Back in 1965, a young singer who’d already earned a strong following among the faithful of such folk greats as Woody Guthrie and Dave Van Ronk, took to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and almost created a riot by pulling out an electric Stratocaster guitar instead of his traditional acoustic Gibson.
At least, that’s what the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown would have you believe. I wasn’t even a twinkle in my dad’s eye at that point, and he surely wasn’t cool enough to be there himself, but so I have no first- or second-hand recounting myself. From what I’ve read, though, the depiction of shouts and cries and dismay in the film is rather overstating the event itself. It’s more of an encapsulation of the angst that followed him and his decidedly rock-flavored backing performers over the next year or so, fans calling him Judas for what he was doing to the folk movement.
Nevertheless, that moment is something of a bellwether of Bob Dylan’s career, a time when he decided it was time to prove that soulful music doesn’t have to be plucked out on an acoustic guitar. Some of his fledgling fanbase surely checked out at that point, but in retrospect, that was still just the beginning of his global stardom.
At nearly 80 years old, it’s hard to see Ferrari as a company that’s just beginning, but this weekend it did something radical: it unveiled its first EV. It’s called the Luce, it has over 1,000 horsepower, and it looks all the world like a happy car from a happy sci-fi movie. It’s hardly the angry aesthetic that so many modern Ferraris skew towards, and, surprising nobody, it hasn’t gone over particularly well.
The response I’ve seen online has been overwhelmingly negative. I confess that I’m a little tired of people immediately hating anything new and different, and so my gut makes me want to be contrarian simply for the sake of shushing the haters, but I have a few more specific problems with this reaction.
The first is that to judge a car you’ve only seen in a 1:1 thumbnail on Instagram is more than a little unfair. The Luce is a car where the intricate details are everything, and those details simply aren’t conveyed in the aforementioned, low-res, overly compressed preview.
I spent a fair few hours over the past weekend pondering that car in person, and while I confess my initial reaction was, well, not positive, I genuinely started to come around to it. Does it give me a yearning deep in my soul like say a 355 or F40? No. Do I appreciate the originality here? Yeah, I do.
That’s doubly true of the interior. I really didn’t have a good reaction to that either when I got a first look earlier this year. But, seeing it inside the car, surrounded by leather and all positioned perfectly, I was blown away. It’s among the greatest interiors in the world.
The bigger problem I have with this knee-jerk online reaction is that everyone is dismissing this car based on a look when there’s a much bigger story to tell here. This isn’t some character-free blob that’ll drive you to work while you doomscroll your brain into oblivion. This is genuinely a car that’s meant to be driven.
Ferrari’s engineers told me they went to great flengths to bring genuine fun and engagement to the car, including a novel paddle system that adjusts torque output and regen to bring some of the feel of shifting to what should be a delightful amount of performance from the quad-motor setup.
And yes, it’s Ferrari’s heaviest car by a long shot, but in the world of performance EVs, it’s remarkably light. It’s within 100 pounds of Porsche’s Taycan Turbo GT with the Weissach Pack, a car that is an absolute thrill ride.
To get the Taycan that light, Porsche’s engineers had to evict the rear seats. The Luce, meanwhile, still has a full interior. Ponder that for a moment when you think about what Ferrari’s engineers could do when they decide to make something properly sporty and battery-powered.
But the most interesting aspect for me is how Ferrari created the sound for the Luce, pumping the raw output from an accelerometer attached to the rear motors through an amplifier. It’s the same concept as an electric guitar, which makes but a tiny twang without an amp, but screams an unholy racket with the right combination of pedals and skill.
And that’s why Dylan was in my head this past weekend. Much like fans struggled to make sense of the noises made by early pioneers like Charlie Christian and Les Paul, I’m not surprised that many casual tifosi can’t get their heads around the Luce.
And maybe that’s okay. There’s a lot more changing here than just sound. Ferrari seems content to be creating something for a new generation of enthusiasts here -- or, as Ferrari CMO Enrico Galliera put it, to extend the “Ferrari Community.”
Will it be successful in that regard and become the car that brings Ferrari into a new generation of motoring? Or, will this unveil be the motoring equivalent of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where many of Bob Dylan’s fans rioted when he started strumming on an electric guitar?
61 years later, that guy’s career seems to still be doing alright, and he, of course, went to reshape his sound again and again. That big shift in 1965, though, really helped catapult him into the massive, mainstream superstar he became.
Will the Luce help Ferrari do the same? The company hopes so. You can’t talk of extending the community without going more mainstream. But there’s one key area where my over-wrought folk/Ferrari comparison here falls apart: price. The Luce is set to become one of Ferrari’s most expensive models, starting at €550,000 in its home Italian market.
That makes it nearly twice as expensive as the Roma, the company’s current most accessible model. Now, I fully realize that Ferraris have never been exactly attainable, but pricing this thing above such exotics as the 12Cilindri effectively rules it out as a market-expansion machine. It just pushes it further into a curious niche of mainstream practicality but an ultra-exotic price tag.
Will it be a success? Can the Luce be the kind of appreciating asset that the brand relies upon? And, most importantly, does this thing drive well enough to silence the armchair critics and keyboard warriors? Only time will tell on all those fronts.
In the meantime, you can read my full take on the Luce and all its details at these fine outlets: