Ferrari (RACE) shares dropped 6.27% in Milan trading on Tuesday, falling to €290.55 and wiping out roughly £3 billion in market cap a day after Maranello unveiled the Luce, its first all-electric car.
The reaction online was overwhelmingly negative — the design got compared to a Honda Accord, an Apple Store minivan, and a luxury toaster. Investors clearly took the temperature of the internet and ran. But we’ve seen this exact movie before — when Ford put the Mustang badge on an electric SUV.
A Mustang Mach-E moment for Maranello
When Ford unveiled the Mustang Mach-E in November 2019 at the LA Auto Show, the reaction from Mustang loyalists was savage. The script was almost identical to what we’re reading about the Luce today:
- “A Mustang can’t be electric.”
- “A Mustang can’t be an SUV.”
- “It doesn’t look like a Mustang.”
- “It won’t feel like a Mustang.”
Bill Ford Jr. himself reportedly resisted putting the pony badge on the car. “When I saw that it was going to be an SUV, I really dug my heels in,” he later admitted. Mustang forums called the decision “blasphemy.” Enthusiast outlets ran obituaries for the brand.
The Mach-E is now the best-selling Mustang. Period.
In 2024, Ford sold 51,745 Mach-Es against 44,003 gas-powered Mustangs — the EV outsold the original by 17.6%. It’s the second-best-selling electric SUV in the United States behind only the Tesla Model Y, and the best-selling non-Tesla EV on the market. August 2025 was its single best sales month ever.
I’m not saying the Luce is going to repeat that trajectory — it’s a €550,000 ($640,000) five-seater limited to roughly Ferrari’s ~14,000-car annual cap, not a mass-market crossover. But the shape of the reaction is identical, and Ferrari fans are doing exactly what Mustang fans did six years ago.
People hate change. Haters are way louder than lovers. The smart move is to let the dust settle a few months and see what the actual reaction looks like once the shock wears off.
Where Ferrari actually missed: no one drove the car
I was in Rome for the unveiling, and I think the design conversation has completely buried what Ferrari did from an engineering standpoint.
Ferrari spent the entire presentation hammering one word: emotions. John Elkann and CMO Enrico Galliera kept telling us that a Ferrari isn’t defined by its powertrain — it’s defined by how it makes the driver feel.
And then they didn’t let a single journalist drive it.
They showed a quick reaction clip from F1 driver and Ferrari ambassadors Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton behind the wheel, but a 90-second hype reel from a brand ambassador can only carry so much weight when the entire pitch is “trust us, this feels like a Ferrari.” The day of the launch should have been the day a hundred reviewers wrote about what 1,050 hp through four independent motors actually feels like on the road. Instead, the entire global media cycle is about whether the car “looks like a Ferrari.” That’s a fight they won’t win.
That’s the real own goal here, and it’s the reason the stock is down 6% today.
The Luce powertrain is genuinely insane
Buried under the design discourse is a powertrain spec sheet that, on paper, could turn the Luce into a rail gun on a track. Here’s what Ferrari is actually packing into this car:
- Four bespoke permanent magnet synchronous motors derived from the F80 hypercar, one per wheel.
- 1,050 hp combined — front motors put down 210 kW combined and spin at 30,000 rpm, rear motors put down 620 kW combined at 25,500 rpm.
- 2.5 seconds 0-100 km/h, 6.8 seconds 0-200 km/h, 310 km/h top speed, with 730 lb-ft of torque.
- 122 kWh battery built in Maranello using 210 cells co-developed with SK On, structurally integrated into the chassis and designed to be replaceable so owners can upgrade as battery tech improves.
- 800V architecture, 350 kW DC fast charging, 530 km WLTP range.
- A brand-new Vehicle Control Unit that updates actuation targets 200 times per second through Side Slip Control X, managing all four motors independently.
- Independent torque vectoring at every wheel.
- Active suspension derived from the F80, with spool-valve dampers — no anti-roll bars.
- Independent rear-wheel steering.
- Center of gravity 95 mm lower than the Purosangue, yaw moment of inertia 15% lower, giving the Luce dynamic behavior equivalent to a car 400 kg lighter than its actual 2,260 kg weight.
Then there’s the part that I think genuinely solves one of the biggest emotional gaps in EV performance cars.
Ferrari’s sound system doesn’t pipe in fake V12 noise from a speaker library. A precision accelerometer mounted at the center of the rear axle picks up the actual vibration of the rotating motors. That signal is filtered, equalized, and amplified — basically the same principle as an electric guitar amp. The driver gets continuous, harmonically rich feedback that tracks what the powertrain is actually doing, in real time. It’s optional, which is the right call, but I’d argue it’s no more “fake” than the sound of a Stratocaster through a Marshall stack.
Pair that with Torque Shift Engagement, five power levels on the right paddle, five regen-braking levels on the left, and you get something nobody else has tried in an EV. It’s not a fake gearbox. It’s an active driver-controlled torque language layered on top of instant electric power delivery, designed to keep the driver mentally engaged in the way a manual gearbox does in an ICE car.
Real sound from the actual motor. Driver-controlled torque modulation. F80-derived suspension. Torque vectoring at every wheel. Rear-wheel steering. Sub-1.5-tonne dynamic behavior at 2.26 tonnes of curb weight.
If even half of that delivers the way Ferrari claims, this car is going to be terrifying on the road.
Electrek’s Take
I’m not worried about Ferrari. I’m worried about how Ferrari reads the reaction.
The exterior design is going to be polarizing for a long time, and that’s fine — personally, I don’t mind it, but I understand why the existing fanbase doesn’t see a Ferrari when they look at it. The interior, on the other hand, is one of the most thoughtfully executed cabins I’ve seen in any car at any price, with the rear seat being my only real complaint. And the powertrain, by the spec sheet alone, is one of the most ambitious performance EV any legacy automaker has ever attempted.
The risk isn’t that the Luce flops with current Ferrari customers — Ferrari already said the customer reaction would be mixed, and Maranello sells out of everything they make anyway. The risk is that a 6% stock drop and a brutal social media cycle convince the board that the EV bet was a mistake, right when Porsche and Lamborghini are pulling back on theirs.
That would be a real loss. Ferrari has built what looks like the most advanced performance electric platform in the industry, and the only reason it’s wrapped in a 5-seat, 4-door sedan right now is weight. As battery cell energy density climbs, and we’re seeing real gains with the latest generation of cells shipping right now, the same architecture in a true Ferrari sports car becomes feasible. That’s the car a lot of these critics actually want, and Ferrari is closer to building it than ever.
The Mustang Mach-E went from “blasphemy” to outselling the gas Mustang in five years. The Luce is in a completely different segment, but the early reaction pattern is the same. Let’s see how loud the haters are six months from now, after Ferrari finally lets some people drive the thing.
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