As it should be clear to anyone who regularly reads this website, we sometimes have spicy takes. People still have extreme reactions to David’s timing belt take, and that was published two years ago. This is all to say that we’ve brought back the Autopian Podcast as a show we’re calling “Carbage Time” that’ll allow us to burden you, our dear readers, with the insane opinions burning a hole deep in our brains.
For this first episode, I couldn’t help but talk about the Ferrari Luce. I proposed to David that there was 0.000% chance that Ferrari would get this right, or that they could get it right. Obviously, the actual execution achieved a level of wrongness that’s impressive, but that’s somewhat immaterial to my argument. There was no version of this that would have felt right. It doesn’t mean the car is bad, or people won’t buy it, just that the entire premise was screwed from the jump.
He didn’t agree with me, and he had his own idea for how this could have been a success. He’s wrong, but that’s ok! The show isn’t about being right, it’s about being honest about our ridiculous opinions (I am right, though). If you’re a video a podcast person, it’s right here on YouTube:
If you’d like to just listen to it right now, in the browser, here’s a little player:
I love that logo, btw, which is something Jason put together for the show.
To listen to more podcasts episodes you can go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or you can use the RSS feed and point your favorite Podcast player at it.
My Main Point
One of our objectives with the website is that every article has value, so if you’re not a person who wants to watch David and I talk about cars, or even listen to it, I’ll outline the main point here, which is that Ferrari set a trap for themselves. When Porsche built the Taycan people generally didn’t freak out about it for a few reasons, and I think understanding the (relative) success of the rollout is key to understanding where Ferrari went wrong.
Obviously, the Porsche looks like a Porsche, so it has an immediate advantage there. The Ferrari is an odd-looking car. From a performance perspective, I haven’t driven a Luce, but I’m going to assume it drives and performs extremely well. Ferrari has made very few bad road cars in its entire existence, and the modern company is an excellent engineering firm.
So what’s the difference? Relative to Ferrari, Porsche is a volume brand. Porsche will essentially sell as many cars as people will buy. This may not be true for every model, as there are limited numbers of 911 GT3 Tourings, et cetera, but it’ll basically make as many Macans and Cayennes as the market will support. Ferrari doesn’t. More than anything, Ferrari sells scarcity. The power Ferrari wields over its customers is that you cannot just buy any Ferrari you want and it can decide, if it wants to, to never sell you a car again. Owning a Ferrari means you’ve put in the time and the money. You’re in the club.
Could Ferrari have made a lower-priced ($200kish), light weight, high performance sports car? Absolutely. But then people would want them and they’d be directly competitive with the 296 GTB and the Amalfi. Ferrari probably doesn’t want to do that. I doubt this current version of Ferrari wants to sell more electric grand tourers than sports/super/hypercars. I think this is why they made the car a GT and why they made it look different. It had to be something very unique and not particularly competitive with the other cars in the stable, and it also had to be super expensive. The reason why Jony Ive and Marc Newsom were called in is that it justified the $640,000 cost.
And that’s the other problem. Ferraris are, by their nature, superlative vehicles. Electric cars have, to a great degree, democratized performance. A sub-three 0-60 mph time isn’t that hard to achieve, nor is going faster than three seconds to 60 mph something your brain can easily register or your body can enjoy. The performance metric that people most care about with electric cars is really range, and the necessity of making it fast means that its range is pretty mediocre (sub-300 miles likely on the EPA test) and, to make things worse, its charging isn’t state-of-the-art. On paper, a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is fairly close as a performance vehicle, to say nothing of a Lucid Sapphire.
Take two of the best designers in the world, let them run free and build a car with few budget restraints, and you’d think you’d get something great. The fact that you didn’t is just proof that what Ferrari tried to do wasn’t ever going to be a success. I do think this makes another proposed electric car seem like a better idea, but you’ll have to watch the episode to find out which one.
Let us know what you think about the podcast, the format, et cetera! This is our first one of these and we’re going to try and do one every week.
Top photo: Ferrari
“Ferrari has made very few bad road cars in its entire existence, and the modern company is an excellent engineering firm.”
I disagree. IMO excellent engineering is best demonstrated when the product can be completely neglected, even abused by its owner yet continue to work perfectly, ala peak Toyota/Honda
I triple dog dare you to try that with any Ferrari.
