Maserati’s biggest problem isn’t a missing V8 or a weak Folgore lineup. It’s arithmetic. In 2025, the Trident shipped 7,900 vehicles, down from 11,300 the year before. Net revenue fell from €1.04 billion to €726 million, and the brand posted an adjusted operating loss of €198 million, a margin of negative 27.3 percent.
Divide that loss by the shipments and you get about €25,000 lost per car before anyone counts impairments. Those were extra. Stellantis wrote down €613 million of Maserati platform assets in 2025, on top of a €514 million goodwill impairment on the brand in 2024. Put Maserati’s whole year next to its parent’s 5.48 million consolidated shipments and it comes to roughly half a day of Stellantis output.
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To be fair, the trend improved late in the year. The second-half 2025 loss narrowed to €59 million from €178 million a year earlier. Stellantis’s own filing still lists the reasons volume collapsed: lower pricing in North America, a thinner product portfolio, U.S. tariffs, and reduced appetite for luxury products in China. That last one matters, because China is where Maserati now seems to be looking for help.
One more detail from the paperwork will matter to anyone tracking this story. Starting January 1, 2026, Stellantis eliminated Maserati’s reportable segment and folded its results into geographic regions. The standalone Maserati profit-and-loss line that made those numbers so easy to read no longer exists. Whatever the rescue costs, outsiders will have a harder time measuring it.
What’s actually on the record
On June 17, Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa spent a long session before the joint industry committees of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate. You can hear it in the hearing recording. He said Stellantis is negotiating with two partners for Maserati’s relaunch. The plan involves two flagship models built at Cassino, with Modena also involved. He added flatly that neither Maserati nor Cassino is for sale, and said the full plan would be presented in Modena by the end of the year.
That is the confirmed part. The partners’ names are not.
In early September, Stellantis’s Asia-Pacific communications chief Wang Chao was asked about a reported tie-up with Huawei and JAC. He declined to comment. He said Stellantis routinely talks with industry players, does not address rumors, and will unveil Maserati’s strategy at a December investor day in Modena. Stellantis China repeated that position on September 22, the same afternoon JAC shares hit their limit-up and closed 10 percent higher at ¥21.32.
So the honest summary is this. Stellantis has confirmed two partners, two flagships and a December reveal. Nobody with authority has put Huawei’s or JAC’s name on a signature line. Treat anything more specific as unverified until Modena.
Why the Huawei-JAC pairing keeps coming up
If you want to know why investors bid up JAC anyway, look at what the Anhui automaker has been saying in public. On September 16, at a delivery ceremony for its Maextro S800 and V800, JAC chairman Xiang Xingchu said the company would stay committed to Huawei. He also said Maextro would expand beyond sedans and MPVs into SUVs and “sports luxury” segments. JAC doesn’t currently build a sports-luxury car. A GT with a trident on the nose would fit that description neatly.
Maextro is the ultra-luxury brand JAC runs with Huawei inside Huawei’s HIMA alliance. The two companies signed their smart-EV cooperation agreement in December 2023. A dedicated Maextro plant in Hefei opened in December 2024 with 200,000 units of annual capacity. The S800 sedan launched in May 2025 priced from ¥708,000 to ¥1.018 million. It is 5,480 mm long on a 3,370 mm wheelbase, a direct shot at the Maybach S-Class.
The timing is interesting for another reason. On September 15, HIMA announced that its best-known brand, AITO, would now be led by partner Seres, while Huawei keeps leading the other alliance brands, Maextro included. JAC’s public reassurance came one day later. A Western luxury badge would give Maextro something none of its HIMA siblings have: a name that already sells outside China.
The engineering gap isn’t the one you’d expect
The lazy take is that Maserati needs Chinese partners because it can’t build a modern EV. That doesn’t hold up. The GranTurismo Folgore already runs an 800-volt battery feeding three 300 kW permanent-magnet motors, with 761 hp and 1,350 Nm. Silicon-carbide inverters, a high-voltage architecture and tri-motor torque vectoring are all things Modena already knows how to do.
