Elkann, 'the reactions on Luce were unexpected but strengthened our conviction'

"We had no intention of making a controversial Ferrari in any way. The fact that there was this kind of reaction was not something we expected." Thus the president of Ferrari John Elkann, speaking at Wave by Vento, at the Ogr in Turin, commented on the reactions aroused by the presentation of the Luce, the first fully electric Ferrari. A debate which, even in its most critical components, did not however weaken the company's belief in the project. "Faced with these reactions, our conviction has become very strong", underlined Elkann, recalling that 1.3 billion people around the world have seen the car.

The history of Light, Elkann said, starts much further back, from July 2016 and a conversation with Jeff Bezos. “I know nothing about cars, but I know a lot about innovation and I think you need to think seriously about building an electric Ferrari,” the Amazon founder told him at the time.

“That was the first moment it occurred to me that we needed to start thinking seriously about what that meant,” Elkann said. The goal, however, was not simply to build an electric Ferrari, but to understand "what Ferrari could achieve by exploiting new technologies". A path that in the following years was intertwined with the meeting and discussion with Jony Ive, founder of LoveFrom and former chief design officer of Apple. During the Covid period, when Ive had left Apple, Elkann started asking him for "advice on how we should think at Ferrari". From those conversations it therefore became natural to transform the reflections into a concrete project.

For Ive, that choice was a demonstration of "courage and foresight", also because at that time "no one was asking Ferrari" to solve the problem of an electric car. La Luce, he underlined, "is not the future, but it is a part of the future of Ferrari". And precisely the comparison with the public, according to Elkann, ended up strengthening the conviction of the Maranello company. After the launch, Ferrari organized an internal meeting to analyze "very precisely" what happened and also evaluate what could have been done differently in the presentation. Among the elements to be reviewed were the images, which would not have fully conveyed "the physicality of the machine". “In the case of the Ferrari Luce, every person who saw it in person was surprised compared to the photographs,” Elkann noted.

Confirmation, in his opinion, also came from the recent presentation in Japan, Ferrari's second market and, he said, one of the most demanding audiences. The reaction to the Luce has been "incredibly positive", both from the public and Ferrari customers.