Maserati MC20 | PH Used Buying Guide

• Available for £130,000
• 3.0-litre V6 petrol twin turbo, rear-wheel drive
• Elegant and potentially timeless styling
• Can be a bit lively under power, likes a drink
• No serious issues so far
• Good value used, appealingly different   

Funny old company, Maserati. At a press conference in July 2025 they declared their MC20 to be dead and then revealed the ‘new’ MCPURA. Most of the assembled throng of press bods thought the MCPURA looked just like the MC20. In fact, barring a new front bumper and splitter and a couple of other aero mods and options, it was.

That’s Maserati for you, though. This company has always managed to generate headlines, if not always for the best reasons. A hot potato in the automotive industry for well over half a century, ownership of the company having been passed around between the big players since the 1960s, it was taken over by Citroën in 1968, by De Tomaso in 1975, by Fiat in 1993, and by Ferrari (then owned by Fiat) in 1997, before becoming part of a new Maserati/Alfa Romeo/Abarth group under Fiat. Fiat merged with Chrysler in 2014 to become FCA, which then merged with the French PSA group in 2021 to form Stellantis, which is now the world’s fifth biggest car maker by sales volume. Stellantis brought Maserati back in the same stable as Citroën, but Ferrari had separated from FCA five years earlier in 2016 to become a publicly traded company, so Maserati had now turned from a Ferrari sister brand into a rival.

Hope we’ve got all that right. Let’s get back to the topic of this buying guide, the 2020-on MC20. The ‘MC’ bit stood for Maserati Corse (Racing) to remind us that Maserati was back on the track, while the ‘20’ bit signified the year of its launch. Obviously Maserati was hoping that the name would put you in mind of the MC12 which came out in 2004, the 12 in that case referring to its big V12 engine rather than its birthdate. Despite that and the rest of the MC12’s Ferrari Enzo lineage, lingering public suspicion about the quality and reliability of Maseratis meant that the MC12 received a less than rapturous welcome. However, anyone with half a million quid on the hip and the foresight to buy and keep one of the fifty MC12s Maserati made will be rubbing their hands now at the prospect of a sale because they can comfortably expect a fivefold return on that initial investment. If you’d like to test that theory you can call the vendors of this 2,500-mile one in Germany and ask them what ‘POA’ means. 

The MC20 wasn’t working in quite such a rarefied atmosphere, powered as it was by a more prosaic twin-turbo 3.0 V6, but its construction was exotic enough; its passenger cell was crafted out of carbon fibre by the respected motorsport chassis builder Dallara, who also made the platforms for the Bugatti Chiron. 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but you would need to be fairly stonehearted not to see some beauty in the smooth and curvy in-house-designed bodywork. It was a refreshing change to the supercar norm of sticky-out aero bits and sharp angles everywhere. Some thought it had a Jaguar C-X75 thing going on, not a bad memory to evoke. 

A Cielo (Italian for sky) open-top version was released in 2022, featuring a two piece hardtop with an electrochromic glass roof. GT2 racing versions debuted at Spa in June 2023, followed shortly afterwards in time-honoured fashion by a run of 62 stripped-down, aeroed-up, track-only, 730hp MCXtremas. A bunch of re-liveried street legal MC20s were offered in 2024 and 2025 by Maserati’s Fuoriserie customisation arm. 

There was no shortage of competition for the MC20 in the ‘pocket rocket’ class, the most notable alternatives being McLaren’s Artura, Ferrari’s 296 GTB and Lamborghini’s Huracan. The MC20’s base price at launch was £187,000. By the end of 2021 dealers were asking premiums of around 10 per cent for in-stock cars, but we’re not sure if they were being achieved. 

By 2023 the base coupé price was a little over £190,000, £3,000 more than the Artura but a full £50k less than the 200hp more powerful 296. In the finest Italian supercar tradition you could easily crank your MC20 invoice to well above the £300k mark by adding a few extras. At the time of writing in September 2025 the price for the MCPURA replacement was being projected at £230,000. 

The cheapest Cielo on the used market in September 2025 was a ‘23 6,000-miler at £135k, but that was a Cat S car and therefore one for Mat Armstrong. Undamaged Cielos start at around £170k, but there aren’t that many of them about. The cheapest coupé we saw for sale in the UK at that time was a ’22 car in blue with 14,000 miles at £129,995. Assuming there were extras aplenty specced on most if not all cars sold, that represents a fairly steep rate of depreciation. Is there a scary reason for that? Let’s take a look. 

