The Ferrari Luce
A car launch experience
As I walked through the sprawling Sheraton hotel next to an autostrada on the edge of Rome yesterday, I assumed an Italian police convention was taking place. There were 40 or 50 immaculately dressed officers, men and women, standing around chatting in the spacious lobby.
They didn’t seem interested in the gaggle of slightly scruffy journalists and influencers from around the world who were staying at the hotel.
Some readers will know I have attended a few car launches over the last 16 years, so many it’s very hard to recall any individual event.
However, as I sat in the back of black Mercedes V class people carrier, travelling at high speed on the Rome equivalent of the M25, I knew the car launch I was attending attending was a little bit special.
For a start, the autostrada we were zooming along was blocked with peak hour traffic, but we were guests at a Ferrari event in Italy which was when we realised why so many smartly dressed police officers had been hanging around at the hotel.
All 12 black people carriers drove in close formation like in the movies, zig zagging along the busy highway as we were lead and flanked by dozens of police motorbikes, blue lights flashing, sirens blaring the officers gesticulating at any cheeky Fiat Punto driver who got in the way.
No one in our entourage had ever experienced anything like it, this was the treatment normally reserved for foreign dignitaries, presidents, the Pope for goodness sake.
Before long we arrived at a large, newly built sports facility south west of Rome to witness the unveiling of what I think will be seen as a bit of a pivotal vehicle.
We chosen few were the first people from outside the company to see the 100% electric, possibly 100% controversial Ferrari Luce.
(Pronounced ’Loo-chay.’ But you knew that.)
This is the first 5 seat, 4 door, built from the ground up fully electric vehicle this iconic supercar brand has ever made.
This, as we soon learned, is not an electric car. It is An Electric Ferrari.
And all cynicism aside, if there’s one car company that can make a claim like that and not sound like a prick, I would argue it is Ferrari.
I want to clarify that I know more about the natterjack toad than I know about the long and impressive history of Ferrari, but we all know something about this 80 year old company.
Low, red sports cars with 2 seats, that make a lot of noise, with no luggage space and an eye watering price.
I sat on a conference panel in, if I recall correctly, 2012, alongside some proper automotive luminaries. One of them was an executive from Ferrari. The conference was about the future of the automobile. I always remember the wonderfully entertaining and passionate Ferrari spokesman stated that the sports car brand would never make an electric car.
Never.
Now, 14 years later, I stood looking at the Ferrari Luce, a low, long, exquisitely shaped grand touring saloon car.
It has a 120 kilowatt hour battery pack and four, yes four, incredibly small, unimaginably powerful motors connected to 4 enormous wheels. A company with an 80 year history of making amazing combustion engines with bucket loads of cylinders suddenly had the skills to make a game changing electric vehicle that sets the bar very, very high for all other car makers.
Well, sort of, because the critical part of the project that delivered this machine to the world, is the design team tasked with coming up with the up with the design and much of the technology.
Lovefrom was founded by two industrial design luminaries, Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Some of you may be aware of Jony’s previous work, he was the bloke who designed that iPhone and Apple watch thing among many other iconic products.
They have worked in collaboration with Ferrari for the last 7 years, coming up with the shape, style and particularly the human machine interface, the stuff you actually touch and hold when you drive the car.
Now I know ‘car buffs’ will pontificate, react and enthusiastically share their opinions and obviously their boundless knowledge of what Ferrari should have done, could have done, how an electric Ferrari is an abomination, how it looks like a 1990’s Honda, how the back end is the ugliest thing to ever be made by anyone, ever.
I think that’s all fine, carry on, help promote a brand that does not need promoting. None of the people who might, at some point, buy one of these cars is going to read this, or indeed read anything any of us say about this car.
It exists in another world, one I have never been a part of, and indeed, I know at my age, I have never wanted to be a part of.
The actual reveal of the car was so off the scale huge, I just sat there, slack jawed and exhausted by the barrage of information. OMG, Ferrari love their tech.
This car will cost up to, and in some cases over, £450,000. About the cost of a mid sized home in the UK. Going to a launch event with Ferrari is on another level. I’m not going to go all false modesty on you, I have met and mingled with numerous high-net-worth individuals in my life, they have always been charming and interesting, but they live in another dimension. If you can afford to consider buying a car like this, then you are in the 0.001% club. That is very exclusive. They breathe better air than the rest of us.
But let’s try and put all that behind us, indulge me for a moment and listen to the stats about this incredible machine. I have explained how Ive and Newson played the lead role in the design, the actual guts of the machine were made in house by Ferrari.
Every major component of the car, the motors, the battery, the inverters, the suspension (mind boggling) and chassis, have all been developed at the company’s factory in Maranello.
