I don't care if you're 5 or 75, if you are into cars, you have probably at some point in your life thought a Ferrari was the coolest thing you had ever seen on this planet. For coke-fuelled businessmen of the 80s (or kids with posters on their bedroom walls) it might have been the Testarossa that got your heart racing; for stoner millennials playing Outrun 2 on the original Xbox (hi!) it could have been the Enzo.
My point being, for decades the name Ferrari has been synonymous with aspirational sports cars. If you won the lottery, and you were going to buy a car, a lot of people would go straight to a Ferrari. If you were rich as hell, and wanted to show it, you would buy a Ferrari. If you were making a video game, or a model kit, and wanted to recreate the coolest thing you had ever seen on the planet, it would be, you guessed it, a Ferrari!
Imagine the world's horror today, then, when the company finally, after years of wondering and pondering, released the images of its first ever electric vehicle. And it looks like complete dogshit.
Rather than do the most simple thing on Earth--take Ferrari's regular design language and put some batteries in the floor--the company has massively overthought things and brought in an external firm to help create the 'Luce': Loveform, headed by former Apple designers Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson.
The Luce does not look like a Ferrari. It looks like the concept for a Honda Hydrogen vehicle from 2002. It looks like one of the "this is what the future will look like from the 90s" cars from Demolition Man, only worse. It looks like a child's remote-controlled car you'd buy for $10 from an Aliexpress-ass market stall. It looks like anything but a Ferrari.
And the horrors aren't contained to the exterior! The interior looks like a Mad Catz steering setup for the PS3:
I hate this so much. The car's announcement goes on and on about comfort and space, and with a straight face says stuff like "Surfaces have been refined to be smooth, continuous and uninterrupted"; motherfucker, every car, down to a Kia Picanto, does that! Nobody is buying a Ferrari for comfort or space, they are buying a Ferrari because they're supposed to look expensive and cool! And this car looks neither expensive or cool.
I can perhaps understand an intention here, that Ferrari didn't want to just slap an electric motor in an existing design and instead wanted their first electric vehicle to be something new and unique and different. If that was the only goal, then mission accomplished, but I'd imagine another, secondary goal would be to make an electric car that people who are into sports cars and want some passion from a Ferrari would want to buy, and I can't see a single thing about this disaster that would entice those buyers.
It's just so incredibly funny to me that Ferrari of all manufacturers would whiff on an electric sports car this hard, when seemingly everyone else, from Audi to a Volvo spin-off (the Polestar 5, below) can get it so right.
Update: Wait, Luce costs $640,000?!?!?! Unbelievable.