Engine: 2,992cc, twin-turbo V6
Transmission: 8-speed dual-clutch auto, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 630@7,500rpm
Torque (lb ft): 538@3,000-5,500rpm
0-62mph (secs): 2.9
Top speed (mph): 202
Weight (kg): 1,475 (claimed)
MPG (official combined): 20.5
CO2 (g/km): 261
Wheels (in): 20
Tyres: 245/35 (f), 305/30 (r)
On sale: 2020 – on
Price new (launch): £187,000 (2025 £222,000, Cielo £252,000)
Price now: from £130,000

Note for reference: car weight and power data are hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.

The Nettuno (Neptune) twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre 90-degree V6 was a dry sump, twin spark, direct and port injection unit that would go on to be used in the Grecale and GranTurismo. Maserati said the engine was all their own work, but the sharper members of the press thought otherwise, citing strong similarities between it and Ferrari’s F154 V8 (as used in the Ferrari 488) and Alfa Romeo’s Giulia and Stelvio motors. Most have credited Maserati with the design and build of the MC20’s cylinder heads but beyond that your guess is as good as ours. 

Peak power of 630hp was produced at a lofty sounding 7,500rpm, with the redline set at 8,000rpm. You could easily live on the 538lb ft peak torque which came in from 3,000rpm, but you’d be struggling to ignore the engine’s constant egging-on. 

Maserati said that the MC20 had a best-in-class power to weight ratio, but that was based on their claimed weight of 1,475kg for the car. Various magazines have weighed both the coupé and the Cielo and received weighbridge readouts that were 200kg higher than the ones on Maserati’s press releases. That would at least partly explain why the Maserati wasn’t as violently quick as the Ferrari 296, which had substantial hybrid assistance, but it was still quick enough for most. In some situations it was maybe too quick for its own good, but we’ll get into that in the Chassis section. 

You’d be unlikely to call the exhaust note soulful. It didn’t take long for Novitec and the like to come out with louder ones, but owners did need to be careful about fitting non-factory parts to their MC20s as Italian manufacturers are famously touchy about warranties. Even routine service items like aftermarket oil filters can create problems in that department. At the end of the day there’s always going to be a limit on the quality of noise extractable from a twin-turbo V6. 

The MC20’s transmission was an eight-speed Tremec dual-clutcher which worked very well indeed (on upshifts at least) once it was warmed through. A graphic on the driver cluster told you if the powertrain and tyres were cold or not. As we’ll find in the Chassis section, that was potentially useful information. 

The petrol tank was small at 60 litres, or just over 13 gallons, giving a range of not much more than 250 miles based on the official combined consumption figure of 20mpg. In hard use that could drop to 11mpg. Maserati’s quoted performance figures were achieved with 98 octane fuel. 

At four years or 50,000 miles, the MC20’s UK warranty was pretty standard for supercars that don’t do much mileage. You could fully extend that to year five, or with more limited coverage to year seven. 

Although there are prepaid fixed-price servicing programmes for the MC20, actual costs aren’t given on the main Maserati GB website, or even when you’re looking at official dealer sites which do list prices for other Maserati models. That’s poor. Compared to some supercars the MC20’s mechanicals are relatively uncomplicated so you’d like to think that will be reflected in the bills. AI suggests typical costs of £580 for the first year, £1,400 in the second and over £2,100 in the third, but one real-life owner on PH this year said he had paid over £2k for the first service and had been quoted £4k for the second one before securing a £3.2k quote from another Maserati dealer. Renewing the extra spark plugs isn’t cheap. 

There are some independents offering MC20 servicing in the UK, including (for example) The Supercar Rooms near Birmingham. They promise to use non warranty-threatening genuine parts and lubricants, but again their website is coy about pricing, saying only that servicing costs ‘from’ £400 for a list of Maserati models.

The carbon fibre tub weighed 100kg and supported active, forged aluminium-subframed, double-wishbone suspension on all corners, unusually with one upper link rather than the usual two. Maserati said that made for better contact between the tyres and the road but there was some beard-stroking in the wider chassis engineering community about that. 

A mechanical limited slip diff was standard with the option of an electronic diff at £1,800 in 2021, or around £2,100 in 2025. There have been reports of low-speed shuddering in cars fitted with the e-diff. Maserati categorised it as a characteristic of the car rather than a defect, which as you might imagine didn’t go down all that well among affected owners who took the more simplistic view that they had paid extra for shuddering. 

Four colour-coded driving modes were available – Wet (green), GT (blue), Sport (red) and Corsa (yellow) – plus ESC Off in orange. GT was the default mode, providing normal engine boost, pedal sensitivity and traction control along with soft suspension, exhaust valves not opening until 5,000rpm, and what Maserati called slow and smooth gearshifts. Wet mode was largely the same as GT but with limited boost and full traction control in operation. 

