It’s never a good sign when your former chairman explains that he has to bite his tongue about your much-anticipated major product launch.
Former Ferrari president and chairman Luca di Montezemolo was so appalled by the Luce, the Italian luxury carmaker’s first-ever electric vehicle, on Monday in Rome that he told a local TV news crew he hesitated to express his opinion.
“If I say what I think, I’d cause harm to Ferrari,” said Montezemolo in Italian, shaking his head in a clip that has gone viral. “We’re risking the destruction of a myth.” The former chairman, who was pushed out of the company in 2014, doubled down on the shade, suggesting that the company should remove its prancing horse logo from the car and remarking: “This is surely a car that at least the Chinese won’t copy.”
It would be one thing if this were just one man’s opinion. But the look of the four-door, five-seat Luce, a long-awaited addition to Ferrari’s roster unveiled with great pomp in Rome, has been mocked by countless Ferrari fans, analysts, and investors.
There have been memes online making fun of its glass-roof design, suggesting that it looks like a vacuum cleaner or a camper, or pointing out the similarities to the Nissan Leaf, an EV with a price tag well below the 550,000 euros ($640,000) a Luce will set you back. One commenter said the car looks like an Apple mouse on wheels.
“Oh boy, how ugly she is,” the Luc Poirier, a Montreal-based owner of 40 Ferraris, told the Wall Street Journal. “How (do you) justify a 400,000 to 500,000 price for this? Unbelievable.”
Earlier this week, Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna responded indirectly to the criticism of the Luce in a LinkedIn post, saying, “We need to bear in mind that true innovation does not look for immediate consensus, nor does it stem from the ordinary.”
That didn’t stop investors sending Ferrari shares down as much as 8% on the Milan Stock Exchange on Tuesday on worries that the negative commentary would translate into a commercial flop. There were also widespread fears that the Luce would harm Ferrari’s overall brand cachet, one that gives it a market cap of $70 billion despite selling only about 14,000 cars per year—a strategy that works to create FOMO and a rabid fan obsession among wealthy car aficionados.
The company has pulled out all the stops for this launch, from the car’s design to its rollout. For the car’s interior, Ferrari tapped former Apple design chief Jony Ive, the man behind the sleek look of the iPhone, and his collective LoveFrom. And the Luce roll-out in recent days included being inspected by Italian President Sergio Mattarella and having Pope Leo XIV pose next to a white Luce.
When Ferrari first announced last autumn it would finally enter the EV market, many wondered what a company famous for marrying gorgeous design with state-of-the-art combustion engines could possibly bring to the market—all the more given that Lamborghini, Bentley, and Porsche had introduced their EVs before Ferrari.
But Ferrari has been looking to cultivate a new generation of wealthy customers, notably tech entrepreneurs in hubs such as Silicon Valley, where Vigna worked for years as an executive at a chipmaker before taking the reins at Ferrari in 2021. Expanding the brand’s clientele and dazzling them with tech has been his priority.
Vigna has taken umbrage at the suggestion that the company doesn’t have anything to offer in terms of technological advances. “A leader has the responsibility to push forward the limit of what is possible. If we don’t do it, then we do not deserve to be called a leader,” he told Fortune in October. Ferrari has said the EV would go from 0 to 62 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds; have a battery with a capacity of 122 kWh to ensure recharging in as little as eight minutes; and boast a range of 323 miles on one charge.
Though the CEO seemed to downplay the importance of EVs last autumn, telling Fortune they were an “and” rather than an “or” and promising that Ferrari wouldn’t produce any fewer combustion-engine cars, he also made clear they were important to its future.
At its investor day in October, Ferrari said that it expected 20% of its car models in 2030 to be fully electric models, with 40% combustion engines and another 40% hybrid. A Ferrari spokesperson confirmed this week that those expectations were still in place.
There’s an argument to be made that Ferrari had no choice but to enter the EV market, even as enthusiasm cools for the sector. No matter how strong the brand’s fanbase is, no company can sit idly by while its industry changes.
And consumers can be very emotional any time a brand they love makes a big change: Ferrari obsessives may need time to adjust to a car without the revving combustion engine they expect. So it’s wise not to put too much weight on social media reactions.
Some analysts predict ultimately Ferrari fans will come around. Indeed, they did after Ferrari launched its Purosangue SUV in 2022, to initial criticism, followed by success. “If Ferrari builds the car, the clients will come. That has been the Ferrari Way,” Stephen Reitman, an auto industry analyst with Bernstein, wrote in a note to clients quoted by the WSJ. “We believe the recipe will continue to work.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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