Ferrari just pulled the cover off Luce, its first fully electric car. The five-seater is one of the biggest gambles in the Italian company’s history, arriving amid a string of missed targets and expensive promises by luxury carmakers to go electric.
In Luce, Ferrari engineers believe that they have developed a sports car capable of taking turns at high speeds despite being weighed down by more than half a ton of battery cells and electrical circuitry bolted to the floor pan.
But will the ultrawealthy spend more than half a million dollars on an all-electric Ferrari that doesn’t quite have the classic look or distinctive engine roar of a Ferrari?
“This has been a major investment from Ferrari’s point of view in a product that, at the moment, there’s no real certainty as to what the market is for it,” Angus MacKenzie, international bureau chief for MotorTrend. “They’re nervous, would be fair to say.”
The story of Luce (pronounced loo-CHAY, or “light” in Italian) is uncommon in the roughly 80-year history of Ferrari’s road-car business. The company teamed up with LoveFrom — the agency founded in 2019 by Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief, and the industrial designer Marc Newson — to develop Luce’s glass-and-polished-aluminum frame, which is capable of hitting close to 200 miles per hour.