Exclusive: Ralph Gilles talks Maserati, UX and beyond

On a candlelit evening in Carmel Valley, FCA’s Global President of Product Design showed us Maserati’s new special editions and gave us an exclusive update on his team’s current efforts.

During Monterey Car Week, Maserati showed limited editions of the Quattroporte S Q4 GranLusso and the Levante S GranSport, which will be limited to 50 examples each and exclusively for the US market. All 100 vehicles are furnished with a ‘Pelletessuta’ interior; a thin, finely woven Nappa leather made by Ermeneglido Zegna.

“This is the first time this has been done in any of our vehicles,” Gilles tells us. “It’s coming from Zegna’s leather goods made in Milan.” For durability, Gilles says Pelletessuta gets the same coating that Maserati puts on all of its leather seats. It appears in black on the special-edition Levante with open-pore wood, along with tri-coat exterior paint in Bronzo. The Quattroporte uses dark brown Pelletessuta and Blu Sofisticato exterior paint.

Maserati chose the US for the special editions in part because Gilles says it can be difficult for customers to find a configuration that’s truly individual. “In this space people like to have unique tailored vehicles. In Europe everyone orders their cars, but here in the US the dealers order the cars.” Gilles also says there will be no allocations and the limited-edition models will be sold on a first come, first served basis.

On a broader front, Gilles and the design team have been focusing on further developing each brand’s identity as they have weathered numerous management and structural changes over the past few years, including the death of FCA boss Sergio Marchionne just over a year ago. “The biggest thing has for us has been brand protection,” Gilles says. “We have dedicated designers that live and breathe the respective brands – so the Maserati team, they wake up and they sketch Maseratis all day, they go to Modena constantly, and the same thing is happening on the business side at FCA; each brand has a true leader all the way down, in what I’d say is an intended silo. I have to have an out-of-body experience to go from Maserati to Jeep, for example, so I have to make sure that within the design space it stays pure, and that’s worked out really well, no matter what happens with management. We still share things at the component level, but we have to make sure for the most part we are insulated.”

That sharing of components between FCA’s volume and luxury brands, while not an uncommon practice in the industry, has been a source of frustration in the past for customers and industry analysts alike, but Gilles says it was “a means to an end. We had no choice to get where we needed to go quickly, and even some of our best competitors do that. But as we go forward, we’re doing a better job, we do bespoke coverings, bespoke tops to things, because the mechanical bits are the same – a good switch is a good switch – it’s just how you present it to the customer. So, whether it’s that or screen technology, we can buy 12-inch, 15-inch, whatever screen sizes we want en masse, but then we can completely reconfigure them in ways where the customer will never know where they came from – and that’s kind of the fun part now.”

Gilles also says he’s also pushing to expand his user experience design team. “We’re hiring, and UX truly is exploding,” he admits. “We kind of got a jump on it but the demand for it is going faster than we thought internally. Not so much for the customer yet, but internally the brands are latching on to how important it is, so I’m having to quadruple the size of my team.”

Gilles has dedicated UX teams in every region to fit the customer tastes in each. “The regions are very different,” he explains. “China, for example, is closing in on 5G and everything is cloud-based, so it’s like your car is the Alexa or the Echo in the Chinese market. They also have very slow commuting speeds, so they expect to do more. And it’s really an innocent market in a way, where there’s no regulation on what you can or cannot do in your car, so people are allowed to surf the Internet, or whatever, and they’ve come to expect whatever they can get on their laptop at home [to be] in the car – and they want voice commands, where here in the US or in Europe it’s not preferred at all.”

In some ways, the push to create different interfaces for different markets may seem like a contradictory strategy for a company that sings the praises of parts sharing. But Gilles says the technology that powers their designs allows for a wide range of flexibility. “The good news is our computing platforms going forward will allow us to adapt the vehicles to those markets and even help the customer present data the way they like to see it, as opposed to ‘one size fits all’,” he says. “So we’re focused on that, the true customisation of the cockpit, the speed of our processors… and I can’t tell you too much more, but let’s put it this way: We’re going to make a lot of effort in that space.”