What Modena can’t do is spread the cost. Developing a clean-sheet EV platform, an electronic architecture, a driver-assistance stack and a cockpit operating system costs the same whether you sell 8,000 cars or 800,000. At Maserati’s current volume, every euro of software and validation work lands on a tiny number of invoices. That is the €25,000-per-car problem in engineering form.
A partnership with a tech-heavy Chinese group would essentially rent that stack instead of building it. The trade-off for buyers is character. Hardware can be tuned in Italy: steering calibration, damper tuning, sound, seats and the feel of the brake pedal. Software is harder to make your own, and on modern luxury EVs, the software is more and more of what the driver actually touches. If the infotainment, driver-assistance logic and over-the-air update cadence come from somewhere else, the Maserati part of a Maserati shrinks to its body, chassis tuning and cabin.
Stellantis has run this playbook before, at a much lower price point. In 2023 it paid about €1.5 billion for roughly 20 percent of Leapmotor and set up a 51/49 joint venture to sell Leapmotor products outside Greater China. The Maserati arrangement Filosa described differs in one key way. The cars would carry an Italian badge and be built, at least in part, in Italian factories.
The American wall
Here is the part most coverage skips. Any Maserati whose brains come from a Chinese software supplier runs straight into U.S. federal law.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security finalized its connected vehicle rule in January 2025. Starting with model year 2027, manufacturers cannot import or sell vehicles in the U.S. that contain vehicle-connectivity or automated-driving software supplied by entities under Chinese jurisdiction or control. Hardware restrictions follow in model year 2030. The rule allows case-by-case authorizations, but it is built to block exactly the sort of connected, sensor-heavy car a Huawei-developed platform represents.
The practical consequence is simple. A China-engineered Maserati flagship would almost certainly need a different electronic architecture for North America, or skip the market entirely. North America is also the region Stellantis blamed for pricing and tariff pain in Maserati’s 2025 results. Engineering two versions of a low-volume car undoes much of the cost saving that made the partnership attractive. How Stellantis handles this in December will tell you whether the plan is global or mostly aimed at Europe and the Middle East.
A smaller, reassuring note for current owners: the final rule includes an exemption for hardware imported for repair or warranty work on vehicles from before model year 2030. Nothing in the rule touches the Grecale or GranTurismo sitting in your garage.
What this means if you own one, or want one
Current Maseratis are Stellantis products, serviced through Stellantis dealers with Stellantis parts supply. That does not change with a partnership announcement. The bigger near-term risk is resale value. Luxury buyers pay for certainty, and a brand whose future architecture is openly up for negotiation tends to take a hit on used values while everyone waits. If you’re shopping a lightly used Grecale or GranTurismo, that uncertainty works in your favor at the negotiating table.
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If you’re thinking about a future flagship, wait for the fine print. Pay attention to who writes the software, where the car gets its over-the-air updates, and who handles data and service in your market. Those answers will shape long-term ownership, repairability and insurance costs more than the badge. Sensor-dense cars with lidar and camera arrays tend to be expensive to fix after even minor collisions, and luxury EVs from newer platforms often come with thin independent-repair networks for the first few years.
Maserati has been somebody’s partner before
This isn’t the Trident’s first foreign rescue. Citroën took control in 1968. Maserati designed and built the engine for Citroën’s SM flagship and borrowed its French owner’s hydraulics in return. When Citroën went bankrupt in 1974, Maserati went into liquidation. It survived through Italian state holding company GEPI and Alejandro de Tomaso in 1975.
The difference this time is which direction the expertise flows. In 1968, Maserati supplied the engine and a foreign automaker supplied the money. In 2026, Maserati may supply the name and the design, and a partner supplies the technology that defines a modern car. It’s a humbling reversal for a brand whose entire identity was built on engines.
Filosa’s own verdict on Stellantis’s 2025 losses was that the group paid for over-estimating the pace of the energy transition. Maserati may be the clearest example of that mistake. It went all in on electrification with volumes too small to pay for it, and now it has to borrow scale from someone who has plenty. December in Modena will show whether the Trident stays a Maserati or becomes something else wearing one.
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