Ferrari's First EV Is Here! Meet the Polarizing, Powerful and Seriously Expensive Luce

• What’s new: Everything! The Luce is Ferrari’s first EV, with 1,035 horsepower and a wild design.
• Why it matters: The Luce is also Ferrari’s first five-seater, and it’s longer than the Purosangue SUV.
• Edmunds says: While it should be stellar to drive, the Luce’s design does not make a great first impression. Neither does its €550,000 price tag — the equivalent of $640,000.

Designed by Jony Ive and LoveFrom

Like Ferrari's work with design firms like Pininfarina in the past, the Luce's styling comes from outside the company. It bears the signature of LoveFrom, the design house founded by Jony Ive after he left Apple in 2019, and certainly casts a very different shadow than anything else in the Ferrari portfolio. 

I may be dating myself here, but I'd say the Luce looks most like the early '80s Dodge M4S Turbo Interceptor (aka, the car from Wraith), but with vastly different proportions. At a glance, it looks awfully bland, just kind of a general SUV-like shape that, were it not for the Technicolor hues at the reveal event in Rome, Italy, would completely disappear in a parking lot. Get closer, though, and you start to see some striking detailing that, from some angles, makes this a real standout.

The nose is certainly a highlight. Many EVs have odd, shapeless snouts as designers continue to struggle in a world without grilles. The Luce instead has a massive scoop that effectively extends the line formed by the windshield straight down and through. 

At the back, a set of four round taillights is the most obvious nod to Ferraris of yore, but here set behind a wide, sweeping panel. From the side, there's not much to get excited about, at least until you open the doors. 

The front doors on the Luce open in the traditional way, while the rears hinge at the back. This makes getting in extremely easy, and since they close at the touch of a button, you won't have to reach out awkwardly to secure yourself.

A stellar interior with big Apple vibes

A flat floor makes for a roomy feel in the back, and there's seating for three across, making the Luce not only Ferrari's first EV, but its first five-seater — and a genuinely comfortable one at that. I'm just over 6 feet tall, and the Luce's headroom is tolerable. Rear-seat passengers have a climate control panel featuring the same sort of delightfully tactile controls you'll find up front.

The Apple vibe is undeniable inside the Luce, but so too is the quality and attention to detail. Fit and finish are remarkable even on these pre-production models. The software that drives it all, though, is sadly still non-functional. Hopefully Ferrari can pull that off, because we're losing track of how many times bad code has derailed good EVs at launch.

Four motors to move you

Power comes from electric motors, or "electro-traction engines" as Ferrari insists on calling them. The two at the rear deliver 831 horsepower. The front pair adds quite a bit less to the mix, at 282 hp. The combined maximum output is 1,035 hp.

That setup, controlled by an electronics suite Ferrari is calling a Vehicle Control Unit, should mean precise management of traction and torque on a per-wheel basis, enabling some extremely capable dynamics. That's paired with a four-wheel steering system and an evolution of the same suspension found on the Purosangue and F80, which replaces traditional shocks with electric actuators. This allows for instant, adaptive damping at each corner, as well as an adjustable ride height, with the Luce lowering itself by 10 millimeters at speed to improve aerodynamics, improving speed and range.

How much speed and range? Ferrari quotes a top end of 193 mph and an estimated 329 miles on a full charge. That’s on the optimistic European WLTP cycle, of course. On our more challenging EPA test cycle, the Luce should achieve around 300 miles from its 122-kWh battery, which can charge at a max rate of 350 kW.

Speed and sound

In terms of acceleration, the Luce will sprint to 62 mph in 2.5 seconds. That makes it among the quickest Ferrari street cars ever, but it ranks behind other EV SUVs like the new Porsche Cayenne Turbo Electric and the departed Tesla Model X Plaid. 

Neither of those, though, sounds quite like the Luce. This EV’s appearance might be a big topic of discussion, but its acoustic profile is even more interesting. It has a raw, exciting note to it that Ferrari engineers tell me is not synthesized. Instead, the car samples vibrations from its rear motors in real time then runs them through an electric guitar-style amplifier and a series of filters to create EV that legitimately sounds good without pretending to have a big V8.

I sadly only got a short sample of the Luce's sound, but it has a distinctive rasp to it — still undeniably digital but far more dynamic than the usual sci-fi samples most EVs spin up when you hit the accelerator.

A relative lightweight

At 198 inches in length, the Luce is roughly 2 inches longer than the Purosangue, making it the company's longest production car. It's also the Ferrari’s heaviest, at 4,982 pounds, but that's actually not as much as you might think. It's about 500 pounds more than a Purosangue, but over 300 pounds less less than a Lucid Air Sapphire, and only 57 pounds more than a stripped-out Porsche Taycan Turbo GT with the Weissach Pack. And the Porsche, remember, doesn't have rear seats. 

It costs how much?

All those numbers and the quad-motor layout create the potential for this to be a far more dynamic machine than its restrained styling might imply. But there's one more number to consider. In the Luce's home market of Italy, its pricing starts at €550,000, which is about $640,000 based on current exchange rates. That'll make it Ferrari’s second-most expensive car, coming in behind only the ballistic F80, which costs nearly $4 million in the U.S.

Official U.S. pricing is still TBD, but if that Italian MSRP is anything to go by, it could come in around 50% higher than the nearly $430,000 Purosangue. Will it drive well enough to demand that kind of a premium? We'll have to wait until we can get behind the wheel to find out.