Greetings from 40,000 feet somewhere above northern Michigan. Yep, we’re way up there today, dodging what I presume is some weather or turbulence. Or maybe the pilot’s just trying to keep us clear from the generally FUBAR state of the FAA down below.

Either way, as I write this, I’m winging my way home from the better part of a week spent in Maranello, which is one of those places where I just say the name and, if you’re a bit of a car enthusiast, you know exactly what company I was visiting.

If you’re not, well, first of all, thank you for your continued readership despite my constant blatherings about all things automotive. Secondly, that company is Ferrari, which this week finally unveiled its long-teased electric car to the world.

Actually, that’s not exactly true. Ferrari showed us a bare chassis, a battery pack, a couple sets of motors, and a fair few slabs of silicon that help to tie it all together. And, really, that’s about it. Company reps gave it a name, the Elettrica, but then declined to say whether that name will stick when the rest of the machine is unveiled next year.

Nobody would even say whether it’ll be an SUV or merely a sedan of some sort. Disappointing? Yeah, a little bit, especially since I fear a 1,000-horsepower EV with somewhere around 300 miles of range is, on paper at least, going to sound a bit pedestrian when it goes on sale, presumably sometime towards the end of next year or the beginning of ‘27. (Surprise, nobody would confirm that either.)

What we got was a promise that this will drive like no other EV on the road, and I’ll just go ahead and get it on record that I 100% buy into that. Everyone at Ferrari surely knows that the world at large is expecting this to be a disaster. They know it has to be good, and I expect it will be.

But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a success.

We also got a promise that Elettrica will sound like no EV before, too, thanks to a system that picks up the vibrations from the rear motors and runs them through a digital amplifier to create a harmonic experience. I dig into the details in my write-up over at Engadget, but what really stood out to me wasn’t the technology involved but rather the marketing pitch wrapped around it.

Ferrari said that the company’s internal combustion-powered sports cars are like acoustic guitars, exhausts serving as resonance chambers. The Elettrica, though, will be like an electric guitar. Electric guitars are wholly dependent on amps, which create a sound that’s directly generated by but at the same time vastly different from the actual sound of the strings doing their thing.

Remove the amp, and the sound of someone plucking away on an electric guitar is a tinny thing that’s hard to hear from more than a few feet away. Plug in the amp, though, and you have an instrument capable of driving countless rock anthems and other righteous tunes.

I don’t often take time to celebrate marketing pitches, but I have to say bravo to that. It’s a genius analogy, easy to understand and wonderfully effective. If more EVs launched with messaging like this, instead of endless pandering about saving the environment or obliterating your internal organs with ever-faster acceleration times, I feel like the American EV market would be in a much better place today.

Conceptually, this approach isn’t miles different from what Porsche did with the Taycan in creating that EVs sound, but Ferrari’s off to a good start in positioning its EV as something truly different from the pack — despite not really doing anything particularly novel beneath the skin.

As to that skin itself? We’ll have to wait and see what Jony Ive and Co. can do with that. Anyhow, you can catch all the technical details on Ferrari’s first EV at these fine outlets below, and stay tuned for more analysis from yours truly regarding how this thing stands to compete in the market.