Everyone’s talking about the design rather than its mad technical potential – but I saw an alternate reality
Couldn’t it have just been beautiful? The Ferrari Luce is having a Jaguar moment online following its unveiling last week. The markets have spoken. Luca di Montezemolo has spoken. But nobody has quite spoken as much as assorted users of various social media disgraces. And the feedback there is not good.
I don’t love the outside of the Luce, but I do think it’s a shame that some of its technical innovations haven’t been getting a hearing. What a half-million-pound Ferrari does while it’s cornering is of rather limited interest in isolation, of course, but if the Luce is engaging, how it could influence other, more affordable electric driver’s cars is something I want to know a lot more about.
Its sound signature apparently isn’t a fake noise, it’s the actual noises from the mechanicals, as they happen, just amplified into the cabin. Are these good? Do they help? They are, at least, authentic.
Then there are theflappy paddles, which are not gearshift paddles. Instead they change retardation and power output, and one comes hand in hand with the other – faster slowing, with slower going – so that you’ll be tempted to get big engine braking into corners, then have less power on the way out, when 1000bhp-plus would be too much anyway. Does this work? And if it does, because the Luce has 1036bhp, would it still be useful in, say, a hot hatch with 200bhp?
Then there’s the interior, which is, I believe, now that I’ve seen it and felt it, the best in the world at the moment. So tactile. Such high perceived quality. And seemingly so usable. I don’t think there’s anything better.
But these moments are being lost because – and I don’t think it’s controversial to say this – the Luce is not a beautiful car.
Perhaps, though, it was meant to be. During my exposure to the Luce, at a roundtable discussion about aerodynamics, one of Ferrari’s engineers had a small styling model of the Luce. With a gloss black passenger cell and a silver body around it, this showed really well the demarcation between passenger cell/glasshouse and body, something that Marc Newson, cofounder of design agency LoveFrom, talks about in our news story.
But what I noticed about the model was just how striking it was. Sleek. I couldn’t take a photo of it, because Ferrari insisted that I had stickers over my cameras’ lenses all weekend, but I don’t think that it had the same profile as the production car. It looked lower, shapelier, more, well, beautiful.
Was the Luce originally meant to look like that? It’s not unusual, of course, for the first sweeps of a designer’s pen to look rather more striking, depicting rather bigger wheels and an impossibly low ride height, than the car that makes production. But given that LoveFrom is an agency invited into Ferrari, would they have had as much control over how the finished design looks as, say, a strong, influential in-house design boss sitting in boardrooms insisting that a particular roofline or body sculpt was essential and engineers dare not change it?
Electric cars tend to be tall. But in the Luce’s case, Ferrari was insistent that it had a complete battery pack, with a lid on top, sited beneath the cabinfloor, so that it could be replaced at a later date (90% of all Ferraris are still on the road and the company wants the ability to replace a battery pack decades down the line). But this inevitably adds height.
With that in mind, Jaguar’s designers insisted that the Type 01 had separate battery modules with ‘foot garages’ between them so occupants could be placed lower in the car. BMW’s Neue Klasse EV platform uses the top of the battery pack as the cabin floor.
Did the Luce gain height and lose grace because of engineering challenges met along the way? If you imagine it lower, with the gaps between the spoilers and bodywork enhanced, does it look better? And might it have looked better if arguments about lines here and there had been had and won?
Newson told us about how LoveFrom’s relationship with Ferrari was “surprisingly not fraught”. Maybe it should have been.
