Ferrari's Electric Luce Is Dividing Italians — And Not in a Good Way

Ferrari unveiled its first electric car this week, and the reaction has been something between a cultural crisis and a PR disaster. The Luce, a five-seat electric sedan priced at $650,000, made its debut at the Quirinale Palace in Rome with all the theatre you'd expect. What followed was considerably less dignified.

The stock dropped 8 percent the next day. Former Ferrari chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo warned of 'the destruction of a myth.' An Italian senator called it an 'aesthetic and technological insult.' The transport minister weighed in, invoking the ghost of Enzo Ferrari for good measure. When a car prompts that kind of political commentary, something has clearly gone wrong in the room where decisions get made.

To be fair, the car itself is technically serious. Four electric motors, one per wheel, zero to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds, and a cabin that reportedly required NASA consultation to stop the acceleration from feeling physically disturbing. Ferrari even engineered a synthetic engine sound from treated mechanical recordings. The engineering team clearly did their job. The design team, depending on who you ask, did not.

Ferrari brought in Jony Ive and Marc Newson from LoveFrom, the creative consultancy Ive founded after leaving Apple, to work on both the interior and exterior. The result is what it is.

We spoke to three Italian automotive designers about what went wrong.

Maurizio Corbi, who trained at Bertone and Pininfarina and has over 30 years in car design, was blunt. 'It's clear this was designed not by a car designer but by a product designer,' he said. 'A good industrial designer isn't capable of designing a car. It's another profession.'

Corbi's critique of the exterior is damning in its specificity. 'Ferrari has designed a family soap bar. It's the negation of everything a Ferrari represents. Then there are those small wheels. We car designers spent decades pushing for larger wheels, sharper forms, more aerodynamic tension. This feels like our grandfather's car, with no stylistic reference to the Ferrari tradition.'

He's also suspicious of the marketing logic. 'They literally threw a boulder into a pond. Everyone is talking about it. I can't recall anything similar.' He stops short of calling it accidental.

On the involvement of Ive and Newson, Corbi doesn't mince words. 'It almost seems like a choice of boundless arrogance — as if to say, let's ignore what our customers love and just sell them this.' He notes that Ferrari Club of America members, loyal buyers with serious money and brand devotion, are reportedly shocked.

Alessandro Cipolli, a designer with two decades in the industry covering interior, exterior, and 3D work, takes a slightly softer line — though his conclusion lands in the same place.

'It was right and inevitable that Ferrari would enter the electric world,' he says. 'The technology is a masterpiece. They are ahead of everyone else.' But the emotional dimension is where he sees the failure. 'The exterior is well designed — clean, proportioned, refined. But it's not a Ferrari. It lacks that tension, that character that hits you before you've had time to think. The interior is even more revealing. The Jony Ive influence is clear: high-quality execution, precise interfaces, meticulous detailing. But it speaks Apple, not Ferrari. Remove the badge and you have no idea where you are.'

Cipolli distinguishes between craft and emotion. 'The details are taken care of, the surfaces are flawless. But a car designer doesn't just think about function. Transferring emotion into a car is not easy, and in this case it simply wasn't done. This car does not excite.'

Carlo Gaino, designer, founder of Synthesis Design, and a professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin, is the harshest of the three.

'This is a classic example of what happens when you hand one of the most iconic brands in existence to people who have never engaged with automotive history,' he says. 'People who never had the expertise to do this job have put their hands on Ferrari. If you want to destroy a brand, that's exactly how you do it.'

Gaino puts the Luce in a broader cultural context, and it's not comfortable reading. 'We are in a historical moment where culture is under attack. People with real skills are being sidelined.' He also takes a swing at AI's influence on design education, though he doesn't connect it directly to the Luce's aesthetic.

On the specific formal choices visible in the car, his assessment is withering. 'Those solutions were already circulating in Japanese design in the '80s and '90s. What you see on the Luce are the choices of beginners, not people who have studied the history.'

So there you have it. Three Italian experts, three different registers of criticism, all arriving at the same destination. The Luce is technically impressive and emotionally inert. It is precisely built and entirely wrong. Ferrari has made something that works in every measurable sense and fails in the only one that matters to its customers.

Whether this is bold strategy or expensive miscalculation probably depends on how the order books look in six months. For now, the prancing horse is getting a lot of sideways glances.