from the normal production process,” explains Gabba: “And all the decor lines are painted by hand and not wrapped in foil.”

While even the individual vehicle paint finishes apparently meet the highest quality standards and are absolutely uniform, the manual work is more evident in other areas. For example, on painted wheel rims with a five millimeter wide, hand-applied colored border. Slight tolerances are visible here and Gabba remembers: “The colleagues from production didn’t want to accept that at first, because machines could do it more precisely. We also told the customer that. But he insisted on the hand-painted wheels, after all they were one-of-a-kind.” And that’s what Fuoriserie is all about.