Excellent engineering achieves its goal, if Ferrari aims to make a fast car that’s satisfying to drive and it comes out just as they intended, then the engineering is excellent, regardless of the maintenance schedule. If a body whose rear section needs to be removed to do the timing belt enables them to shorten the wheelbase by 1%, reduce weight by 2% and increase torsional rigidity by 7%, then they’ll do it, because a $20k maintenance job is actually pretty reasonable to the buyer of a $400k supercar.
Mind you, I’m still a Ferrari hater, just not because of their engineering.
It looks like a Chinese EV TEMU Ferrari,
but worse, since it is really a Ferrari,
but doesn’t look like a Ferrari nor has Ferrari specific performance.
For half a million USD I’d expect more. A lot more. A Chinese Xiaomi SU7 almost looks better (looks actually better?) for a fraction of the price.
I don’t know who’d want to be found driving let alone owning this EV Ferrari, since everyone will laugh their a.. off that you paid half a million dollars for basically something that gets owned by a dozen Chinese EV manufacturers. Sure it has a Ferrari badge on it, not sure if that is actually a plus in this.
I don’t understand why Ferrari didn’t make a hypercar. Ferrari style. RED. RED. RED, did I write RED? It’s blue for a reason. An EV Enzo? An EV 360 or 355 ? Low, wide, but electric. Heavy, sure, but with active suspension you can negate that a lot. Maybe a low range, but then again, virtually nobody is driving Ferraris 500 kilometers day after day after day. Except rentals.
I don’t understand Ferrari going through with this. It’s just dumb.
The Xiaomi is nearly the same performance a pricetag nearly a magnitude cheaper.
You could pay someone $100k to custom-paint your SU7 like a custom Smeg kettle, and it would turn more heads.
> Take two of the best designers in the world, let them run free and build a car with few budget restraints, and you’d think you’d get something great. The fact that you didn’t is just proof that what Ferrari tried to do wasn’t ever going to be a success.
Ive is high on his own flatulence and the only way he ever produced high-quality designs was when Jobs was editing him. Since Jobs died, Apple design has been generally pretty crap with a lot of self-indulgent user-hostile designs for the sake of keeping Ive busy. If you scrutinize his post-Apple work past the initial shiny object appeal, you’ll see it’s generally pretty bad, especially his car-related work.
Ive should stay away from cars, because it’s not his lane and he’s not good at it, especially without adult supervision.
I think Ferrari got exactly what they wanted. If they wanted an EV Purosangue they would’ve left it to their in-house team.
It’s a question of the brief and management’s decisions, they knew what they were getting with Ive and Newson, and apparently they liked it. I’m not sure the designers are to blame for delivering something very much in their style.
Apart from subjective aesthetics it actually seems to be very thoughtfully designed. There’s a level of sophistication not really found on other Ferraris so I suspect people who couldn’t care less for the brand (like myself) would find themselves drawn to it. And i like that it doesn’t look like an angry insect like all their other cars from the last 20 years.
I’m not sure where you get that about Apple. Jobs was famously the one who stood up for Ive and aesthetics over everything. With Tim Cook at the helm there has been a clear shift to a more utilitarian approach, putting engineering over design.
Anything Jony Ive designed for Apple needs a protective case or it breaks when it hits the road. Look at the pictures from different angles. It looks like a Tesla Model 3 with its own plastic case. I wonder what other colours they will offer besides the blue, red and yellow in the pictures. And will there be third party cases with cool features?
Nah man. My iphone SE2 is a brick and the last couple of Macbook Pros have lasted 10 years plus and are still usable
This is my theory on the Luce. You walk into a Ferrari dealership wanting to buy the latest F666 Fonzarelli Competizione GTS+ for $2mm, 1 of 25. Ferrari says sure – as long as you take a Luce off our hands.
Two thumbs up for the Fonzarelli Competizione. Aaaaayyyy!
So, you’re saying Ferrari jumped the shark, eh?
That was so good I wanted to give it two smiley faces. Turns out I first read through one browser but my member login is through another brand…so there take your two thumbs up, aaayyy!
Yeah the type of car they chose to build was a mistake. They should have built the Ferrari of EVs, instead they built the EV of Ferraris. As their first EV they should have been going big, like targeting the Nevara but making it more track focused than straight line type of thing.
Don’t love your job. Job your love?
This, for sure. Or go the other way and make something like an EV California where the top down motoring is more important than outright performance. Because as it sits, it seems like they shot for a middle-of-the-pack EV with some very premium pricing.
