Recently, luxury car maker Ferrari has come under fire for its new electric car with a mind-melting $640k price tag. It has become a divisive topic, and the model has been mercilessly roasted online. The ‘Luce’ is Ferrari’s first electric car.
Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s former president and chairman, told a local TV news team in Italy that he did not want to express his honest opinion on the new model.
“If I say what I think, I’d cause harm to Ferrari. We’re risking the destruction of a myth,” he said. “This is surely a car that at least the Chinese won’t copy.”
Ferrari’s ‘Luce’ has been mocked for its glass-roof design. Online, it has been compared to a vacuum cleaner, a camper, the Nissan Leaf EV, and an Apple mouse on wheels. It has also become the target of meme-makers and automotive industry experts.
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“Oh boy, how ugly she is. How (do you) justify a 400,000 to 500,000 price for this? Unbelievable,” Luc Poirier, the owner of 40 Ferraris, told the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna argued in a post that “we need to bear in mind that true innovation does not look for immediate consensus, nor does it stem from the ordinary.”
In the meantime, veteran car designer Maurizio Corbi told Wired that Ferrari’s approach might be a “powerful marketing ploy.”
"They literally threw a boulder in a pond, and that's all people are talking about. I can't recall anything similar,” Corbi said.
He added that, from his perspective, the flat surfaces and lack of emotion in the design of the ‘Luce’ show that “it’s clear that this is a product designed not by a car designer but by a product designer.”
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One of the designers who worked on the interior and exterior of the ‘Luce’ is Jony Ive, an ex-Apple designer. He worked on the project together with Marc Newson.
“This gentleman came from Apple and is used to designing objects of that type. The car is something else, it's not industrial design. A good industrial designer isn't capable of designing a car; it's another profession,” said Corbi.
"The involvement of Jony Ive and Marc Newson almost seems like a choice of boundless arrogance, as if to say, let's not care about what our customers love and just sell this to them. The stock price has lost 8 percent. I have American friends, Ferrari owners who are members of the Ferrari Club of America, people in love with the brand, who are shocked. As is [former Ferrari chairman] Montezemolo, who yesterday publicly expressed his disappointment.”
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According to Corbi, the ‘Luce’ innovation in the design department.
“From the standpoint of volume, Ferrari has designed a family soap bar: It’s the negation of everything that is a Ferrari. Then there are those little wheels. We car designers had the desire to make ever larger wheels, ever sharper, more aerodynamic shapes. Here we have returned to our grandfather's car, without any stylistic features that hark back to the Ferrari tradition.”
The automotive industry has been dealing with challenge after challenge over the past few years. Due to supply chain issues, the entire industry has had to adapt, according to Statista.
Some of the main challenges were larger inflation rates and rising raw material prices in 2022 and 2023.
As per Statista, though the global car sales volume wasn’t impacted as much due to these issues, automakers’ annual profit margins actually decreased.
What’s more, consumer worries about inflation led to “fluctuating car purchasing intentions in many markets.”
In other words, economic uncertainty has affected both consumer sentiment and many brands’ bottom lines.
2024 had been the automotive industry’s most successful year since the Covid-19 pandemic, with vehicle sales exceeding those recorded in 2019.
“Passenger cars constituted the largest share of motor vehicle sales worldwide, representing around 70.9 percent of sales. China and the United States were the largest markets for this segment in 2024, partly due to a culture of mass-motorization prevalent in the United States.”
Despite global sales growing in 2024, global motor vehicle production declined by a whopping 1 million vehicles. “Heavy buses, despite still being behind the 2019 global output, was the only segment for which a production increase was recorded between 2023 and 2024. China was the leading car producer worldwide, with nearly 27.5 million units manufactured in 2024. This was over threefold the production of Japan, which came second in the ranking,” Statista explains.
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