Well. I commented on the Jag with a contrarian take, so it feels only fitting that I do the same for Ferrari’s effort.

The Luce’s reception has been brutal. The share price fell close to 8%, Luca di Montezemolo, who ran the company for twenty-three years, said they should take the prancing horse off it, and even Matteo Salvini, the Deputy Prime Minister and a reliable booster of Italian industry, would not defend it. The design has been compared to a Honda Accord, a Nissan Leaf, and a Tesla Model 3 that someone sat on. The general view is that Enzo would be turning in his grave.

He probably would be. But the styling is probably the least interesting thing about this car. What the Luce is designed to do is break a rule that has held fast for a decade, and the clearest way to see it is to look at the company going the other way.

Ben Thompson made the case this week that Tesla proves something true of all modern technology: the rich and the rest end up with the same thing. The richest people he knows, he wrote, drive Teslas not for the finishes, which are cheap, but for the self-driving software, which nothing else can match. But the car a billionaire buys to drive for them is the same one half the mums in London use for school drop off.

The principle runs through everything with a chip in it. Tim Cook does not own a secret gold iPhone; he owns the one you own. There is no executive edition of the AirPods, no billionaire’s iPad. Whatever the best phone or pair of headphones happens to be, the wealthiest person alive owns the same one you can. Technology is the one luxury money cannot upgrade.

Cars were never that. A car is the most conspicuous thing most people will ever own, and the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive has always been vast and deliberate. But an electric car is barely a car in the old sense. Strip the body and it is a battery, some motors and a great deal of software, and software levels everyone. These aren’t cars; they are computers with wheels.

So for a decade the electric car turned as egalitarian as the phone. There were grander electric cars – a Rolls-Royce Spectre, a Maybach EQS – but the Rolls is built to waft and the Maybach to be chauffeured; neither is the car you buy as an ultra-premium daily driver. The best electric car you could drive hard was a Tesla Plaid, and a Tesla Plaid is what a Silicon Valley software engineer buys. If you were seriously rich and wanted to drive something electric, your shortlist was the same as someone earning a tenth of your salary: the Tesla, a Taycan, a Lucid or an electric BMW.

This is a real problem for a particular kind of buyer – the kind who cares a great deal about the statement his car makes. He might well even have a V12 Ferrari in the garage for the weekend, but he wants something electric for the week, and right now the electric car in his driveway is the same one his head of engineering parks next to his at work. He does not want that. He has never wanted that. For everyone else the levelling of the car is a curiosity; for him it is a daily irritation he has the money to fix and, until now, no way to.

The Luce is Ferrari’s fix: the first fast electric car that also makes a statement. For the first time, money buys you a better electric car to drive – and that, not the styling, is the entire point of it.

And – this is the part the styling row has drowned out – it is apparently a genuinely extraordinary car to drive. There is a motor on each wheel and around 1,050 horsepower between them; 62 mph arrives in 2.5 seconds, 200 km/h in under seven. But the raw figures are the least of it. With no conventional gearbox, Ferrari hands the driver two paddles that do something no combustion car ever could: pull the right and the four motors release their full torque for a corner exit, pull the left and they trade it for regenerative braking – the control unit re-aiming all of it two hundred times a second to keep well over two tonnes flat and gripping. It is torque vectoring of a precision a mechanical drivetrain cannot come close to.

And where almost every other maker now pipes a synthetic engine note through the speakers to paper over the silence, Ferrari does the opposite: it amplifies the Luce’s own sound, the real frequencies of its motors and electronics, and leaves it there. It is a small thing that says a large one. This is not a company faking the old Ferrari; it is a company deciding what the next one sounds like.

The objection to the Luce comes in two parts: that it is ugly, and that it is not “a Ferrari”. It is both. But the two have different causes, and only one of them is Ferrari’s fault. Start with the part that isn’t. A combustion Ferrari is dramatic because it is allowed to be; an electric one is not. This is a piece of technology, and the technology dictates the shape. At around 2,300 kilos the Luce is the heaviest Ferrari ever made, heavier even than the Purosangue, and most of that weight is a slab of cells laid flat under the floor. That mass fixes the proportions before a designer draws a line: the long wheelbase, the high body, the short overhangs. Then there is the air. Range is the only number that matters in an electric car, and at speed the enemy of range is drag. The Luce has the lowest drag coefficient of any Ferrari ever made, 0.254, against roughly 0.34 for the F40. Everything that makes a combustion Ferrari beautiful – the low nose, the deep intakes, the splitters, the wing – exists to manage air at speed, and every one of them creates drag. None of it survives the switch to electric, and that was set before Jony and Marc first put pencil to paper.

Ferrari’s chief designer, Flavio Manzoni, said it plainly: on a combustion car you design for downforce, on an electric one you design for drag, and the body “must be almost continuous, almost flat. Even the wheels must be flat.” That is the constraint.

It is why fast electric cars have all drifted toward the same general silhouette – the Tesla, the Lucid, the Taycan, the Mercedes EQS, each with the same big, long fastback, the same flush wheels, the same smooth, intakeless face. They did not copy one another. They were designed by the same maths. Until battery chemistry improves¹ enough that range no longer dictates the shape, every fast electric car will look broadly like this one.

This is also the answer to the obvious objection, which is that plenty of electric cars look good. Some do. But the most dramatic ones – the Chinese electric supercars, say – manage it by not caring about range, a freedom a car meant to be lived with does not have. The handsome ones that are meant to be lived with – basically only the Taycan – are handsome within the same smooth envelope, not in defiance of it. Drama and range pull in opposite directions, and Ferrari built the Luce to be driven on the road, not the racetrack.

The Luce cannot win on looks, then, and it does not need to. It is not competing with the F80, the 12Cilindri, or any car with cylinders – Ferrari has no plans to stop building those. It is competing with the Tesla and the Taycan, where it holds an advantage no rival can engineer. A Porsche is a driver’s car; a Ferrari is a statement, and at this level the statement is what the money buys.

And then the same logic, multiplied, points east. The buyer I have described exists in London and California, but there are far more like him in Shanghai, where Ferrari has never properly cracked the market and no one feels much nostalgia for a V12 they were never really sold. Nor is there much patience there for quiet luxury: the Luce wears no fewer than eight prancing horses, with a light-up key as a ninth – the kind of thing that “accidentally” falls from a pocket onto a restaurant table. In the land of the logo, that is a feature, not an embarrassment. The tax seals the deal. China punishes big engines – a displacement levy reaching 40%, before import duty and VAT – potentially doubling the cost of the car – so a combustion Ferrari costs far more there than at home, while an electric one skips the engine tax entirely.

The other charge – that it is simply ugly – is the fair one. Ive and Newson’s rounded minimalism suits a phone, a thing you are meant to forget you are holding; but a $500,000 car is meant to be looked at. The colours are loud, but the surfaces beneath them are forgettable, and forgettable is the one thing an object bought to be seen cannot be. The envelope was forced on Ferrari; the dullness was not. They had room to do more within it, and didn’t.

Tesla killed off the Model S and X this year and handed the factory to its robots; its richest customers now have the same cars as everyone else. Ferrari has gone the other way, and built the rich a car the rest of us cannot have. The Luce is not really selling a car. It is selling the one thing a Tesla cannot: the badge.

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1. The chemistry that will eventually change that – solid-state cells, silicon anodes – is a good part of what we focus on over at CanaryIQ. ↩