Yeah, should have made a type of car they already are known for making, just make it a very high performance EV. Then if you want to try for a Cayenne moment with a more generic EV shaped thing go right ahead for your second EV.
Carbage Time is perhaps a nod to old mate Wade’s (aka Dank Pods) channel Garbage Time?
https://www.youtube.com/@GarbageTime420
It’s actually a play on Katie Nolan’s show and the sports term, but it’s a fun coincidence.
I don’t know that show. I’ll have to look out for it.
The comparison to the Taycan is a valid one. You pointed out that Porsche has different brand positioning than Ferrari, but it is worth remembering that Porsche enthusiasts are famously very chill and reasonable. Definitely not a group that would freak out over how an engine was cooled or thier brand introducing an SUV, or their entry level car moving to 4 cylinders /s
Yet the Taycan was not met with outrage but it was a low slung good looking sedan. It looked like a Porsche and it didn’t look weird or oddly proportioned. It looked like a proper sports sedan regardless of powertrain. I don’t know why designers are so intent on making EVs look odd.
Porsche 911 owners I knew lost their marbles when the Cayenne came out.
Shock value wore off, though, pretty quick when they realized it would only help Porsche make more 911s.
I’ve had enough time to think about the Luce that I have what might be a different opinion than most.
I agree that is doesn’t “look” like a Ferrari, but I also think that was the point. Ferrari wouldn’t have slipped into Jony Ive’s DM’s if they wanted to make something like they’ve always done. That dude is wired different and they knew that. They wanted that.
I also suspect it’ll be perfectly successful. Actually, knowing Ferrari and how they “nuture” their customers, they probably had enough buyers lined up to make money on it before it was shown to media. I wouldn’t be shocked if we found out later that a number of wealthy Ferrari customers were given first chance and first opportunity to buy.
This might also be the first Ferrari that won’t spend all of its life in storage appreciating in value too. Mostly because this is going to be the first Ferrari that *everyone* will know about. It’s a statement car for people that don’t know cars. It’s the first Ferrari where most of the known world will know you own a $600k car, which is probably more the point than any of it’s electric or performance numbers. Buyers of this Ferrari are going flex with it. My mom will know it’s a $600k car, whereas with every other Ferrari she’d describe them as “pretty red cars.”
I think the Luce is potentially brilliant.
And I suspect that it’s setting something up. I wonder what’s next.
This feels like a worst-case-scenario for Ferrari.
If Ferrari wanted the Luce to be different than the other Ferraris, they could’ve pulled a Bentley or Rolls Royce and do a large, luxo-barge but with a more sporty approach. Those are exclusive, fast cars but more importantly, they look expensive.
I could have understood that. Instead they came up with a plastic computer mouse.
If you strip the Ferrari logo of this car, it does NOT look expensive. It could have been some concept Lotus, generic Chinese EV or something Volkswagen came up with to stop the bleeding.
You just described Jaguar. That’s been the XJ (or brand in general) marketing position for over 50 years
Okay, there is some irony that in the headline complaining Ferrari didn’t get it “RIght,” you have a typo.
Don’t ever change, Autopian.
I still remember the article where everything was upside down, no other news site would dare to do that.
“It Was Impossible For Ferrari To Get The Luce RIght”
Horse Hockey.
All Ferrari had to do was call their friends over at Pininfarina to do the job.
But Noooooo…..
Legacy automakers still think “EV” stands for “Tesla Alternative”
Which isn’t the case at all.
And it’s a mistake which will put many of them out of business.
Styling wouldn’t help IMHO. Pininfarina already have their own in-house designed EV supercar (Battista). Matt is right, there’s a price ceiling on EV’s, regardless of their styling, power, interior, or anything else. If it costs more than a Lucid Air Sapphire or Taycan Turbo S, it’s irrelevant, and those aren’t exactly lighting up the showroom floors as it is.
Yeah. I’m sure Ferrari saw Rimac and Pininfarina not selling their “150 planned” production run and decided they had to try something else.
I’m sure they will sell all they make. But when you hire the guy that invented the rectangle: this is what you get.
In my opinion, uninformed as it is, Ferrari could have gotten this right if they took this car and gave it a Ferrari body. Where it really goes wrong is in that it doesn’t look like a Ferrari. If the speed and handling are what they claim, then that’s all good.
As far as the podcast, maybe I’ll check it out this weekend.
