Of all the many sports cars to roll out of the Ferrari factory in Maranello over the years, none has ever been quite as odd as the Ferrari GTC4Lusso (née Ferrari FF). Grand tourers have long been a staple of the Prancing Horse lineup, but when the FF arrived in 2011 to replace the elegant 612 Scaglietti, it broke with tradition in two crucial ways: it was a hatchback, and it packed all-wheel-drive. A midlife facelift changed the name to GTC4Lusso, tweaked the design a bit and brought a new RWD version powered by a twin-turbo V8 (the GTC4Lusso T).
Well, it seems as though it won’t be the odd duck in the Ferrari flock anymore. The GTC4Lusso, it turns out, has officially been discontinued.
Henry PhillipsThat was the word handed down from on high to the crew at Road & Track yesterday, who reached out to Ferrari in response to reports that production the AWD hatchback was being stopped. Maranello’s response left little room for hope: “In accordance with its five-year model strategy announced in 2017 and the company’s standard model life cycle,” the carmaker told Road & Track, “Ferrari has phased out production of the GTC4Lusso and GTC4Lusso T.” (Interestingly, just five days earlier, the brand suggested to The Drive that production was ongoing, suggesting the hatchback gran turismo‘s run may have juuuuust concluded.)
Henry PhillipsSo does that mean for fans of usable four-seat Ferraris? Well, it just means they’ll have to wait for the new Ferrari Purosangue, the brand’s forthcoming SUV due out in 2022. (Yes, that rumble you just felt was Enzo Ferrari quaking in his grave.) Little is known for sure about that new crossover — we don’t even know if it’ll pack a V12 or a V8, though the latter seems more likely, possibly outfitted with hybrid tech like that found on the SF90 Stradale — but Ferrari chief technical officer Michael Leiters told Autocar last year that it’ll be both “a real SUV” and “a huge differentiation of concept to existing SUVs.” In other words, expect it to be even more of an outlier than the GTC4Lusso.