When I saw the design, I thought "This looks like a Tesla".

I'm sure it's an awesome car, and also a high quality premium experience. The question is whether it can command supercar prices - they are selling it for $650,000, and I don't quite understand the value proposition of a superior Tesla selling for that much.

Now you can say, well what is the value proposition of the other ICE Ferraris selling for that much? And that's the point, when they first came out, they didn't sell for such high prices, it was a long period of decades in which collectors were bidding up the prices due to their interest in collecting Ferraris and reselling them, at which point the cars became an investment and collectible item, rather than just "expensive high end vehicles".

So when you break from that tradition, but assume you can carry over the collector premium -- particularly for a disposable tech-heavy EV -- then that is where Ferrari made a mistake, and not only Ferrari, but there is a reason none of the EV supercars have sold well, or will sell well. Tech and collectables don't mix.

If you want an example of a brand that is doing this well, look at Rolls Royce. Rolls is selling actual luxury experiences, and their prices reflect the unique ownership experience, not the collectible value, as all Rolls Royces suffer massive depreciation, and have always suffered massive depreciation. No one buys a Rolls Royce expecting it to go up in value, it's understood that in 30 years, you can pick it up for less than the cost of the tires on the brand new model. In that environment, EVs work very well, and Rolls is having success with their high priced EVs that none of the automakers are having in the hypercar market.

I lived through similar dynamics (though not at Ferrari, of course).

The management knows that they need something new and out of their comfort zone. Someone (from within or without) suggests an idea that would never been accepted in the olden days.

The management, for the sake of their company, would suppress every instinct they have built over the years, often over-correcting. This inevitably results in some questionable choices seeping in, in the name of openness to new paradigms.

And not every time this goes well.

I'm not saying this is what's happening here. These are world-class engineers and designers, but nobody is immune from a bad decision or two.

Where is the Ferrari in this at all? I completely agree that they missed the mark in design. While the interior is 100% Jony Ive, the exterior screams "design by committee."

An electric Roma successor would have been much better received and possibly cheaper for them to develop (who knows?).

The silver lining in all this is that it means that the EV arm will not cannibalize their ICE cars.

This is a disaster for Ferrari. You buy the brand, the car and its lack of reliability is well known and the difficult handling also well known. But its La Ferrari.

This is the type of car that will be seen in the hands of people buying Cybertruck or the UK chavs that now buy Rolex. The moment that happens your brand is dead. Your customers will flock away back to Buggati and Aston Martin.

Massive Ferrari mistake.

> what political struggle was behind that within Ferrari ... could be an indicator for internal disagreements.

A while back I read a couple books on the history of Ferrari and came away with the clear sense that Enzo was one of those unique iconoclastic entrepreneurs who was brilliant, flawed and irreplaceable. After Enzo, Ferrari's management has mostly hovered between being inconsistent and incomprehensible. From the racing team to road cars, the company has become legendary for political fiefdoms and internal conflict.

I agree the Luce exterior may be the least Ferrari-looking Ferrari ever. I suspect it's going to be a disaster for the brand.

The exterior is just a magic mouse! At least those switches in the dashboard are real switches, not touchscreen buttons.

Ferrari has historically worked with outside designers. Pininfarina being probably the most prominent. Bertone, as well. Ferrari brought design in-house relatively recently.

I thought the same. If it had a Kia badge on it, it wouldn't shock me, and I think Kia make some quite nice cars now.

I don't like the interior. I think this style can work for some things, it reminds me of a NuPhy keyboard, blocky plastic that looks nice in some circumstances.

For me this is not a Ferrari-standard of car, Ferraris are strikingly beautiful, and this just isn't.

  > To me, the exterior has lost almost all of Ferrari's identity. It's a nice car-design, but if you'd tell me it's a Hyundai, Lexus or BYD I would believe you.

I do get a lot of "plastic" vibes and "high quality raching sim gear"

I felt the web site was "lights on nobody home", I think the interesting fact about this vehicle is that it is electric and even though you can pick different colors and a heated steering wheel as an option there isn't a single word about power train.

Just being a legendary brand like Ferrari doesn't mean that 100% of us understand 100% about 100% of your products.

Doesn’t matter as long as it isn’t ugly. Porsche made the cayenne and the panamera, too. The V12 buyer won’t even look at this, but the luxury EV buyer now has a new thing to consider.

"(Also the fact that they presented the interior much earlier than the exterior could be an indicator for internal disagreements...)" - not necessarily, they did similar already back in the 1990ies, when the new line of front-engined GTs as successors to the mid/rear-engined Testarossa came up. At first some appetizers about the new way of building chassis (Ferrari had a decades old legacy of building rather outdated tubular space frame chassis), followed with tidbits about exterior and interior designs of at first the 456, and then the actual two-seater successor to the Testarossa, the 550.

To what extent is the design a response to the constraints imposed by the electric drivetrain? The car is built around the engine. An EV has a large battery and small motor(s), while a gasoline sports car has a big engine in the front. I'm curious how much of the Luce design is a direct result of having to work around the drivetrain (noting that the Mustang Mach E also deviated significantly from the classic designs of past Mustangs in some of the same ways as the Luce deviates from past Ferraris).

Ferrari have long worked with third-party coachbuilders such as Pininfarina. I'm not sure how much autonomy Ive had over the final design, but if it's anything like the relationship with Pininfarina, etc. the design would have been a collaboration.

The problem with cars is if you take all design constraints into consideration you will always end up with something that looks similar.

I just feel they were required to start an EV offering to comply with EU standards, but have designed something of a joke entry to protest being dragged into the EV game.

That, or they truly have insight into where consumer trends will go, and like the F50 etc, this will be better received in a decades time than now.

It looks like a Polestar.

The performance is certainly what you would expect from Ferrari, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a car that should have a Ferrari emblem on it. This will go down as one of the all time automotive blunders.

I think Jony Ive is done too. He was responsible for those awful MacBooks that generated a class action lawsuit and now this. It’s hard to come back from two consecutive flops.

(Conspiracy) Plot twist:

Teams inside Ferrari despise EV's (because they lack 10,000 moving parts and loud noises), so they pushed hard for this design, ensuring a flop, and giving ferrari cold EV feet for the foreseeable future.

100% looks like a BYD/Hyundai; the front (exterior) is hideous. Surely this isn't the production version of the vehicle? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is this so unusual for Ferrari and do we need to blame it on Jony Ive? Ferrari's been selling an SUV since 2024, after all...

It’s a brilliant design. Everyone here is complaining about it, and hardly anyone is saying “EV is no true Ferrari”.

The whole point of Ferrari is high enough volume to print money, low enough to make almost bespoke cars whose sheet metal can change quickly. If the platform is adaptable for that purpose, it will be a success.

Ferrari has certainly outsourced design of the exterior before, often to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pininfarina

The interior is also, frankly, very meh.

Edit: ignore

If you don’t like it then you’re not the demographic they’re targeting. Let me say that I think it’s bland but I won’t say I don’t like it. The market they’re targeting is probably young and can’t afford it but those that can afford it will buy it to appear young, as if they belong to the demographic.