The Luce looks like it might have started out as a lithe, low slung sports car that came up too fast on a Chevy Impala so it swallowed it whole, and now it’s dealing with a major case of constipation as it tries to poop it out the back.
I really like the podcast format. More and more I find myself with less time to read, but I can listen while I work all day long.
That’s why I like pods myself! Glad you like; more to come.
Just wait until they unveil the Lucedore mexican wrestling heritage edition.
This car wearing a mask to hide its identity would be a really good idea.
Plot twist: Ferrari knows what they are doing, the Luce is targeted at rich people on China and Silicon Valley tech bros who want a status symbol (designed by Johnny!), it’s so different that nobody talks about the electric propulsion, it‘s so expensive that it subsidizes the gas cars, gives them a compliance car on top and expands the brand to new customers. Still ugly though.
Agreed: the exclusivity is still there. Though we associate Ferrari with ultimate performance, the quality of the luxury item isn’t really the flex; the price and label are. Here’s the problem in the Internet age: if there’s enough negative hype, even the super rich may not buy it. Nobody wants to be seen in the Ferrari everyone hates (see also Jaguar). You don’t even need an EREV: had this been a beautiful EV, instantly identifiable from afar as a Ferrari, I think the Luce would’ve been an instant success.
I’m not sure that exclusivity is a good thing if it achieves it because no one wants it.
“Their appeal is becoming more selective.”
You can say that again.
Look at the Tesla Cybertruck. Now that it’s a laughingstock, not even techbros want to be seen in it.
I think it’s a valid argument that Ferrari couldn’t get this right, but they certainly could’ve gotten it less wrong.
Ferrari cast-off Pininfarina, for example, created the Battista which is stunning.
Oh, hey, the podcast! I didn’t recognize it! A couple of notes:
1. You should introduce yourselves at the start of the pod, so I know who’s talking. Maybe for the video there’s a caption or something, but it wasn’t until the EREV discussion that I knew it was David.
2. The trouble with a series hybrid / EREV is charge depletion at prolonged high speeds. That said, the idea of a tiny V12 is both ludicrous and, since it’s a gazillion-dollar Ferrari, brilliant. Maybe you run it at two speeds, depending on how fast you’re going. Maybe you Volt it and couple it to the wheels at high speed. It’s a challenge for F1 too (though those aren’t series hybrids); you could claim some lessons from that.
I’ll pass this along to them! Complete oversight. First time producing and it’s been years since the boys have done one; I’ll whip us into shape
Autopian death knell:
“we’re going to try and do one every week“
Pfft, as if any of us would be happy with car that started every time we tried.
The Trunk. How does it work? This is the question the people want to know.
They literally designed the one car that zero people were asking for :
A 4 door Ferarri sedan that costs $600k, and then hired someone who has never designed a car to design it.
The ONLY possible saving grace is that Jony Ive approached THEM with this configuration, and somehow bullshitted his way up the executive chain to convince them that this was a good idea.
I see why they just couldn’t convince themselves to create an EV SUV which I think would have probably been more widely accepted.
But a 2 passenger GT EV with traditional proportions that drove like a Ferarri could have been achieved, especially for $600k.
I could design a better
carFerrari than that! In fact, I bet everyone that reads The Autopian could. Nothing but the badges scream Ferrari.I couldn’t. I know my limitations and design is decidedly not in my wheelhouse.
You could get ChatGPT to design a car better than that.
Maybe, but that really wouldn’t be me designing it.
You could just try to draw a Ferrari you know from memory, I’m sure it would come out better than this, and by doing it from memory it would be sufficiently distinct from the real model to count as a new design.
All the cars I have ever drawn look sorta like K-cars. Square with round wheels. Most children could probably do better.
Y’know what, fair enough.
The amount of failed checks that somehow all forgot to ask “does this look cool like a Ferrari should” will go down in history. I’m sure Ferrari will sell at least a few to the folks wanting the next hypercar allocations if nothing else haha.
That straight-on rear shot of the Luce makes it look like there’s another, better (or maybe worse?) looking car hiding inside an oversized costume.
3 Ferraris in a Nissan trenchcoat.
It’s been mentioned before that the Luce looks like it’s pooping out a C4 Corvette.
2000-06 Chevy Impala.
Thank you for bringing back the podcast. I missed it, especially if Beau or a special guest was involved.
No concrete plans on guests YET but I know we all want to incorporate them. Thinking with producer brain: get a few in the can so that we can show it to prospective guests and they know what they’re getting into