Maserati has chosen to revive a historic name for its upcoming Jeep Grand Cherokee based SUV. The new name is LeVante and it consigns the old one, Kubang, to the automotive-name scrapheap. With the brave venture into a new market, Maserati plan to boost sales from the 6 150 units last year, to something like 50 000 by 2015, they believe. Maserati hopes that at least half of this figure will be down to the Levante. The other half will be achieved by the imminent introduction of a BMW 5-Series sized sedan called the Ghibli.
The name for its new SUV specifically means ‘east’ and is in fact a nod towards a move the Maserati brothers did back in 1919 when it moved into a bigger production facility, in LeVante, Bologna. Maserati fans will appreciate the tradition in the choice of name, others will appreciate that it sounds much better than ‘Kubang’. The LeVante SUV will be built on a Jeep Grand Cherokee platform and is meant to compete with the Porsche Cayenne, new Range Rover, BMW X5/X6 and the Mercedes-Benz ML-Class.
It should go on sale by 2014 and while no specifications were released at the Paris Motor Show, the Maserati SUV will get a range of diesel and petrol engines, one of which might be the twin-turbo, 298 kW, V6 engine touted for the Ghibli sedan.
