LUKE FELTHAM | Ferrari, EVs and the fear of change
We all laughed at the Italian brand’s Luce, but the joke might be on us
June 01, 2026 at 5:00 am Luke Feltham (Editor-in-Chief)
We could all sense the squabble that was about to unfold when the boxy images of the Luce, Ferrari’s first all-electric vehicle, flashed onto our screens this week.
The Italian brand’s acolytes are outraged. The design, they say, is a betrayal. A five-seater Ferrari spits in the face of legacy and has surrendered to modern sensibilities of misplaced progressivism.
It has been compared to a vacuum cleaner and Apple Mouse. Former CEO Luca di Montezemolo called for the prancing horse to be stripped from the logo because “we’re risking the destruction of a myth”.
The blowback will be familiar to any who survived the great Jaguar uproar of 2024. In one of the automotive market’s most infamous days, the British carmaker relaunched its brand. Gone were the austere gentlemen with gruff voices. In their place stood bohemian models draped in hues of pink and purple. The leaping cat was kicked off the logo, replaced with more neutered lettering.
The lack of cars in the car advert was notable. New designs followed later, but the actual product being sold was incidental to the new direction the company was going in.
There is an uneasy truth beneath the searing invective. If all those with a claim of undying love for the brand ― who took such personal offence to the changes ― had actually bought their cars, Jaguar would never have had to make such a drastic move in the first place.
Ferrari is similarly animated by necessity. The automotive industry is going through an unprecedented period of disruption. Chinese cars have swept the globe, conquering huge swathes of market share. Europe’s legacy manufacturers, who went unchallenged for so long, are being forced to introspect in the face of an existential threat.
In many ways, the Italian luxury producer is better inoculated to the sharp change than its German colleagues. It operates on a far smaller scale, has tight sales controls and boasts a clientele that won’t be swayed by undercutting prices. Still, complacency would be foolish.
Similarly, it could not ignore the world’s march toward electric vehicles. Other manufacturers have long since bowed to social pressures and made bold promises about moving away from the internal combustion engine. Nobody, not even a supercar brand, wants to be the last prehistoric hold-out.
The problem is that it is not as simple as swapping out a petrol motor for an electric one. The battery must sit under the floor, towards the middle of the vehicle, and maintain a low centre of gravity. That would have effectively been impossible in a traditional Ferrari shell.
Former Apple designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson were brought on to create the new design ― presumably in the hope that their fabled name power would help add a positive spin to the iconoclastic design.
It might still. Social media reactions are fickle and schadenfreude is short-lived. In the automotive world, few accurately predict what will become iconic or be sent to history’s scrapheap.
Beyond the toxic emissions of Ferrari fan culture, the situation also says something interesting about where we are as a society embracing electric vehicles (EVs). As far as we have come over the past decade and strong adoption rates, there is still significant resistance to change and the mechanisms required to get us there.
“Range anxiety” ― the fear of getting stranded between charging stations ― is inexplicably still alive in major cities. People legitimately worry that EVs are a long-running political statement that will ultimately lose its cachet.
There’s no reasonable debate at this point. Battery technology has reached phenomenal levels and is only improving. Any country with a healthy amount of sun in a year can theoretically set up a solar charging network ― providing perpetual, sustainable energy and reducing reliance on oil imports.
Marketing savant Rory Sutherland presents a great counterfactual. Imagine that it was EVs that were the antecedent technology. Someone comes along and says they have developed an engine that is noisier, slower, pollutes the planet, and, instead of charging at home, requires expensive, finite fossil fuels to run. You would incredulously throw that person out of the window.
Most of us will struggle to summon any sympathy for a company like Ferrari. With a price tag of $640,000, we’re also not pre-ordering the Luce as our next family car. Yet in an abstract way, the car represents the transformation our society is undergoing, just as a rejection of the new design is indicative of our fierce resistance to change.
Our salvation will never come from a supercar. But our collapse may well come from our intransigence.
