AUTOMOBILE
Ferrari Luce Backlash Is Running BMW’s China Playbook
<p>Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first all-electric car, at a venue in Rome this week, and within a day the &euro;550,000 (about $640,000) machine had been compared to a vacuum cleaner, a Magic Mouse and a Nissan Leaf. The mockery was loud enough to knock roughly 8% off the company&#8217;s Milan-listed shares the morning after.</p>
<p>Strip away the memes and a familiar shape sits underneath. A storied brand softened its signature look to court buyers in China, took the punishment at home, and now has to decide how far to walk it back. BMW spent the better part of a decade learning that exact lesson.</p>
<h2>What Ferrari Put on Stage in Rome</h2>
<p>The Luce (&#8220;light&#8221; in Italian) is Ferrari&#8217;s first five-seat model and, at 197.6 inches long, the biggest car the company has built, about the length of a Tesla Model S. It rides low, with a dark glass cabin that looks nested inside a chunkier aluminum shell, and there is no traditional grille. In its place sits an S-duct swoop that drops down the nose. Several writers said it reads more like a hatchback than a supercar.</p>
<p>Under the skin, the hardware impresses. Four electric motors produce 1,050 cv (cavalli vapore, the metric horsepower figure Ferrari quotes, equal to around 1,035 hp), enough for 0 to 100 km/h in about 2.5 seconds. A 122 kWh battery on an 800-volt architecture gives roughly 530 km, near 330 miles, of range. You can read <a href="https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/auto/ferrari-luce" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the full Luce specification sheet</a> on the company&#8217;s own site.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>&euro;550,000</strong> (about $640,000) starting price in Europe, with U.S. deliveries not due until the second quarter of 2027</li>
<li><strong>1,050 cv</strong> from four motors, roughly 1,035 horsepower, 0 to 100 km/h in about 2.5 seconds</li>
<li><strong>530 km</strong> of range, around 330 miles, from a 122 kWh, 800-volt battery</li>
<li><strong>197.6 inches</strong> of length, making this the longest car Ferrari has ever produced</li>
</ul>
<p>The market reaction was quick. Milan-listed shares fell about 8% the day after the reveal, the U.S. listing dropped 5.3%, and both recovered close to pre-launch levels by week&#8217;s end. Our earlier <a href="https://budgyapp.com/ferrari-luce-ev-jony-ive-backlash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">coverage of the Luce stock slide and meme wave</a> tracked the intraday move as it happened.</p>
<p>Chief executive Benedetto Vigna, who took over in 2021, said interest was strong, especially among new customers, and has called the Luce a &#8220;leapfrog moment&#8221; for the company. The styling is where the fight is.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter featured-image" style="margin:1.5em auto;text-align:center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://budgyapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ferrari-luce-ev-design-backlash-echoes-bmw-china-grille-strategy-scaled.webp" alt="Ferrari Luce EV design backlash echoes BMW China grille strategy." style="width:100%;max-width:800px;height:auto;border-radius:8px;display:block;margin:0 auto;" /><figcaption style="text-align:center;font-size:0.85em;color:#888;margin-top:0.5em;">Ferrari Luce EV design backlash echoes BMW China grille strategy.</figcaption></figure>
<h2>Where the Design Loses the Prancing Horse</h2>
<p>Ferrari built the car with Centro Stile, its in-house studio in Maranello, and with LoveFrom, the firm founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and industrial designer Marc Newson. Ive&#8217;s fingerprints show in the aluminum finishes, the glass detailing and the on-screen graphics, work you can browse at <a href="https://www.lovefrom.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the LoveFrom design studio</a>.</p>
<h3>An iPhone Designer Takes On a Supercar</h3>
<p>Industrial design and car design are different trades, and the skills do not always carry over. Ive&#8217;s iPhone work made the physical object seem to disappear in the hand, which suited a device you hold. A 197-inch Ferrari is not a phone. Ive himself, long a critic of car styling, recently admitted he was surprised by how hard the job turned out to be.</p>
<p>The interior has drawn praise for mixing analog switches with digital screens. The exterior is where the trouble starts.</p>
<h3>What the Critics Keep Pointing To</h3>
<p>&#8220;I can see a couple of things in the exterior design that still reference the brand,&#8221; said Derek Jenkins, senior vice president (SVP) of design and brand at Lucid, the U.S. electric carmaker, in comments to The Verge. He pointed to the taillights, the red paint option and the logo, then said the proportions, the visual agility and the sense of performance were gone. &#8220;The face of the car isn&#8217;t identifiable. It&#8217;s a mismatch with the brand.&#8221;</p>
<p>Raphael Zammit, chair of transportation design at the College for Creative Studies in Michigan, was blunter, calling the shape &#8220;brutally bland&#8221; and &#8220;alarmingly vacant of identity,&#8221; as if averaged by a machine across many themes. Loyalists agreed. Italy&#8217;s transport minister and even a former Ferrari chairman called for the prancing horse to come off the car, a revolt our report on <a href="https://budgyapp.com/ferrari-luce-electric-salvini-backlash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the loyalist and political backlash</a> covered in detail.</p>
<h2>China Is the Audience That Wasn&#8217;t in the Room</h2>
