Ferrari built an EV to take on China. Its own fans turned on it first

A Ferrari has always sold a sound before it sold a car: the bark of a combustion engine that owners learn to recognize the way they recognize a voice. So when Maranello pulled the cover off Luce, its first fully electric model, and the room met a silent four-door, the company was betting that the badge alone could carry it into the future. The prancing horse had other ideas.

The fiercest critics were not rival brands or climate skeptics but Ferrari’s own aristocracy. Luca di Montezemolo, the chairman who presided over the marque’s most romantic decades, called the car a disgrace and said he hoped they would take the prancing horse off it altogether. Italy’s transport minister piled on. For a generation raised to believe a Ferrari must be felt as much as driven, an electric one reads less like progress than like apostasy.

What makes Luce more than a styling row is the map Ferrari was reading. The fastest-growing tier of the luxury market is now electric, and much of its momentum comes out of China, where a new class of high-tech cars has rewritten what a six-figure machine should be. Ferrari, whose Chinese sales have been slipping, wanted Luce to win that room. The twist is cruel: critics said the car looked like the very machines it was meant to answer, some reaching for the Nissan Leaf as a comparison, while chief executive Benedetto Vigna insisted it had “nothing to do with Chinese EVs or those by other brands.” Every heritage marque now faces the same trap; Aston Martin has staked its own future on ultra-luxury electric performance, and the question of whether a storied badge survives the switch hangs over all of them.

Prestige does not transfer automatically across a change of engine. Shaped with Jony Ive’s studio LoveFrom, Luce swaps the V12 scream for a system that amplifies the motors’ real noise, and wraps more than a thousand horsepower in the outline of a family car, Ferrari’s first five-seater. Priced around 550,000 euros and due in showrooms late this year, it asks buyers to pay supercar money for a shape the faithful refuse to recognize.

The market answered first. Within a day of the reveal, Ferrari had shed close to a tenth of its value, billions gone in a single session, the sound, perhaps, of a myth being asked to idle.