Blade Runner made real: The Ferrari Luce has to be seen to be believed
If a Ferrari should take your breath away, box ticked. But that rumbling sound isn’t just its unique take on powertrain audio...
The all-new, all-electric, four-door, five-seat Ferrari Luce (loo-chay, Italian for light) has just landed. You aren’t ready. Maybe nobody is. It’s a wild super-saloon, touched by genius and madness. Tech bros form a queue, aesthetes look away now.
There’s a lot both to look at and take in here, as there are a wealth of firsts and stories inside the stories. Ferrari’s first electric car, first four-door saloon and the first project to be briefed out to the industrial design team at Love From, home of Sir Jony Ive, previously the Apple creative tour de force responsible for the look and feel of pretty well everything.
While it’s not unusual for Ferrari to outsource design – decades of heritage with Pininfarina, Bertone and Scaglietti point to that – Ive’s colleague Marc Newson’s insistence that Love From “have to be able to touch everything” has led to an extraordinary reinvention of convention inside and outside the Luce, especially around the human/vehicle interface. The results are jaw-dropping.
Just look at it, for a start. Blade Runner made real: aero-formed, cab-forward, future-forward 21st Century hyper-transport. Like no other Ferrari, and few other cars, echoes of Newson’s own Ford 021C concept of 1999 aside, perhaps. It’s dramatic, very different and thereby likely polarising. Early online reaction dwarfs even Jaguar’s reinvention. Though if you are going to drop north of £438k (yes, you read that right) on an electric car then go big or go home, I guess.
And go quickly. The term super-saloon is not an affection: 1050 horsepower, 0-60mph in less than 2.5 seconds and on to 192mph and beyond. With, to accompany, a unique sound created to enhance the driving experience, drawn entirely from an accelerometer at the centre of the axle to capture the texture and vibration of the rotating components, as one might derive amplification from an electric guitar. A patented system, Ferrari describe it as “authentic and functional” and – as I’ve seen on video – it’s enough to make Lewis Hamilton giggle like a schoolboy. Rolling Stone has an exclusive interview with the sound engineer who created that to follow.
The wider claim to design “coherence” is no mere bluster. The ‘what I thought a car of the future would look like when I was a kid’ silhouette extends inward from outward, to an interior that has been scrutinised, component by component. A stand alone central screen, with deliciously tactile toggle switches and buttons claiming back analogue territory from infernal touchscreens (amen to that), a similarly independent instrument binnacle with video game undertones but absolute clarity – and a thinner than you might expect steering wheel with snickerty-snick flappy paddles. Haptic joy is an Ive trademark, it’s here in spades.
The question, though, is if the the Playstation Generation, the Gran Turismo go-tos or the Apple disciples – or enough of them – will have the cool half-million necessary to download this newest Ferrari? The maker itself acknowledges this is a whole new product that will bring in a whole new audience who’d not previously have signed up for the works of the definitive supercar and hypercar portfolio. And it will have to – this is chalk presented by makers of exemplary cheese.
But we do love a wow factor, a WTF on wheels, and for the minute the stage is all Ferrari’s…