Maranello's first EV was ridiculed before a single car was delivered. Then it quietly cleared its entire 2026 order book. Here's what the noise missed.
There is a peculiar kind of car story that only Ferrari can produce: a vehicle mocked as the ugliest thing the brand has ever built, blamed for wiping billions off the company's market value, publicly disowned by a former chairman — and sold out inside two months. That car is the Luce, Ferrari's first fully electric production model, and it has just done exactly that.
According to the Financial Times, Ferrari quietly set a target of just under 500 Luces for the 2026 model year. That entire allocation was spoken for roughly six weeks after order books opened on 27 May, before a single customer had taken delivery. Deliveries in Europe do not even begin until October. American buyers wait until 2027. The company declined to confirm the numbers directly, instead addressing the reception at its half-year results at the end of July — where the story only got better for Maranello.
The mockery was real. It also didn't matter.
Let's not pretend the backlash was imagined. When the Luce broke cover at Rome's Vela di Calatrava on 25 May, the response was among the most hostile any modern car launch has drawn. Ferrari's stock fell around 6 percent in the days surrounding the reveal. Former chairman Luca di Montezemolo told Italian media the company should have "at least" removed the prancing horse. The internet did what the internet does and lined the Luce up against a $35,000 Nissan Leaf — a comparison so persistent that Nissan's Irish arm cheerfully thanked Ferrari for the flattery. Weeks later, Ferrari's marketing chief departed after sixteen years, and Lamborghini's CEO pointedly reminded everyone how good he felt about cancelling his own brand's first EV.
The design, penned with Jony Ive and Marc Newson at LoveFrom alongside Ferrari design director Flavio Manzoni, is the crux of the argument. This is the first car Ive has styled, and his fingerprints are unmistakable: a smooth, shell-like, almost pharmaceutical silhouette that deliberately rejects the aggression and theatre that made Ferraris legible from a hundred metres. A senior executive told the FT the shape is dictated by aerodynamic requirements and needs to be "contemplated" before it makes sense — which is a polite way of asking buyers to trust the physics over their first impression. Ferrari claims the Luce carries the lowest drag coefficient in the company's history.
Whether you find it brave or forgettable, the sellout says something plainly: Ferrari never needed you to like it.
The scarcity math nobody talks about
Five hundred cars sounds trivial, and by mass-market standards it is. But Ferrari is not a volume manufacturer. It delivered just 13,640 vehicles in all of 2025 and counts roughly 90,000 active clients on its books. Do the arithmetic and the Luce's entire 2026 run represents about 3.7 percent of annual output — and required commitments from just 0.56 percent of Ferrari's existing customer base. Fewer than six buyers per thousand clients. Ferrari had already previewed the car privately to around 1,600 hand-picked customers in Rome, meaning the whole allocation amounted to under a third of that invited room.
This is the part the outrage cycle keeps missing. A Ferrari allocation is not a purchase decision the way a normal car is; it is a position on a ladder. Long-time owners have argued openly that the overwhelming majority of these orders come from existing clients securing their standing for the genuinely unobtainable cars to come — the next limited-run special, the next F80-tier halo. Under that logic, most Luce buyers are not Luce fans at all. They are Ferrari clients who understand the system. The strongest demand, tellingly, came from China, where the first batch of 88 cars reportedly sold out within days.
At a starting price of €550,000 — roughly $633,000 to $640,000 depending on the exchange rate, and that is before options — the sellout represents well north of $300 million committed to a car nobody had driven. When Ferrari reported second-quarter earnings, bespoke personalization orders (paint, leather, carbon, liveries) had surged enough to force a rare mid-year guidance raise, industrial free cash flow jumped, and shares climbed despite a per-share figure that came in under consensus. Scarcity, it turns out, sells.
Now the part enthusiasts should actually care about
Strip away the styling war and the Luce is a genuinely serious piece of electric engineering — arguably more interesting under the skin than over it.
