The Luce Is Here

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EV Drama at Ferrari

9 October, 2026

Words by:

Sarah Palmieri

What happens when a heritage brand does something different? For Ferrari, it's caused quite the stir.

Technology is moving quickly these days. If you caught Bill Gates’ interview with The New York Times in August, maybe too quickly. He called AI “the most dangerous tool ever invented,” said the tech bosses privately admit the risks and then tell each other to keep quiet because “it’s bad for us,” and summed up the industry policing itself with: “Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented? No, thanks!” Add the ex-Anthropic insider who warned of human extinction by 2030, and it starts to feel a bit like Terminator.

Don’t stress. We’re here to talk about a car, the Ferrari Luce, not to go further down that rabbit hole. The legacy brand’s first EV might make you wonder, like me, what happens when we push too hard into the future. And is it even necessary?

Take a look online, and you’ll see the Luce has set off a heatwave of controversy. It’s a four-door, five-seat family spaceship, designed with LoveFrom, the creative collective run by ex-Apple designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson. That’s about as far from their sleek, two-door, engine-thrumming sports cars as you can get.

But Ferrari’s idea was never to copy another EV on the market, or to take an old model and give it a green star.

The day after its May reveal near Rome, Ferrari’s shares dropped more than 6%. Even former chairman Luca di Montezemolo said he had “strong concerns.” And Italy’s Minister for Transport Matteo Salvini claimed, “it looks like anything but a car from the Prancing Horse.”….gosh, they have a way with words. I’d love to hear Enzo Ferrari’s take.

“In the past 100 years, technology has changed for sure,” Ferrari’s chief test driver, Raffaele de Simone told Top Gear’s Jason Barlow. “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.

“People often talk about all the new possibilities that software and electrification bring. That’s true, of course. But for me the most important thing is that none of these possibilities ever feel artificial. There has to be a very direct relationship with what the driver asks and what the car does.”

Compared to my Kia Picanto, yes, the Luce rolls a little differently (I never said better). It has 1,035 horsepower from four electric motors, goes from zero to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds, and gets more than 500 km of range. At the Melbourne reveal, the Ferrari folks proudly played a video of Charles Leclerc shouting, in a not-so-convincing tone, “Wow, it sounds so great!” That’s because instead of faking an engine roar, the Luce picks up the mechanical sounds of the drivetrain and boosts them. Whatever that means…Leclerc wasn’t wrong.

Now, I haven’t driven it, and I’m usually pretty easily impressed by a camel-toned interior, a heated seat, extra legroom and a few flashy buttons on the steering wheel. But there’s no escaping that this machine is far from what I imagine Lewis Hamilton is driving Kim around the Amalfi Coast in. At least I hope not. It’s certainly not Jordan Belfort’s white Testarossa in The Wolf of Wall Street, or Ferris Bueller’s cherry red 250 GT California, or Magnum P.I’s salt-sprayed 308 GTS.

So I can’t help but wonder: did they have to do it? Ferrari has been racing since 1930. Look at Rolex, founded in 1905, or Hermès, back in 1837. These are brands that don’t need to drift from their identity. If anything, when they do, it almost makes me distrust them, or maybe the system they’re running in, that they’d need to change a recipe that’s worked for so long just to “keep up with the times.”

To make the Luce, Ferrari brought in outside designers for the first time since 2014. That’s not totally new for them, since Ferrari spent 60 years working with the famous coachbuilder Pininfarina. But this time the Prancing Horse skipped the car experts and went to the tech world. If the look of the car, and the reaction to it, tell us anything, maybe that was a reach too far.

Funny thing is, the market doesn’t seem to mind. At $991,446 before on-road costs here in Australia, it’s the most expensive new EV you can buy in the country. Even so, all 500-or-so cars in the 2026 allocation sold out in under two months, before a single one was delivered. And ‘Chassis 0’, the very first Luce, went for around A$56 million at RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction in August.

Whether it’s a Rolex with Mickey Mouse on it or a Birkin semi-quilted by a Lower East Side artist, if you’re giving it away for free… sure, I’ll take one. I just won’t be so proud of what it says about my taste. I think driving a Ferrari EV says about the same thing. Sometimes we don’t need to modify something already great. Sometimes it’s better to keep it classic.

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