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Some still believe that you can’t manage a car company unless you’re a fully paid-up “car guy.” Tell that to Benedetto Vigna, Ferrari’s CEO. He’s a physicist by education, hired to run the company in 2021 after a career in semiconductors, although he did significant business with automotive during that time.
Vigna also helped develop a three-dimensional motion sensor first used in airbags, later adapted for the Nintendo Wii and the iPhone’s screen rotation function. An inventor, then. “I prefer innovator,” he once told me. “A lot of the time inventors are just thinking, but innovators conceive new things and make them happen.”
This is all useful background to the Luce, Ferrari’s first fully electric car, engineered in Maranello, Italy, but designed in California by LoveFrom, the agency set up by renowned iPhone designer Jony Ive. It’s not Apple’s abandoned car, reskinned and rebooted for the world’s most famous automotive name, but more the product of a union between like-minded innovators—Italian spirit and attitude, Silicon Valley lateral thinking.
Courtesy of Ferrari
But unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Mars with Elon Musk these past few months, you’ll also know that the result didn’t land the way its creators would have anticipated. Ferrari’s immense global fan base is seemingly not on board with the idea of an electric car on a point of principle. And hiring Ive and his team to reimagine the aesthetic has proven as welcome as Kryptonite is to Superman.
Part of the frequently obnoxious discourse around the Luce centered around the idea that a Ferrari’s design should deliver an instant dopamine rush. These aren’t cars that require a PhD in design to understand; they’re meant to hit hard and fast, seeding desire the moment you see them. The Luce spectacularly breaks from tradition, and without the famous Prancing Horse badge, there’s little here that yokes it to perhaps the most revered automotive back catalog of all. But that was all part of the brief: Do something different.
The driving experience amplifies this feeling. The Luce is a Ferrari, just not the sort we’re used to. “In the past 100 years, technology has changed for sure,” Raffaele de Simone, Ferrari’s chief test driver, tells me. “But what hasn’t changed is our bodies. We have two hands, two eyes and ears, and two feet. The interface is the same—steering, brakes and throttle—but the Luce has a different sort of driving emotion and a different way of announcing driving thrills.”
Driving Different
I was at a test track in northern Italy in May to find out how successfully that’s been achieved. I was in a preproduction car, still disguised at the time of driving because it pre-dates the car’s reveal in Rome. First impressions? The Luce’s cab-forward proportions mean you sit closer to the front axle than usual, and higher because there’s a large battery pack beneath the cabin. It’s clearly not low-slung or sporty.
