Ferrari finally showed the whole car. On May 25th in Rome, at the Vela di Calatrava, the Prancing Horse pulled back the curtain on the exterior of the Luce, its first fully electric production vehicle. I had already given my take on the interior in the article Ferrari Luce: What We Know About The First Electric Ferrari, and my take was overwhelmingly positive. The metalic controls, tactile approach, and the refusal to default to a touchscreen wall all showed restraint and class.
The exterior… is a different story.
I wish I could say my reaction is mixed, because i knew how much potential this car had performance-wise. But if I’m completely honest, the more visceral feeling I have when I look at it is just, disappointment. The problem is simple and something that performance just can not fix. This car does not look like a Ferrari.
The Glass House
The exterior design centers on what Ferrari calls a “glass house,” a continuous shell that extends to the outer edges of the car, with suspended front and rear aerodynamic wings appearing to float above and around the cabin. The windshield and hood flow together in one uninterrupted surface. From above, this black pod-like passenger cell has a teardrop shape, and the aluminum body wraps around it. Beyond looks, they clearly made these decisions with aero in mind, achieving a solid drag coefficient of 0.254 cD on a car that is nearly 198 inches long and 60 inches tall.
But aerodynamics and identity are completely different matters, and Ferrari has spent seven decades building an identity that this exterior does not carry forward in any recognizable way. If you pulled the badges off the Luce, you would not know what you are looking at. That sentence alone should have stopped someone in the early design review stage.
The Apple Comparison Is Fair, and That Is the Issue
The internet of course ran immediately to the Apple comparison, and unfortunately for once the internet is correct. LoveFrom, the design house led by Jony Ive and Marc Newson, shaped every dimension of the Luce. Ive spent decades at Apple defining what reduction looks like as a design philosophy: strip away the unnecessary, round the edges, and hide the mechanical complexity behind a seamless pane of glass. That approach gave us the iMac and the iPhone. It is a legitimate and influential design language. The problem is, Ferrari already has a design language equally well-loved.
Apple’s design language communicates calm, frictionless, and minimal. Ferrari’s design language has always communicated tension, intention, and purpose. Every vent, every crease, every surface angle on a traditional Ferrari communicates something about what the car does and how it feels. The Luce communicates serenity. For a car making 1,035 horsepower, that is a complete philosophical mismatch.
The backlash was not limited to enthusiast forums. Ferrari’s former president and chairman Luca di Montezemolo (1991–2014) publicly questioned whether the Luce undermines the brand’s heritage and suggested the Prancing Horse emblem might be better left off the car entirely. He even so far as to say that the new model was “certainly a car that at least the Chinese won’t copy.” Ferrari shares opened more than eight percent lower in Milan the day after the full reveal.
The Interior Earned It. The Exterior Did Not.
We covered the Luce interior in detail when it was first revealed, and our position has not changed. It is the best part of this car. The machined aluminum controls, the Gorilla Glass dial, the deliberate decision to give drivers physical inputs rather than a flat screen to swipe through while going at high speeds. That interior reflects a design team that understoodwhat a performance EV’s cockpit should do. It is driver-focused in the ways that matter.
That philosophy deserved an exterior built with the same feeling. Instead, the outside arrived wearing minimalism borrowed from Silicon Valley. It is so much more on-the-nose than I could have even imagined, looking quite literally like what the doomed Apple car would have looked like. It is almost as if Ferrari just handed it over to a firm that had never designed a car before and trusted the result without asking whether it belonged. How much of this was LoveFrom and how much of it was Ferrari’s engineers however, is not clear. Aero obviously played a huge role in the resulting design, so we cannot put all the blame on Jony Ive and Co.
Who In the World Is This Car Actually For?
Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna framed the Luce as a vehicle designed to bring in a new generation of buyers when he said, “In our client base there are many … who are still looking for something completely different, to be used in different moments of life.” This could be interpreted as an admission that this car was not built for the people who have made Ferrari what it is. These hypothetical customers will be much less concerned with the legacy of the brand than they are with performance numbers alone, or simply having a status symbol. Or maybe just a wealthy tech founder who wants to drive the most expensive electric daily driver that money can buy. No joke, it is the most expensive by far if you consider that the closest ultra-luxury electric competitor that can be considered a “daily driver” is the Rolls-Royce Spectre which starts at a measely $420,000.
At roughly $640,000 USD to start, with four electric motors, a 122 kWh battery pack, a claimed 0 to 60 in under 2.5 seconds, and approximately 329 miles of range, the performance credentials are genuine. This is not a slow or lazy car. It’s actually one of the most impressive out there. But performance without identity does not make a great Ferrari. The buyers Vigna is describing are not buying a Ferrari because of what Ferrari represents on a racetrack or in a mountain canyon. They are buying an object. An artifact of a particular design moment. That is a different transaction entirely.
Ferrari has also been clear that the Luce is an addition to the lineup, not a replacement for combustion or hybrid models. The company’s 2030 target calls for 20 percent EVs, 40 percent hybrids, and 40 percent combustion. So in that sense, the brand is not abandoning what it is. But the Luce is still Ferrari’s opening statement on electrification, and first impressions leave a lasting impact. This one will almost certainly be remembered not for what it proved mechanically but for what it looked like.
The Wrong Canvas for a Great Powertrain
Here is the part that genuinely stings. The engineering underneath the Luce is extraordinary by any standard. Four permanent-magnet synchronous motors using F1-derived Halbach array rotors, one per wheel, with torque vectoring and all-wheel drive. An 880 volt architecture with peak discharge rating of 830 kW and the ability to absorb 0.5 MW (500kW) under regenerative braking. Sixty patents filed in the process of building this car. A vehicle control system Ferrari describes as the most sophisticated it has ever produced. All of that technology, all of that institutional investment, packaged in a body that looks like it was designed to appeal to people who think Ferraris are a bit gaudy.
Imagine that platform beneath a silhouette that carried the visual DNA of the Roma, the 812, or even an evolved interpretation of the F12. Something that announced Ferrari’s arrival in the EV space with the same visual authority the LaFerrari and later SF90 brought to hybridization. That would have been a milestone event. The Luce, instead, will be a footnote in the brand’s design history. A hiccup in an otherwise consistent visual story. Technically ambitious, but esthetically outcast.
The technology really did deserve a better stage, but Ferrari chose to build a gallery installation. Looking forward, I can predict a day when engineers won’t have to design EVs around aerodynamics nearly as strictly due to advancements in battery capacity making it less important. They could then reintroduce more visually pleasing aspects when not trying to optimize for efficiency. Until then though, I think Ferrari should have stuck to hybrids.
We at Amped Auto Magazine have consistently argued that electrification done right will enhance the driver’s experience, and we stand by that. But brand identity is also an incredibly import aspect of the experience in car culture. It is the accumulated trust of every car Ferrari ever built that looked and felt like it meant something. The Luce has the heart of a Ferrari and the face of something else entirely. I for one certainly hope that this misstep can be learned from and be followed up with something that fans would actually want to pin up on their wall.