Sport was recommended for the track. Engine boost in that mode was still normal but there was higher throttle pedal sensitivity, earlier exhaust valve opening (3,500rpm), ‘fast and direct’ gearshifting, stiffened suspension and less intrusive traction control. Corsa put everything – gearshifting, suspension, traction control, engine boost – into ‘race’ mode. The exhaust valves were always open in Corsa, which could also be accessed by pressing the selector for two seconds. Launch Mode was accessible via a steering wheel button. ESC Off (obtainable by holding the selector down for five seconds) was the same as Corsa mode but with zero traction control. 

A button in the centre of the selector wheel let you ease the suspension in any mode. The only issue to think about there would be the scraping of the underside over even quite small bumps which, on the softer settings and even some of the not so soft ones, could happen quite a lot on British roads. Protruding aero fins attached to the floor would take quite a beating if your route involved sleeping policemen. A 50mm nose lift was on the options list at a cost of £2,700 in 2021. We believe it’s gone up to more than £3k in 2025, but whatever the price some would say it’s essential in the UK. 

One well-known journalist/TV personality found the MC20 underdamped in any setting, while also stating that it was his favourite car in the class. That’s what character can do. In dry conditions you’d rarely feel shortchanged on traction, dart and jink, encouraged by generous front-end grip and a lovely all-round balance, but with the wrong mode selected on a wet or even just a cold surface you had to be wary of wheelspin and rear-end stepout even in third gear. Of course you might legitimately see all that as part of the fun. Steering that could seem over-light at low speeds and standard iron brakes that could seem a bit wooden at any speed (especially when cold) were flies in the ointment, but in fairness the steering became progressively better with speed, eventually bordering on great. 

As regards the braking, the 380mm front and 350mm rear discs gripped by Brembo aluminium monobloc calipers (six pistons at the front, four at the rear) worked well enough once you’d worked out the pedal pressures. 390mm/360mm carbon ceramic brakes were on the options list. As you might expect they were superior to the iron ones on track and the side bonus was considerably less brake dust on your wheels. 

Tyres were Bridgestone Potenza Sports with asymmetric tread patterns specially developed for the car, but it was worth thinking about fitting winter tyres to any MC20 that was intended to be used all year round in the UK.   

Carbon fibre wasn’t limited to the main tub. It also featured heavily, or lightly, in the MC20’s panelwork. Unusually for modern times there was very little in the way of visible aero, with no rear spoiler. It was a clean look. 

Maserati said that the colour of an MC20 wasn’t just a colour, it was a substance. Hard to argue with that: paint is a substance, after all. The launch colour was a warm white with a bluish mica which they called Bianco Audace. The other five substances on offer before you got into the custom stuff were Giallo Genio (yellow), Rosso Vincente (red), Nero Enigma (black), Grigio Mistero (grey) and Blu Infinito (we’ll let you guess that one). We’re not 100 per cent sure if any of these were no-cost choices, but we do know that ticking the Rosso Vincente box cost the buyer £8,000 in 2021 and ticking the Giallo Genio one in 2025 cost the best part of £10,000. 

Still, that seemed cheap against the exterior carbon pack which was £28,500. It’s hard to read between the lines of Maserati’s PR information, but we got the impression that this didn’t include the carbon engine cover at an individual price of just over £4,000, or getting on for £4,900 if you wanted to fully carbon up the engine bay. The carbon front spoiler on its own was nearly £4.5k. 

The huge door-bottom aero pieces looked big enough to stand on, if there’d have been something on the roof to hang on to, but they threw up a lot of road slime and that would have made a right mess of your Gucci loafers. 

Unlike the MC12’s doors, which looked like they should butterfly upwards but didn’t, the MC20’s did. When opened they added a fair bit to the width of the car (as well as to the height, of course) so you needed to be careful in tight spaces or when up against a kerb. On the plus side they did make passenger entry and exit easy. One owner thought that the button that was meant to open the passenger door on their brand-new 2022 coupé had failed, but then found that hitting the button three times unlatched it. Another had to have their passenger door adjusted to reduce banging noises over rough roads. 

The Cielo’s rigid folding hardtop with the switchable glass roof added a hefty 65kg to the MC’s weight but the electronic roof deployment time was impressively short at 12 seconds. 

Main luggage space wasn’t great. The front cubby was titchy at 47 litres. The rear one was marginally better at a little over 100 litres but its proximity to the engine would have you worrying about the long-term health of anything organic that you might put in there. Some testers found that the insulation was fine, others said it did get hot in there, so it sounds like a case of suck it and see. Talking of cases, optional Zegna fitted luggage made the most of the MC’s boot shapes.  