Ferrari has claimed more than 60 patented technologies for components and systems that have gone into its development.
Everywhere we looked in the huge display area at the launch were examples of incredible, and yes, very expensive technology. Two surprisingly petite permanent magnet synchronous motors are housed in each unit, fitted to the front and rear.
This results in each wheel having its own, independent 250+ horsepower drive unit. These motors were designed and built by Ferrari and here’s a little stat that might boggle your mind.
They can spin from zero to 45,000 rpm in one second.
What the whaaa!!
Obviously they are not going to do that when connected to the gearbox and transmission but it gives some indication of just how much power is at your disposal.
The total horsepower available to the driver is 1,036, so yeah, quite a lot. It has a 122 kWh battery pack, about 111 kWh usable giving a range of 330 miles, if you drive sensibly. So until I get to drive one, no one is going to achieve that.
The cells are made by SK, a Korean battery maker who supplies all the top tier European brands. (Although SK have huge factories in China as well as Korea, and the massive one in America has stopped producing batteries for cars because . . . drill baby drill. Isn’t that lovely)
It can charge at up to 350 kilowatts, 800 volt architecture, blah blah. I mean, seriously, if these kind of facts are important to you you shouldn’t be buying this car
Ferrari is about emotion, about passion, about speed and raw power. Obviously it launches at incredible speed, going from a standing start to 100 mph in around 6 seconds. That’s miles an hour, not kilometers, and all the way to nearly 200 miles an hour in another polite handful of seconds.
That is, if you use the gears.
Wait. Gears! In an electric Ferrari! What the whaaa!!
No, it doesn’t have gears in the traditional, mechanical sense that all combustion engines have to have because they are so hopelessly compromised. (Just a little dig at petrol heads, it’s funny, calm down)
The Luce has something that feels like gears, technology that enables the emotional experience of gears using some incredible fancy way of keeping maximum power/torque to the wheels from a standing start all the way to the car’s top speed.
I stood for hours listening to a Ferrari engineer explain this, I could see all the proper journalists asking questions again and again to try and get their heads around it. The final conclusion being that ‘you can only really understand the emotion when you drive the car.’
We are all going to have to wait a long time to do that. Sorry, I’ll modify that. I am going to have to wait a long time to experience that.
I’ve left the interior until last, no pictures can do this justice. It’s essentially the result of a bunch of very clever, very fussy designers who’ve driven hundreds of electric cars, experienced hundreds of different touch screens, understood that anything other than a good map or music being controlled from that screen is a massive, dangerous, stupid, teenage coder sitting on a bean bag design nonsense.
They have created exquisite buttons and knobs that control the functions of the car.
And the sound, which we heard once but it didn’t make much sense. There are sensors inside the motors and the gearbox, so what you hear inside the exquisitely furnished interior is the actual sound of an actual electric drivetrain.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
From 2001 to 2006 I spent a lot of time in California making Scrapheap Challenge and JunkYard Wars (for Discovery Channel) and during that time became aware of the efforts taking place to create a new breed of battery electric cars.
This entire tech development came out of silicon valley, not the automotive industry in Detroit, or Germany, or France, or South Korea, or Japan. It was essentially entirely because of one extraordinary company. Tesla.
They showed the world, and in particular other car makers, that it could be done, that it was possible to make plausible, reliable, fun to drive electric cars that in many casaes left combustion vehicles in the dust.
Initially many of the European and American car makers lied and fought and lobbied and cheated and bullied as hard as they could to stop us using electric vehicles.
They lost out big time, everyone knows, the Chinese and Koreans have gone full on.
The world has changed beyond recognition, and now, quietly and I admit, for the exclusive use of the hyper wealthy, Silicon Valley has done it again. Pushed what we accept as an electric car one step further.
As I say in my little Everything Electric Cars episode about the car, the notion of trickle down economics is a brutal, cruel lie that has allowed the very people who can buy this car to get even richer.
But the tiny balancing factor is that trickle down technology does work, we will be seeing far cheaper, more sensible vehicles adopt some aspects of what LoveFrom and Ferrari have achieved, and I for one will applaud and defend that aspect
Oh wait!! I haven’t even mentioned launch control!
OMG, so beautifully simple, you would never engage this by mistake in the supermarket car park. You stamp on the brake, floor the accelerator, pull that handle down until it lights up, slip your foot off the brake and leave your bladder on the start line.
Toodle pop.
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I just had to listen to the AI voice say " it's pronounced Loo chay, but you knew that already" after previously and continually pronouncing it "Loose". Not vey ontelligent AI 🤣
Yup. Sounds ELITIST.