Underneath sits a bespoke 800-volt platform built around a structural 122 kWh battery pack that Ferrari integrates directly into the floor. The pack uses lithium-ion NMC pouch cells developed with South Korean supplier SK On, assembled in-house across fifteen modules — including a double-stack tucked beneath the rear seats — and weighs around 1,389 lb. Making the battery a load-bearing member of the chassis drops the centre of gravity roughly 3.74 inches below that of the Purosangue, which matters enormously in a car this size. Kerb weight lands at about 2,260 kg (just under 4,982 lb) — heavy in absolute terms but genuinely restrained for a five-seat, 122 kWh EV, thanks to a chassis built from hollow aluminium castings and extrusions.
Power comes from four motors — one per wheel — for a combined output of around 1,035 hp (roughly 772 kW) and 739 lb-ft of torque, with a boost function nudging it toward 1,050 hp. That yields a claimed 0–100 km/h in 2.5 seconds and a top speed beyond 310 km/h (193 mph). Four independent motors mean true per-wheel torque vectoring, and Ferrari has clearly prioritised handling character over headline straight-line numbers — the sign of a company that wants this to drive like a Ferrari, not just accelerate like one.
Two engineering details stand out to anyone who has driven quick EVs and found them numb. The first is Torque Shift Engagement, a patented system worked through column-mounted magnetic paddles that lets the driver step the torque up in stages — building a sensation of progressive, escalating pull rather than the flat, instantaneous shove that makes most powerful EVs feel one-dimensional after the first launch. The same paddles adjust regenerative braking on the fly. The second is the sound. Ferrari resisted the temptation to pipe in a synthetic V-12 fantasy. Instead the Luce captures the real mechanical noise of its own electric drivetrain and amplifies it according to drive mode through a 21-speaker, 3,000-watt system. It is honest noise, not karaoke.
On the practical side, the range sits at 529 km (329 mi) on the WLTP cycle, DC fast charging peaks at 350 kW, and Ferrari claims you can recover around 70 kWh in twenty minutes. There are five real seats — no transmission tunnel means a genuine middle passenger — and a 21.1 cubic-foot boot, the largest luggage space Ferrari has ever offered. Inside, Ive's restraint shows: physical dials, toggles and buttons in machined recycled aluminium, an F1-inspired steering wheel modelled on the classic Nardi three-spoke and roughly 14 ounces lighter than a standard Ferrari wheel, and screens used sparingly rather than smeared across the dash.
The verdict, and what to watch
The Luce is a paradox that only makes sense once you accept what Ferrari actually sells. As an object of desire in the old, visceral, prancing-horse sense, it divides a room. As a demonstration of scarcity economics, it is a masterclass — a car that cleared its order book faster than the mockery could cool. And as engineering, it is far more considered than the memes allow: a structural-battery 800-volt platform, genuine per-wheel torque vectoring, a novel stepped-torque system and an admirably honest approach to sound.
The real test is still coming, and it is not aesthetic. It is residual value. Ferrari's allocation model rests on cars appreciating or at least holding firm. The most interesting number won't be how fast the Luce sold — it's how many appear on the used market a year after delivery, and what they fetch when they do. That is when we'll learn whether the Luce is a Ferrari in full, or simply an entry ticket to the next one.
You are allowed to think it's ugly. Ferrari already knows you do. It sold every one anyway.
Jasmine's Take: I Speced Ferrari's First Electric Car Back in 2021 — Let's See How Close I Got
Hey gearheads, indulge me for a second, because this one is personal.
Way back in June 2021, I took on a copywriting challenge: invent Ferrari's first radical, boundary-breaking car before Maranello did. Name it, spec it, write the campaign. I called my creature the Ferrari SF100 Cavaliere — S for special, F for Ferrari, 100 for the special series and Cavaliere in honour of Enzo himself, who was known as il Cavaliere. Five years later the real thing landed as the Luce, and it is a strange, delicious feeling to hold my old spec sheet next to the finished car. So let me do what I do best and read the tea leaves in hindsight.
