Ferrari Luce Review: A Ferrari That Thinks Different

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Need-to-knows

• Ferrari’s first fully electric car
• Designed in collaboration with LoveFrom, the creative collective led by Jony Ive and Marc Newson
• Around 1,050hp, 0–100kph in 2.5 seconds, approximate range of 530km
• Tactile controls throughout
• Priced from €550,000 in Europe, approximately £440,000 in the UK

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I’ve been to a lot of tech launches over the years. Phones, laptops, headphones, cars; none of them prepared me for what Ferrari did in Rome this weekend.

No cameras allowed. At all. Everything had to be shot through the lens of the camera crew on site (which, to be fair, made my life a lot easier).

Ferrari was, clearly, very serious about keeping its first-ever EV, the Luce, under wraps right up to the last minute of the official unveiling (bar the interior and tech reveal we saw in San Francisco earlier this year). And they’ve done a marvellous job; this has to be one of the most successfully hidden significant car launches of all time.

Now that I’ve seen the Luce, I can see why.

A 30-minute hands-on

Thirty minutes is how long I had with the Ferrari Luce. Thirty minutes to take it in, form some kind of opinion, work out what I wanted from the camera crew, and try to keep enough mental notes to produce some coherent content.

It’s the scariest, toughest, and most enjoyable part of this job. You’ll see the result of it on my YouTube channel.

It’s even tougher when you realise the scale of what Ferrari is doing with the Luce. By all accounts, this is the biggest launch in Ferrari’s history, and the level of secrecy around it — the airport-style security on the way in, the embargoes piled on top of embargoes — suggests that Ferrari is expecting a significant public reaction.

There will be nerves, I’m sure. Because the Luce is the first time Ferrari has handed real creative control over a car to a third party. The design has been led by LoveFrom, Jony Ive and Marc Newson’s creative collective. That’s a huge decision, and the sheer volume of media at the event — many of whom, like me, work primarily in video — is the giveaway. Ferrari isn’t just unveiling a car with the Luce. It feels like a global test to see how far they can push a completely new design language.

An honest caveat: the cars we saw were stationary. I haven’t driven the Luce (and I have no idea if or when I will). And we shouldn’t forget that a huge part of what makes a Ferrari a Ferrari is how it drives.

On that note, the Luce has around 1,050 horsepower. It’ll go from standstill to 100kph in two and a half seconds. It’ll go from nothing to 200kph in 6.8 seconds. And it has an approximate range of 530 kilometres. It also has a fancy paddle ‘shift’ system with torque vectoring across all four wheels, which isn’t designed to replace the feel of a gearbox, but instead ushers in an entirely new way of driving an EV at speed.

Pull the left paddle to increase ‘engine’ braking and decrease maximum available torque as you head into a corner, and then pull the right paddle to progressively increase the available torque and remove the braking. It’s clearly the kind of thing you need to experience first-hand to understand what the Luce does for the thrill of driving a Ferrari.

Chances are, the Luce is going to drive like nothing else before it. Certainly, the reaction we saw from Charles Leclerc in a video which depicted the aftermath of his time as a Luce passenger (Lewis Hamilton was in the driver’s seat) suggests that it’s a rather wild ride.

A design that hits you in the face

It hits you immediately. Before you’ve registered the badge, the wheels, or the fact that it has four doors and five seats, you’ve already clocked that the Luce looks nothing like any Ferrari that has come before it, bar some relatively discrete nods to the past.

The whole car is built around a single, shell-like glass house, with the bodywork and aero elements floating around it. It doesn’t look like an SUV. I’m not entirely sure what it looks like, to be honest, but for some reason, it was giving off BMW i8 vibes for me. With a hint of Blade Runner, a sprinkle of Audi R8, and a dash of 360 on the rear end.

But it is not an SUV. I repeat.

There’s also lots of detail that’s easily missed. A huge scoop carved into the bonnet, which enables you to see straight through to the road beneath. One of the most surprising was the enormous windscreen wipers that sit fully vertical when not in use (they’re positioned that way for aerodynamic reasons). The tail lights disappear into the surface when they’re off, then return as a halo when they’re on. And, yes, that halo is indeed a direct nod to the 360 Modena and 458 Italia.

There are plenty of other quiet callbacks. The three-spoke steering wheel is a reinterpretation of the Nardi wheel from the 1950s and 60s. The custom yellow (known as ‘Giallo Luce’) on the wheel hubs and the steering wheel itself is lifted straight from the historic Ferrari logo. The colours chosen for the launch, bar the reds, are modern, muted, pastelly shades that fall in line with the colours chosen for most modern smartphones. Azzurro la Plata got my vote from the demo vehicles that were placed in front of us in Rome. Luce customers will, of course, have a wider choice.

It’s impossible to look at any of this without immediately switching into Apple Fanboy Mode. Jony Ive’s influence is baked deeply into this car, and you feel it from the moment you look at it and set foot inside.

And that brings me to my favourite part of the Luce.

The switchgear is the star

I bang on about this constantly in my car reviews, so apologies if this sounds familiar.

Touchscreens have taken over modern car interiors, and they have largely made them worse. And less safe. The fewer buttons a car has, the more frustrating it is to use — it’s that simple. Tesla is largely responsible for the death of the malleable car cockpit, and it’s hard to forgive them for it when cars mean as much to you as they do to me.

Ferrari and LoveFrom appear to have met somewhere in the middle on this, and what they’ve done is nothing short of stunning — if already divisive (the switchgear, dials, and steering wheel have been the only elements of the Luce made publicly available until now).

However, I’d urge any detractors to try and get their hands on the Luce’s controls, because they’re something else.