The MC20’s interior design was pleasingly simple. It was reminiscent to some of the Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio, adding weight to the theory that the MC20 was originally going to be the replacement for the Alfa 8C until Ferrari turned the Alfieri concept into the Roma. 

Although the cabin might seem dated to some it was usefully roomy, and passenger comfort in general was more than up to the challenge of long-distance driving as long as you weren’t expecting too much in the way of cabin storage or more than one cupholder.

As you might expect, Maserati would happily wring out your wallet to make the cabin less simple, or more carbony at least. The cost of an interior carbon pack to spruce up the sills, instrument hood and steering wheel was approaching £7,000. You could have the steering wheel covered in Alcantara if you didn’t fancy the standard leather with carbon inserts. Some cars have had issues with premature leather wear in the cabin. Choosing an alternative wheel could cost you £3,800. The standard metal shift paddles didn’t need changing as they were exquisite, unlike some of the other buttons and controls which could seem cheap.

The composite sports seat shells, a collaboration between Maserati and Sabelt, delivered an excellent driving position. The bolsters and headrests were trimmed in leather (stitching was a £900 extra) with Alcantara for the sitting bits. Electronic seat adjustment and heating added £6,400 to your invoice. 

Standard audio was the six-speaker ‘Premium Unbranded’. Presumably this was deliberately uninspiringly titled so as to shame you into going for the 695-watt 12-speaker Sonus faber premium sound system at £3,100. Some owners have reported issues with audio components poking them in the back. We’re thinking that must have been with the Sonus (not Sonos btw) faber (not Faber, apparently) setup because all six of the speakers in the basic system were housed in the door panels. At least one owner had a long-running issue with the Sonus amp. 

The drive mode selector was apparently inspired by a luxury watch, something Maserati felt they had to do given that the traditional analogue clock was no longer present in the cabin. Two 10.25-inch displays handled driver instrumentation and the MIA (Maserati Intelligent Assistant) multimedia system, which incorporated a Maserati Connect app that allowed you to remotely check up on your car via your smartphone, Alexa or similar assistance device.

The old MC12 had no central rear-view mirror at all, on account of how the panel behind your head was solid. The MC20 coupé did have a rear-view ‘mirror’ which was actually another digital screen showing images from the rear camera. You could flip it to normal mirror mode but there really was no point in that. In the event of camera failure you always had the door mirrors, which were reputedly the same as those on the Ferrari F8. The view through the front wasn’t necessarily going to be immediately great on a wet day as it could take the rather feeble HVAC a few minutes to clear the glass. Those seat heater elements weren’t massively powerful, either. 

Some owners using the HomeLink feature to open their garage door from inside the car have experienced incompatibility and fob problems. Interior lighting has sometimes fritzed out, as has the fob-controlled auto-up window function.

Chris Harris said that the MC20 was the first proper Maserati supercar since the Bora of the 1970s. Would that persuade you to get one over the higher-performing Ferrari 296, though? 

Well, there are plenty out there who would always take the trident badge over the horsey one as long as the product was good enough. Many reviewers thought that the MC20 was one of the first Maseratis in a very long time to fall into that category. It had its weaknesses, and it would be a left-field choice for sure, but its differentness can easily be seen as a good thing in this market, as can the hybrid-free nature of its rear-wheel drive design. 

The exterior still has tons of what you might call traditional appeal. Put an MC20 in a car park next to any of the rivals we’ve mentioned in this guide and there’s a good chance it will attract the most attention. 630hp in a compact and reasonably lightweight sports car is a far from traditional amount of power and unlikely to get boring anytime soon, especially when it comes with the edginess revealed under power on dodgy British roads. Although there’s some uncertainty about the ‘it’s all Maserati’ thing, there’s none about the fact that it’s all Italian (apart from the usual ancillaries that can come from anywhere on any car). 

Lowish used values suggest that Maserati as a brand still can’t quite sustain the prices being asked for them new. As noted in the overview, in September 2025 you could find MC20s on the UK used market for £130,000 or less. That seems like an attractive proposition for second owners, given that most if not all of the cars they’ll be looking at will have lots of expensive extras on and/or in them. The fuel consumption can be high and the exhaust note is not as shouty as it is on say a Huracan, but if your driving involves something more than first gear blasts up and down the High Street, the relative peace offered by the Maser should prove to be a blessing. 

The most affordable MC20 on PH Classifieds at the time of writing was this 14,000-mile 2022 car in Blu Infinito at £129,995. For an additional £3k you could knock 4,000 miles off the clock in this otherwise very similar example. The cheapest Cielo convertible was this heavily optioned ’23 car in Grigio Mistero at £169,995.