EBM Newsdesk Analysis
On 25 May 2026, in front of more than 200 reporters in Rome, Ferrari unveiled the Luce — its first fully electric car, priced from €550,000, with a polarising design shaped over five years by Jony Ive’s LoveFrom collective. CEO Benedetto Vigna called it “the result of five years of work.” The car the world long knew by its working name, Elettrica, arrives as a four-door, five-seat machine with a quad-motor layout producing over 1,000 horsepower — and, conspicuously, no V12 to announce it. For a brand built on the scream of a combustion engine, that is the boldest gamble in its history.
The strategic logic is unmistakable. Reuters framed the Luce as a wager that younger buyers, raised on technology and AI, may prove less attached to Ferrari’s eight- and twelve-cylinder heritage than their fathers were. Ferrari is not chasing the mass EV market — it is testing whether the world’s most emotive car brand can sell restraint, silence and Silicon Valley minimalism at a six-figure premium. It is betting that for the next generation of the very rich, light replaces noise as the luxury signal.
What Ferrari actually built
The Luce is a departure in every dimension. It is the most spacious and versatile Ferrari ever — four doors, five seats, a 600-litre boot, rear-hinged doors and a sedan-meets-shooting-brake silhouette that has divided opinion. Underneath sits a bespoke platform, four electric motors delivering more than 1,000 horsepower, a top speed above 310kph, and a 0-60mph time under 2.5 seconds despite a kerb weight over 2.2 tonnes.
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SubscribeCrucially, Ferrari has tried to engineer the emotion back in. The car amplifies the natural vibration and sound of its electric powertrain to preserve some of the visceral feel its combustion cars are worshipped for — a tacit admission that an EV’s silence is, for this buyer, a problem to be solved rather than a feature.
The Jony Ive factor
The headline collaborator is the story’s commercial hook. LoveFrom, the design house founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive with Marc Newson, has worked on every dimension of the Luce for five years. The result is the closest the world may get to seeing what the long-cancelled Apple Car might have felt like.
Ive’s signature is most visible inside, and it runs directly counter to industry orthodoxy. While rivals pack cabins with ever-larger touchscreens, the Luce leans on physical controls — knobs, toggles and switches machined from glass and anodised aluminium, each engineered to have weight and feedback. The three-spoke steering wheel, milled from 100% recycled aluminium, is treated as a piece of product design in its own right. Even the digital instrument display layers two OLED panels with physical needles sandwiched between them. It is a deliberate, expensive rebuke to the screen-first interiors of Tesla and its imitators.
The bet beneath the badge
This is where the business stakes sharpen. Ferrari is launching the Luce precisely as rivals retreat: Porsche and Lamborghini have both slowed or softened EV plans amid weakening luxury-electric demand. Ferrari is moving against that tide, wagering that its brand power lets it succeed where volume makers stumble.
The “polarising” design is therefore not an accident but a calculated risk. A car that “asks the eye to recalibrate before the badge lands,” as one reviewer put it, either reads as visionary or as a €550,000 machine that vanishes in a car park. Ferrari is betting the former. The deeper question is whether the brand’s mystique — forged entirely on noise, heritage and the internal combustion engine — survives the transition to a silent, minimalist, Ive-designed future. Deliveries begin in late 2026, with the US following in 2027. Only then will Ferrari learn whether the world’s wealthiest drivers will pay supercar money for light instead of thunder.
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