Every switch, every dial, every toggle in this car feels engineered to within an inch of its life. They click. They have weight. They give you that little bit of mechanical resistance that tells your fingers exactly what you’ve just done — without you needing to remove your gaze from the road ahead. And those physical controls are married to smooth, well-resolved graphics across the cabin displays (provided by Samsung, no less).

Special mention must also be made of the launch control mode, which is accessed via a pull-down switch (?) located where most cars place the sunroof controls. No words will do the awesomeness of that thing justice. You need to see it. And pull it.

The most telling detail, though, is that the dials are still analogue. So is the clock — a multi-function piece called the Multigraph, with real mechanical hands. I love that as much as I love the mechanical clocks that Porsche makes available to its customers. That steering wheel, too, is a thing of beauty and a respectful nod to Ferrari’s heritage.

At the press event, we sat in on a roundtable with Marc Newson. It provided a fascinating insight into how LoveFrom approached the Luce project. Both Marc and Jony are petrolheads who own classic Ferraris, so they knew exactly what was at stake. Newson also noted that the project didn’t start as an EV, which might have been the most surprising thing I learned all day. And he made it very clear that the LoveFrom team couldn’t understand the obsession other EV manufacturers have with removing physical controls from the interior.

The LoveFrom representatives also repeatedly talked about working closely with Ferrari’s drivers throughout development. That should be reassuring and, again, reveals that many of our opinions about the Luce need to be rounded off with a test drive.

What the Luce ISN’T

There are two comparisons people are going to reach for almost immediately with the Luce, and they’re both wrong.

Inside the Ferrari lineup, the obvious comparison is the Purosangue. Four doors, family-friendly proportions, designed to be the Ferrari you can actually use every day. On paper, the Luce is its spiritual successor or sidekick, albeit entirely powered by electricity.

In reality, the two cars have wildly different personalities, and they couldn’t look more different. The Purosangue is the supercar family car. The Luce is… I still don’t know. But it does have one extra seat in the back. And the LoveFrom connection.

Outside the Ferrari lineup, the lazy comparison is the Porsche Taycan. Once again, I think this is wide of the mark. I’m a fan of the Taycan, but it feels like a sports saloon. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the Luce isn’t trying to be a normal anything.

The sound

Anyone who tunes into my reviews knows I’m an audio geek at heart, and the sound a manufacturer chooses to give an EV is, for me, one of the more interesting challenges. Some don’t bother at all, leaving you with a tiny whine every time you put your foot down. Some force a quasi-real engine sound through the speakers. BMW employed Hans Zimmer.

How do you replace the engine? More importantly, what on earth should a Ferrari without an engine sound like?

I wouldn’t want that job.

Ferrari’s approach to this is fascinating, on paper. The Luce features a precision accelerometer that sits on the rear axle, which picks up the actual vibrations of the electric motors as they spin. The sound is amplified and played aloud to anyone within earshot.

Ferrari has likened the setup to an electric guitar — the source is real, if quiet, and amplification does the rest.

That’s a lovely idea. We got to hear it, briefly, in the aforementioned video featuring Ferrari’s Formula One drivers. It sounded great — but I need to hear it in person. Encouragingly, Ferrari told us that the sound is designed to aid the driving — not to show off. And, if you’re wondering, the Luce is silent unless it’s in performance mode.

Brave… but what happens next?

So where do I sit on the Luce after 30 minutes of touching-but-no-driving?

It is, clearly, the bravest and boldest move Ferrari has ever made. ‘Forced’ is certainly the wrong word, but they’ve had little choice but to play their EV card now. They’ve waited long enough, after all.

I like that strategy. I also like the fact that they’ve entrusted the design to a third party, and even more so that the third party is LoveFrom. Jony Ive’s — and, of course, his team’s — touch is evident as soon as you set eyes on that car and, particularly, when you sit in it and start playing with all the buttons, switches, and knobs. Even if you’re not sold on the external looks, just five minutes in that cabin would probably prompt a purchase. If you have deep enough pockets.

The Luce will be extremely divisive, though. Ferrari knows this. LoveFrom knows this.

I like it — but it took a while over the course of two days (we spent more time with the car beyond our filming slots) for those looks to settle in. This isn’t an instant hit, looks-wise, in my opinion.

I hope it isn’t the de facto design direction for all Ferraris going forward, but I’ve always admired bold, different designs, and that’s what Ferrari’s first EV needed. Ferrari has also made it very clear that this car is an addition to the lineup. With notable emphasis on the word ‘addition’.

They could quite easily have just EV’d the Purosangue and have done with it, but instead, Ferrari spent several years quietly building something completely new.

It will sell. It’ll sit in museums. It’ll be talked about among journo circles for years. People will love it. People will hate it. But, most of all, the Luce will create noise in an otherwise stale world of flatpack EVs and fast-but-no-substance electric hypercars. And, yes, the pun in that last sentence was fully intended.

Oh, and the price? You’ll pay €550K in Europe and around £440K in the UK.

Wrapping up

The Ferrari Luce is not a car you’ll make your mind up about overnight — I know this because it took me two full days before the exterior clicked. What I can tell you is that the interior alone is worth the price of admission (emotionally, at least). Ferrari and LoveFrom have created something genuinely special in there, and the analogue-meets-digital approach to the cockpit should be the blueprint every carmaker studies before they rip out another bank of physical buttons.

Whether the Luce drives as brilliantly as it looks like it should? That’s the story I still can’t tell. Until I get behind the wheel, the fairest verdict is this: Ferrari has been braver here than I expected them to be, and braver than they needed to be. That, on its own, earns a great deal of respect.

If you have the budget and can handle a wait list that’ll almost certainly stretch into years, the Luce is already compelling on the strength of a 30-minute hands-on. That’s not nothing.