Ferrari Built the Luce for Outsiders. Its Own Fans Are the Only Ones Talking. | Car Curious

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Ferrari Built the Luce for Outsiders. Its Own Fans Are the Only Ones Talking.

Across dozens of car podcasts, the objection was rarely the electric motor. It was the badge.

May 30, 2026

From the Car Curious Team

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On this week's Hot Pursuit!, Bloomberg's hosts worked through the Ferrari Luce before bringing on their guest. One of them landed on a word:

"The more I think about this, the more I think it truly is an aberration for Ferrari. It is weird that they did it."

— Bloomberg Hot Pursuit!, May 2026

A fair-minded take, and it still came out "aberration." Most of the car-podcast world got there too. We index car mentions across automotive podcasts, and in the week after the reveal the Luce ran in roughly 30 episodes across 25 shows, more than any new car we track. The hosts barely brought up the electric motor.

Two things stood out. Ferrari's own fans rejected the badge and shrugged at the technology. And the buyers Ferrari built the car for stayed out of the conversation.

What the Luce actually is

The Ferrari Luce is Maranello's first electric car and its first five-seater. It rides on a bespoke 800-volt platform, makes more than 1,000 horsepower from four motors, and goes about 330 miles on a charge. The name is Italian for "light." Ferrari handed the design to LoveFrom, Jony Ive and Marc Newson's studio, the first time it has gone to a design house outside its own walls. The reveal happened in Rome on May 25, after Ferrari teased the powertrain and interior over the prior year. Ferrari has not set an official price. Reports put it around €550,000, about $640,000.

The data

How the reaction landed across enthusiasts, the press, and Ferrari itself. Source: Car Curious podcast index.

The full episode list is public. (The Luce's episode trail is here.) Those 30 are the reaction in the week after May 25. Add the powertrain and interior teasers from earlier in the year and the count nears 100 episodes; the 90-day pace roughly doubled. One caveat: "luce" means "light," and the Spanish-language shows use "luces" for headlights, so a handful of those hits are not the car.

No one has driven the Luce or seen one on the street, and it still pulled a week of coverage where most reveals get a segment.

What they're objecting to

Hardly anyone objected to the battery. The hosts objected that the car does not look like a Ferrari. On CarCast + Edmunds, they pulled up the configurator on the air: take the badges off, drop it in an LAX parking lot, and no one would call it a Ferrari, or even exotic. If Apple had built it, they said, everyone would nod. Ferrari built it, and that was the shock. A Hot Pursuit! host put it the other way: "If this car had come from Tesla or Lucid, we would not be freaking out. The problem is that it comes from Ferrari." The hosts were grading the Luce as a Ferrari, against sixty years of what the badge has meant.

Chris Harris and his panel cut an emergency episode about it. The panel called the styling "an iPhone with suicide doors," and Harris asked why Ferrari needed to "make something look like an i-Pace that had a 430 crash into the back of it." He read the reveal as defensive, too: Ferrari phoned to ask "how positive I was about electric cars," he said, and when he answered "not very," the launch invite "was not forthcoming."

Everyday Driver got there from the other side. The hosts liked the car. They spent most of the segment praising the aerodynamics and the clean shape, and one of them said, "I encourage clean, beautiful design, that's what this is." Then he hit the wall: "The longer I look at this, the more I like it, but I don't like that it's a Ferrari. This isn't a Ferrari."

The Smoking Tire spent more time inspecting the car than condemning it. The hosts reached for the memes, an "iPad that was a Ferrari," a Waymo, a Leaf, then worked through Marc Newson's "90s wedge" revival, praised the interior and the wheels, and traced the aero down to the carbon vent that pulls air from the wheel well. They would not call it until they saw one in person. Their verdict came to this: it looks wrong in photos, and they still want to drive it. The sharpest reactions ran in Spanish. On Autos Y Más:

"¿Verdad que el Luce bien feo?… Está horrible. O sea, ni Tesla tiene coches tan piñatas."

"The Luce is really ugly, right?… It's horrible. Tesla doesn't even make cars this piñata-like."

— Autos Y Más, May 2026

Who is the Luce for?

The hosts disagreed most about the customer. Two readings emerged: allocation bait, and a reach for new money.

The first reading is a loyalty play. Ferrari sells the Luce to collectors who buy whatever Maranello builds, because it holds their spot in line for the cars they want. The Smoking Tire figured it will mostly go "to...