The power figure? I basically nailed it. I gave my Cavaliere 1,200 horsepower from a swarm of motors. The Luce lands at roughly 1,035 (up to about 1,050 on boost) from four of them, one per wheel. Same postcode, same philosophy: forget a single screaming engine, spread the muscle across the corners and let torque vectoring do the choreography. My concept ran three electric motors; Ferrari went one better with four. Close enough that I'm taking the point.
The sound system — this is the one that gave me chills. For the Cavaliere I speced a Burmester setup, because if you are going to wrap a Prancing Horse around your ears it had better be the good stuff. Here is the thing: when I wrote that in June 2021, Ferrari had no public audio partnership with Burmester at all. That only became official the following year, when the Purosangue arrived with a bespoke 21-speaker Burmester system. So I picked Ferrari's future audio house a full year before Ferrari announced it. The Luce, for the record, carries its own 21-speaker, 3,000-watt system that dwarfs the 14 speakers I dared to dream up — Ferrari hasn't publicly named the brand behind it, so I won't put words in their mouth. But calling Burmester a year early? I'm keeping that one. Chef's kiss.
And here's the poetic part. My Cavaliere kept a real combustion voice — that 4L flat-plane V8 was the emotional anchor of the whole thing, the horse straining to break free in my TV ad. The Luce has no engine to sing, so Ferrari did the next most honest thing imaginable: instead of piping in a fake V12 fantasy, it captures the genuine mechanical whir of its own electric drivetrain and amplifies that. Different hardware, identical soul. Neither of us was willing to fake it. That, to me, is the most Ferrari decision on the whole car.
Where I zigged and Ferrari zagged? Two big ones, and I'll own them.
First, the powertrain. I bet the future on hydrogen — a fuel cell, no battery, an all-electric range topped up by clean gas. Ferrari went the opposite way entirely: a monster 122 kWh lithium-ion pack from SK On, bolted into the floor as a structural member of the chassis. I wrote "eliminating the need of a battery." They built a 1,389-pound battery and made it the backbone of the car. Swing and a miss, but an honourable one — the whole industry was still guessing in 2021.
Second, and this is the juicy one: my Cavaliere drove itself. The entire pitch was Level 5 autonomy, a Cavalier concierge of remote pilots who could take the wheel, mixed reality overlays and a virtual race you could join from the seat. I imagined Ferrari surrendering the driving. Jony Ive did the exact reverse — he ripped screens out, filled the cabin with machined aluminium toggles and dials and built a car that begs you to drive it yourself, no chauffeur, no algorithm. And my gearless transmission? I wanted to bin the gearbox entirely. The Luce bins it too — but then hands you paddles for its patented Torque Shift Engagement, a system that steps the torque up in stages so the acceleration builds and swells instead of dumping all at once. We were chasing the same ghost — how do you keep the theatre alive once the gears are gone — and we answered it from opposite ends of the room. I said delete the shifting; Ferrari said reinvent it.
So did I get the big prophecy wrong? Not really. My core instinct was that Ferrari's first "impossible" car would break a sacred promise and get roasted alive for it before the money quietly rolled in. I guessed they'd break the no-autonomy vow. They broke the no-EV one instead. But the pattern held perfectly: radical car, furious backlash, sold out anyway. I even priced my Cavaliere at scarcity levels — fewer than 200 units at around $2 million — while the Luce plays the identical game at fewer than 500 a year and about $633,000. Same DNA. Same trick. Same Ferrari.
The only thing I'd change on my old spec sheet? I'd swap the hydrogen tank for an 800-volt battery, keep the Burmester and frame my 2021 homework. Turns out the hardest thing to predict about Ferrari isn't the horsepower. It's which promise they'll be brave enough to break.
So, gearheads — did I read the future or just get lucky? And now that we've both had our turn designing Ferrari's first electric car, which one would you rather have in the garage: my self-driving Cavaliere or Ive's shell-shaped Luce? Let me hear it.
Reporting drawn from the Financial Times, Reuters, Ferrari's official reveal and Q2 2026 disclosures, and technical specifications published across the automotive press. SF100 Cavaliere specifications from Jasmine's 2021 concept project.