<p>Why build a car this far from the brand&#8217;s own playbook? Look east. China has accounted for around 10% of Ferrari sales, a share that has slipped in recent years, and the country is exactly where the Luce&#8217;s choices start to make sense.</p>
<ul>
<li>Electric cars are mainstream there, while large gasoline engines face heavy taxation</li>
<li>Domestic brands are launching ultraluxury electric vehicles (EVs) at volume, setting the visual language buyers now expect</li>
<li>The big glass surfaces, five seats and minimal cabin fit that market far better than a two-seat track car would</li>
</ul>
<p>There is a tidy irony in the response. <strong>The Luce was built to win a market that wasn&#8217;t watching the launch, and panned by the audience that was.</strong> Former chairman Luca di Montezemolo, no fan of the design, did note one upside: this is one Ferrari that Chinese rivals are unlikely to copy.</p>
<p>The bet is not absurd. Chinese ultraluxury demand is real, and a five-seat electric grand tourer has no direct rival inside Maranello&#8217;s own range. The question is whether a global brand can tilt that hard toward one region without the rest of its customers noticing.</p>
<h2>BMW Already Ran This Experiment</h2>
<p>This is where the history rhymes. BMW spent most of the last decade enlarging its kidney grilles to sizes that drew near-universal mockery in the West, and it did so largely for one reason.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In certain areas in the world, like China, it is good; people are still asking for big grilles.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That was Adrian van Hooydonk, BMW&#8217;s design chief, explaining the strategy after years of complaints. China is BMW&#8217;s largest market, near a third of group sales, and the grilles played there even as they bombed elsewhere.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Stage</th>
<th>BMW kidney-grille era</th>
<th>Ferrari Luce</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Design move</td>
<td>Grilles enlarged year after year</td>
<td>Grille dropped for a soft, sedan-like body</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Western reaction</td>
<td>Near-universal mockery</td>
<td>Memes, official rebukes, a sharp stock drop</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>China logic</td>
<td>Buyers there kept asking for big grilles</td>
<td>Five-seat EV aimed at a booming luxury market</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Outcome so far</td>
<td>Neue Klasse reset toward a global look</td>
<td>Unresolved; CEO says interest is strong</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>The ending is the useful part. BMW has since moved to its Neue Klasse design language, a global reset built to work everywhere rather than optimize for one region, and van Hooydonk&#8217;s own summary was that the risk of not changing enough was greater than changing too much. The lesson most rivals drew was simple: when a brand built on one emotional identity lunges toward a different buyer, its original audience notices fast and takes it personally. Ferrari is now living the first half of that sentence.</p>
<h2>What the Stock Slide Signals About the Bet</h2>
<p>The selloff looked worse than it was. Shares recovered to roughly pre-launch levels within days, and the Milan stock is still down more than 32% over the past 12 months, so the Luce reaction landed on an already-soft chart. Analysts at RBC Capital Markets called it too early to be overly concerned, while Citi flagged that the polarizing look could land with new buyers, China included. The deeper worry on the desk is older: the research and development (R&#038;D) cost of an electric program and what it returns. Ferrari lays out that picture in its <a href="https://corporate.ferrari.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">corporate and investor disclosures</a>.</p>
<p>Vigna, a former semiconductor executive, has staked his tenure on this being a leap rather than a stumble. The engineering case is strong. Whether the sheet metal earns the badge is the part the market cannot model.</p>
<h2>Selling to a Buyer Who Isn&#8217;t Your Buyer</h2>
<p>Rivals noticed. Lamborghini chief executive Stephan Winkelmann, without naming the Luce, said canceling his company&#8217;s full-electric plan in favor of plug-in hybrids (PHEVs, gasoline-electric cars that run short distances on battery) was &#8220;the right way to go,&#8221; and warned against innovation forced on customers.</p>
<p>Not everyone thinks the damage lasts. <strong>A Ferrari that removes its most emotional asset, the engine, has to replace it with something equally compelling, and critics say this design does not.</strong> Even so, the brand&#8217;s record is long enough to absorb a miss.</p>
<p>&#8220;It might end up being a blip on Ferrari&#8217;s overall history,&#8221; said Stephanie Brinley, automotive analyst at S&#038;P Global Mobility, the research firm. &#8220;I don&#8217;t see why this particular vehicle needs to destroy the Ferrari legacy.&#8221; Her read sits alongside more bearish takes in <a href="https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">automotive forecasting at S&#038;P Global Mobility</a>.</p>
<p>She is probably right, and the BMW comparison shows why. A single divisive car rarely ends a brand. What it can do is force a reckoning with the strategy behind it, which is the choice Maranello now faces.</p>
<p>If the Luce sells in China the way Vigna is betting, the memes become a footnote and the gamble pays. If it does not, Ferrari is left with BMW&#8217;s other option, the quiet reset that admits the first idea reached too far. Either way, the loudest effect so far has been to make everyone suddenly more interested in the Ferraris that came before it.</p>