COBI Maserati Levante Set 24560

COBI's Maserati Levante is built from 97 blocks, 14.5 cm long, under original Maserati licence, with wheels that turn on rubber tires. All markings are printed.

Maserati names its cars after winds

The Levante is a wind — the easterly that blows through the Strait of Gibraltar and across the western Mediterranean, known for arriving suddenly and bringing cloud and heavy seas.

It is part of a pattern the company has kept for sixty years. The Ghibli is a hot Libyan desert wind. The Bora is the cold, violent downslope wind of the Adriatic. The Mistral blows down the Rhône valley into Provence. The Khamsin is Egyptian. The Grecale comes from the north-east.

The convention began in the 1960s and has outlasted several changes of ownership. It is also unusually well chosen: a wind has a character and a direction and a place it belongs to, which is more than most car names manage.

The Levante itself arrived in 2016 as Maserati's first SUV — a thing the company had spent decades saying it would never build — and promptly outsold everything else it made.

In the COBI range

Set 24565 is the Levante Trofeo, the high-performance version with a Ferrari-built V8. Set 24567 is the GranTurismo GT3 racing car and 24568 the Maserati garage, which includes a Levante and a GranCabrio.

Specifications

Pieces: 97 · Licensed by Maserati · Rubber tires, printed detail
Model dimensions: 14.5 × 6.3 × 5 cm (5.7 × 2.5 × 2.0 in)