Ferrari Luce

If a simple car can hurt your feelings, maybe your relationship to your own feelings is the problem.

If you're hoping for design commentary, why—I don't critique liquid soap dispensers. Stay in your lane, Michael.

If you long for the sort of comfort that only a raucous 12-cylinder-engined Ferrari can provide, find and rescue one from the bosom of its current lover. Your passions are best enjoyed elsewhere. Forget I said anything. Luce? What Luce?

Pour your heart and soul into furthering your relationship to what you think Ferrari is, and it'll be fine. Ferrari is fine.

Everything is fine.

Arguably, if a Ferrari ends up here, it's a bad day for Ferrari. An all-electric Italian super-crossover would be news in any age, but this is the iPhone age, so Ferrari put that guy and his cohort in charge of the entire show, as the sources of my sources say.

An opinion I've long had is that Ferrari exists as a benchmark so that others can hold it up as a goal of image and high performance. Ferrari's core legend is so strong, its competition are spinoffs: Lamborghini, Bizzarrini, ATS. People gave relative unknowns trust and money because they worked at Ferrari.

Working at Ferrari is winning.

Why is this essential to understand? For its competition, winning is sweeter if a Ferrari finishes in second place.

Ford vs. Ferrari is a very different film than, say, Ford vs. Isuzu. Yet here it is. Ferrari is so G.O.A.T. it evolved into an entire HORSE.

I can't begin to imagine asking for the job of designing the first all-electric Ferrari, which sounds simple but…are you high? Nothing is simple anymore. 

Designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson and Ferrari management all knew this, and worked very hard while daydreaming of (I would hope) an outcome opposite to what shot out of the birth canal at mach-Jesus: a weird, pierogi-faced Ferrari.

Weird not because it's electric, or because it has more than two doors, or looks like a Li Auto crossover cursed with a severe peanut allergy. 

Weird because we all expected nothing of Ferrari, and it gave us something, and its betrayal of form stings us. Ferrari used to be safe. Ferrari makes aspirational cars. Now it makes this?

Ferrari owes me nothing, and I expect nothing. Not even beauty, or performance, or five-seat EV crossovers with artfully layered digital touch displays.

I'm convinced: that a massive organization took a chance on outside help of this calibre and came up with a 600 horsepower VHS tape rewinder will eventually give us a documentary. And a book, and hopefully a fictionalized Hollywood version where Ive is played by Tom Hardy, shouting in broken Italian and hurling impossibly perfect laser-cut prototype parts at some poor soul trying to help undo some of the inevitable damage.

If a simple car can hurt your feelings, maybe your relationship to your own feelings is the problem.

The Luce isn't that bad, or good, or weird. It is betrayal of the humanity that beats within Ferrari.

I am a longtime fan, of the alloy bodies, the Challenge Stradales, the prototipos, the surgical patchwork repairs of F1 championship-winning cars, each hand-assembled with the human connective tissue that remains the backbone of Ferrari's mythos as the world's most revered house of high sports car couture, that Enzo built.

We revere il Commendatore, the fearless commander.

We detest il Commodore, the feckless computer.

There's no doubt considerable effort was expended on Luce. What's weird is…I can't see it, yet it's there. Conceptually, literally, lamentably.

A liminal object. A liminal Ferrari. From the iPhone guy and his merry band of do-gooders.

I assure you, they didn't intend to make a weird car, or a Temu Nissan Juke.

Still, my wish is for people to buy them, transforming Luce from weird to familiar.

The elites deserve their own Cybertruck moment.

My wish is for Ferrari to adopt this Duplo design language across its lineup, and bury Enzo's legacy alongside its supercars. Ferrari can go weirder. Ferrari can embrace EVs, and lower prices, and open up a dealership in your town.

Horror: Ferrari can do whatever the hell it, and its shareholders, want it to do.

My feelings may be the problem, but they're still a little hurt.

This Luce, too, shall pass.