Since you’re looking at the cars and bikes section of Forbes, I will go out on a limb and say the new Ferrari Luce probably isn’t for you.
Ideally, this article should be in a fashion or industrial design section. Perhaps one of those surprisingly heavy quarterly magazines where the correspondent has had time to breathe, take a walk around the garden and form an opinion that runs to more than a tweet.
This isn’t an effort to create a water-tight defence for the first electric car from Maranello. But I’d like to avoid jumping on the bandwagon powered by the noisy opinions of everyone else who has ever seen a car and thus believes they know what’s best for a $60 billion company.
The $640,000Ferrari Luce isn’t for me, either. The greatest automotive experience of my life came at the wheel of a sixty-year-old Ferrari 250 GT. But I think I understand where Ferrari is coming from. Or rather, what the pens of Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson of design agency LoveFrom have set out to achieve.
This is a Ferrari for people who would previously never consider a Ferrari. It is for a new generation of ultra-wealthy individuals who don’t shout about their bank balance, but who know a luxury product when they experience it. They wear high-quality clothing but with minimal branding. Ideally none at all. They carry an iPhone like everyone else, but update every year without fail, always picking the largest screen and greatest storage option. They shoot holiday snaps on a four-figure Leica camera, partly because it’s capable of beautiful photographs, but equally because of the way it looks and feels.
The Luce is for the sort of customer who also might spend a six-figure sum on a classic car that has been turned electric.
Back in 2022, I spoke to Matt Rogers, co-founder of Nest, the smart thermostat company, and former Apple software engineer largely responsible for the early days of the iPod and iPhone. He’d just invested in Everrati, a British company taking classic cars and turning them electric. Rogers had also just become the firm’s first US customer, and later took delivery of a blue 964-generation Porsche 911, restored and electrified.
He told me how attitudes towards traditional supercars, with their noisy engines and look-at-me design, were changing. “We love our cars [in California],” he told me. “But overwhelmingly people are wanting to move to electric.
“We had a similar story [to Elon Musk’s McLaren purchase in the 1990s] at Nest. One of the entrepreneurs from one of the companies we acquired at Nest bought a McLaren the next day and people looked at him funny. Like, ‘what are you doing?’. It’s so loud and with a spewing exhaust. It’s like ‘gosh, it’s kind of tacky actually’. That is the culture, especially in the Bay Area. People are very environmentally conscious.”
Speaking of Everrati, I dropped founder and CEO Justin Lunny a message today for his thoughts on the Luce. Recognizing how a high-end EV could bring new customers to Ferrari, Lunny told me, “The Ferrari Luce highlights a bigger shift in luxury automotive: electrification can be a client acquisition strategy, not just a compliance or technology strategy.
“California is probably one of the best places in the world to see this play out. The audience here already understands the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and luxury. For many of these clients, an electric Ferrari may be more relevant than a traditional one.”
Speaking about his own customers – who may well look at a Luce with intrigue – Lunny said, “Our $700k+ commissions are often for clients who value craftsmanship, heritage and engineering, but who also want something that feels aligned with the future. They’re not always traditional petrolheads. They’re collectors, founders, tastemakers and families who want an exceptional object with meaning. Ferrari Luce shows that the next chapter of luxury automotive is not about abandoning emotion. It’s about redefining where that emotion comes from. Done well, electric luxury can attract new clients, expand the market and create desire in a way that feels completely authentic.”
Listening to Justin, and to Matt previously, it’s easy to see where the Luce’s first trove of customers will come from. Not petrolheads who take their Porsche 911 GT3s to trackdays and talk about the latest Michelin rubber. But tech bros with piles of cash who don’t care for horsepower, torque and lap times, but understand the gravitational pull of the Ferrari brand, and want to access it in a way that aligns with their preferences. They’ll care more, and doubtless speak more passionately on social media, about the lovely weighing of the air vents than the trick dampers.
The Luce’s quiet-luxury design will also please those browsing Ferrari’s new fashion stores to make a purchase and not just gawk at the prices. At its Capital Markets Day last year, Ferrari described its new high-fashion effort as something very different to the Formula One merchandise it calls the “fan offering”. Instead of baseball caps covered in sponsor logos, these garments refer to their make more discreetly. Some don’t have any visible Ferrari branding at all – much as how, minus its prancing horses, the Luce doesn’t share much of its maker’s DNA.
Step inside though, and it’s a different story. Revealed earlier this year, the interior is a celebration of tactility, from its solid metal switchgear and analogue dials, to its simplistic, almost retro steering wheel and plush leather upholstery bathed in ambient lighting. This is a car interior for the newly wealthy who recognize the damage caused by a decade of scrolling. There’s no ghastly passenger touchscreen, no dimwitted haptic touchpads and no infuriating AI assistant. Instead there are beautiful materials that are sure to bring joy with every interaction. They’ll remind the driver of their Leica camera, their Linn turntable and their Rimowa suitcase.
All are products of exceptional quality, but which can fly below the radar. In use, their value is most clearly on show. But to passers-by they slip into the background. Many have criticised the Luce for doing this – for looking too much like a Jaguar I-Pace, not at all like a Ferrari and, perhaps the greatest crime of all for supercar fanatics of old, landing somewhere between generic and forgettable.
All could be levelled at the Luce, but I still don’t think its buyers will mind. These people – the same Matt Rogers spoke about – are the kind who have seven- or eight-figure net worths, yet drive a Tesla or a Lucid because they don’t care for engines, are nonplussed by Ferrari’s other practical car, the Purosangue, being endowed with a V12, and certainly aren’t on the waiting list for an F80 hypercar. The Luce gives them a new option; the ability to own a Ferrari – the kudos that iconic key fob brings – but to do so on their own terms.
These are buyers who already have an electric Candela boat in Antibes harbour, admire the hydrogen-powered Breakthrough superyacht, have probably invested in flying taxi startups like Joby Aviation, and are hopeful that the Boom Overture will pick up where Concorde left off. You probably won’t bump into a Luce driver at Pebble beach or Goodwood Revival.
It’s easy to say Ferrari is just the latest victim of vague regulation drawn up a half-decade ago. That it was forced into building an electric car that it knew none of its customers would buy. There’s probably some truth in that, and had automakers been left to do whatever they like, then a battery-powered Ferrari would certainly never have existed. But a publicly-listed company like Ferrari has to look forward, has to innovate, has to seek out new customers, prise a few hundred grand from them, and grow shareholder value.
You don’t have to like the Luce. You’ve probably already made up your mind. But if Ferrari, Ive and Newson have correctly judged the direction of modern luxury, there are enough people uninterested in noise, theatre and lap times, but who love the idea of an EV that puts a Ferrari key in their hand for the very first time.
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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