Pope Leo XIV and Ferrari chairman John Elkann posing by Ferrari's first fully electric model (Luce) during the car's presentation to the Pope at his residence in Castel Gandolfo.Supplied/Getty Images
Enzo Ferrari was a visionary entrepreneur. But what made him great was not so much his ability to assemble the best techies, designers and racing drivers; it was his marketing genius.
Enzo knew his company wasn’t flogging cars per se. “I don’t sell cars; I sell dreams,” he reportedly once said.
To him, buying a Ferrari was all about passion. His generally red machines were fast, sultry, noisy, mostly gorgeous and thrilling on both the racecourse and the road. Hit the gas pedal when you were coming out of a curve and your heart would thump as the engine snarled like a tiger. “The best engine in the world is the heart of the driver,” he said.
Enzo died in 1988 in Maranello, Ferrari’s hometown in central Italy. A lot of Ferrari fans feared the end of Enzo meant the end of Ferrari, that the man’s DNA would not pass onto the next generation of Ferrari company owners and engineers.
They were wrong. Ferrari, as a business, powered forward. The initial public offering came in 2015. At its peak, in mid-2025, the company was valued at US$75-billion. Not bad for a production run of fewer than 14,000 cars that year; General Motors needed to make 6.2-million cars to produce similar market value.
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Then came the electric vehicle, or EV, era. Ferrari knew it had to make an EV, as every other luxury car company did, with varying degrees of success or failure. It took its time and, this week, unveiled the Luce, which is Italian for “Light.” The reviews were almost entirely savage. To be sure, Ferrari has had some misses – the bland, underpowered, four-seat Mondial of the 1980s comes to mind – but not like this one.
When the wrapper came off, I honestly thought I was looking at a minor variation of the Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf, which should not have come as a surprise, given that the Luce was designed in good part by Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer.
While it carried the prancing-horse Ferrari badge, nothing else about it shouted “Ferrari.” The car has four doors, five seats and – get this – latches for baby seats. To be sure, it’s fast; the four electric motors produce more than 1,000 horsepower, allowing dazzling acceleration. But it’s not as fast as a top-end Tesla that costs one-fifth as much. The Luce’s price is €550,000 ($880,000).
It took about 10 minutes for car geeks to produce a million memes depicting the Luce as a computer mouse, a vacuum cleaner, microwave oven and a Croc shoe. Some of the comparisons are unmentionable in polite company. The most biting comment came from Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, a former Ferrari chairman. “We risk destroying a legend,” he said. “I hope they at least remove the prancing horse from the car.”
Ferrari’s share price plunged, taking their value down by 30 per cent over a year. Investors, too, knew that the Luce potentially signalled that Ferrari had lost its way, that it, like other luxury brands that brushed aside their heritage and exclusivity – Gucci comes to mind – risked losing a carefully nurtured market appeal.
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Making an EV was always going to be risky for a company that rose to fame on the back of thundering V-8 and V-12 gasoline engines. Luxury car companies that plunged into the EV market are mostly regretting having done so and taking massive writedowns for their miscalculations. Sales of the Porsche Taycan, to take one high-end German EV, are in rapid decline.
I suspect Ferrari will see the same sales performance with the Luce. Ferrari’s executives probably hoped that their first EV would appeal to a whole new market, one brimming with rich tech bros who have electrons, not gasoline, in their blood.
They may be wrong. The vast majority of Ferrari sales are to existing Ferrari owners, many of whom wait for two years for the new model they have ordered; outsiders need not apply. This crowd tends to be rich, middle-aged or older, and utterly passionate about the Ferrari brand. I am going to guess that almost none of these guys was pleading for a battery Ferrari that runs quietly on the highway while the kids in the back seat scream that they have to pee. If they want an EV, they’ll buy a Tesla.
All of which is not to say that Ferrari should have given EVs a pass. There may – just may – be a market for an Ferrari EV, but it’s sure not one that looks like a drab family sedan. A small, sleek, two-seat, open-air Ferrari roadster whose design would have pleased Enzo himself might have stood a chance.
The Luce might pick up some sales in tech-mad China or in Silicon Valley. But I suspect the car will vanish in a year or so and that Ferrari will go back to what it does best – produce dream cars that roar. The question is whether Ferrari chief executive Benedetto Vigna can survive this EV debacle. The bosses who thrived at Ferrari didn’t take bold, strategic risks; they stuck with what had worked since Enzo launched the company in 1947.