Ferrari has entered its electric era with the Luce, and the car is already doing what significant automotive design often does: dividing people before anyone has fully understood it.
Unveiled in Rome, the Luce is Ferrari’s first fully electric model and one of the most radical breaks from the brand’s familiar sports-car proportions. It is a four-door, five-seat electric GT shaped around a dedicated EV architecture rather than dressed up to imitate a mid-engine supercar. That decision alone explains much of the reaction. The Luce has a shorter visual nose, a forward cabin, center-opening doors, a rear liftgate and a body that Ferrari says delivers the lowest drag coefficient of any road-going Ferrari.
The project also marks a rare external design collaboration for Ferrari. LoveFrom, the studio led by Jony Ive and Marc Newson, worked on the exterior and interior, bringing a noticeably different product-design sensibility into Maranello’s performance language. Inside, the Luce moves away from screen overload and returns some control to physical interfaces: OLED instruments, a pivoting central screen, real steering-wheel switchgear, and dedicated paddles for regeneration and torque delivery.
Under the surface, the numbers are pure Ferrari: four electric motors, 1035 horsepower, 0–62 mph in 2.5 seconds, 800-volt architecture, and a 122-kWh battery pack. But the design debate is bigger than performance. The Luce asks whether Ferrari should preserve its visual memory or let the engineering of a new drivetrain create a new silhouette.
The market reaction has been just as sharp as the comments online. Reuters reported that Ferrari shares fell more than 8% after the reveal, while CEO Benedetto Vigna defended the car, saying customer interest was strong and that the Luce adds to the Ferrari range rather than replacing petrol and hybrid models.
For designers, the Luce is interesting because it refuses the safest possible answer. Ferrari could have made an electric car that looked like a familiar exotic with a battery hidden underneath. Instead, it made a car that exposes the tension between heritage, packaging, regulation, aerodynamics, and luxury technology. Whether people love it or hate it, the Luce has already achieved one thing: it made Ferrari’s design language a live argument again.