I had a poster. You had a poster. Everyone I knew had the poster, and it was always the same one — red, sexy, absurd, photographed from the angle that made it look like it was already doing 200 while parked. Mine was an F50, because I was that age at that time. Nobody chose the poster because it was well resolved. Nobody stood in a bedroom at eleven years old and thought: what an excellent knob material they've used.
You wanted it because it was crazy and sexy. That's it. That's the whole product.
There's a special category for such cars. Icons. How to get in? Requirements are simple: fast, powerful, low, crazy, uncomfortable, trying to kill you, exclusive and madly expensive — in other words, pass the Wall Poster Test.
And that's what Ferrari, any Ferrari, passes automatically. Yes, some are more elegant, some even have sitting room for four full-grown people (definitions of full-grown apply). Not passing? Not a Ferrari then. Easy. Lamborghini Diablo? Hell yeah. McLaren F1? Of course. Jaguar XJ220? Aha. F40? Absolutely. F430? Yes. Testarossa on Miami Vice? Sure.
Even Purosangue, god forbid — I do think a Supercar SUV is an amalgamation that should never exist — it still passes the Wall Poster Test. Sound of the name, Purosangue: it tells you this is special.
Glorious Past, Modern-Mad Present, Luce'd Future?
So what we have here? Ferrari built an electric one, and they hired Jony Ive's shop to design it, and I want to be fair here — genuinely fair, because this is the part most skips. LoveFrom did the job. Five years, working alongside Maranello's own people, and what came out is coherent from the wheels to the interface. One design language, applied without a single lapse. The exterior is smooth and continuous and uninterrupted. There's real aerodynamic work hiding under sheet metal that refuses to boast about it. Four motors, 1,035 horsepower, a 122 kWh battery. The knobs are machined glass. The needles are analogue, sandwiched into the digital instruments, and I'd like to say that's a gimmick but it isn't — it's lovely. They rejected the giant touchscreen. They put back the toggles. In an era where every carmaker is busy hiding the hazard lights three menus deep, someone at LoveFrom stood up and said no, and they were right.
The reviewers noticed all of it. The interior got glowing write-ups. Tactile, precise, honest, unfashionably physical.
The Wall Poster Test? Failed on all fronts.
The rules were followed. That's the problem.
Here's the thing about design rules — the real ones, the ones you'd defend in a room full of professionals. Reduce until nothing is left to remove. Let materials be what they are. Don't add drama that the object hasn't earned. Make it legible. Make it calm. These are good rules. I use them. You use them. They have produced most of the objects in your house that you actually like.
Now apply them to a Ferrari.
Reduce until nothing is left to remove — but a Ferrari is the stuff you'd remove. Don't add unearned drama — a Ferrari is a machine whose entire function is unearned drama; the drama is the earning. Make it calm. Make it calm. It's a 1,035 horsepower Italian supercar for god's sake; if it's calm, something has gone wrong — wrong the way a nuclear blast is wrong. No rule will catch it. Rules check the parts; nobody ever wrote one that asks whether the crater used to be Maranello.
Every one of those rules is correct. Applied here, in sequence, without error, they annihilated the thing they were applied to.
And nobody in the process could have stopped it, which is what makes this interesting rather than just sad. There was no moment where someone did something stupid. Show me the meeting where it went wrong. You can't — because at every meeting, the more defensible option won, and the more defensible option was, every single time, the less Ferrari one. That's not a failure of execution. That's a failure that looks exactly like good execution, all the way to the end.
Good UX was never the brief
But the interior, you say. The interior is good. The knobs, the toggles, the needles.
Yes. It's good UX. Now ask yourself the question nobody at that table asked: do you want a good-UX Ferrari?
Think about what you're actually buying. Not transport — you have transport. Not usability — a Corolla has usability, and it will still be usable in 2040, when it will also still be a Corolla. At half a million euros you're buying madness, power, extravagance, and the fact that your neighbour can't have one. Usability is not on the list. Usability has never been on the list. Enzo Ferrari did not lie awake worrying about the discoverability of anything.
And here's the tell — the reviewers praised the interior, and every word of the praise was true, and none of it was about the car. Tactile. Precise. Legible. Honest. Read those four words back and tell me which supercar they describe. They describe a very good thermostat. They describe the single best kitchen scale you have ever owned. They are the vocabulary of tools, and a Ferrari is not a tool — it's a poster that happens to have an engine, and you can't put “legible” on a wall.
With that in mind, calling a Ferrari legible and honest is like calling Monica Bellucci a nice lady who's okay to lay your eyes on. In other words: a hideous lie, a crime, and I'm calling the police.
The interior didn't fail. That's precisely the issue. Even the part that succeeded, succeeded at the wrong thing — it went out and won a game that nobody in Maranello had entered.
You have a win, but at what cost?
Then there's the thing that finished it, and it's the one Ferrari should have caught in the first week, because it's their actual business.
The criticism that stuck was that the Luce is anonymous — take the badges off and you wouldn't know what it is. That sounds like an aesthetic complaint. It isn't. It's a commercial one, and it goes straight through the heart of the company.
Exclusivity is not in numbers. Ferrari doesn't sell you rarity by building few of them; plenty of firms build few of things and nobody has a poster of a limited-run industrial compressor. Ferrari sells rarity by making a shape that announces, from four hundred metres, across traffic, to people who will never own one and know it: you cannot have this. That announcement is the product. The car is the delivery mechanism.
The Luce doesn't announce anything. It's smooth and continuous and uninterrupted, and it slides through the world like a nice appliance, and the man in the next lane doesn't even look up. A car that doesn't say you can't have me has stopped being exclusive no matter how few they build and no matter what it costs — because the exclusivity was never in the production line or the invoice. It was in the announcement.
Which leaves Ferrari selling, for €550,000, something that has been carefully, expertly, five-years-of-work-edly stripped of the only thing it was selling.
iPhone on wheels
And really, what did anyone expect?
Look at the iPhone. It's the most successfully designed object of the century, near enough. It's clean, it's calm, it's obvious, it disappears into your hand. It is also — and this is not an insult, it's the entire point — not extravagant, not expressive, not mad, and not remotely sexy. It was never meant to be any of those things. It's a tool of such quality that it gets out of the way, and getting out of the way is the highest thing a tool can do.
So Ferrari hired the man who does that. The best in the world at it. Five years.
And they got what he does.
They got an iPhone that costs €550,000.
I'd love to claim that line. I can't — the internet got there within the day, unprompted, thousands of people at once: iPhone on wheels. The other one doing the rounds was Ferrari Multipla, which is crueller and, if you've seen the Multipla, unfortunately quite hard to argue with.
The market read the Luce in one afternoon and priced it immediately. Not because the engineering was wrong — the engineering is superb. Two years ago Ferrari signed Lewis Hamilton and the stock jumped 10% in a day: seven billion dollars, on a feeling about a man who hadn't yet driven a lap for them. He's won them one race since. Nobody's asked for the seven billion back. Then came the Luce. Superb, validated, five years in the making — and six billion off.
A month later, Ferrari's chief marketing officer left the building. Sixteen years in the job. The official line is that Enrico Galliera had decided to move on some time ago and had graciously agreed to stay through the launch before pursuing a new chapter in his career, and I'd like you to read that sentence twice, because it is a small masterpiece and somebody was paid to write it.
Why has Enrico been “let go”? Because if the car fails to sell, at least you know who to blame. You cannot tick a box marked “we made something nobody dreams about.” There's nowhere to file it. No one to fire for it. Sorry, Mr. Galliera.
Enzo knew about a-box-you-cannot-tick — and so he built the dream car and didn't bother to “understand the market.” Exactly like Steve did with the iPod and then, consequently, the iPhone.
So what went wrong now?
One critic wrote that the Luce “asks to be understood before it is desired, and admired before it is loved.”
Which is the most damning sentence I've read about any product this year, and it was meant as analysis. Because that's the correct order for a scientific instrument. It's the correct order for a kitchen scale. It's the correct order for absolutely everything except the one category of object where a person is expected to hand over half a million euros for a feeling they can't defend to their accountant.
Let me reiterate. Ferrari was never in the understanding business. Ferrari sells the feeling.
The Luce cleared every hurdle a modern company knows how to build. It was researched. It was validated. Five years of the best design thinking on earth. What it never tried to pass is an eleven-year-old with a roll of tape and an empty wall — and that is the only exam that matters for Ferrari.
Ferrari will survive this, mind. Eighty years of thorough madness in the bank against one clinical EV, the badge will absorb the hit. Somewhere in Maranello a very good designer is being tapped on the shoulder and told the market wasn't ready, and the market will go on not being ready for as long as anyone tries to make Extravaganza Italian into Anonymous Boring.
Luce, though? I don't think it will.