The Ferrari Luce arrived to a reception the company cannot have enjoyed. Top Gear, which drove a late-stage pre-production car in April before the public reveal, describes the aftermath as a pile-on and says value came off Ferrari's share price before recovering. Its verdict after actually driving the car is blunter than the styling argument allows: the thing works. We covered the car's first UK showing when it was still static. Top Gear quotes 1,035 bhp from four motors, one at each wheel, 0 to 62 mph in 2.5 seconds, a 192 mph top speed, a claimed 330 miles of range and a kerb weight of 2,260 kg for a car 5.1 metres long with five seats. The drag coefficient is given as 0.25.
There is a discrepancy worth naming. Top Gear cites 1,035 bhp, while Auto Focus, briefed separately on the same car, quotes 725 kW in performance mode. Those two figures do not reconcile cleanly and neither video accounts for the difference, so treat peak output as approximate until Ferrari publishes a homologated number. The range claim is steadier: 330 miles here lines up with the 530 km cited elsewhere. What is genuinely new is the mass. At 2,260 kg the Luce is heavy by sports car standards but unremarkable for a five seat electric car this size, and Top Gear reports that 85 percent of the cells sit in the floor, giving a lower centre of gravity than Ferrari's SUV. That detail explains the driving impressions better than the power figure does.
Top Gear's drive centres on what Ferrari calls torque shift engagement, which splits delivery into five steps so a driver can load the car on corner entry the way engine braking would in a combustion car. The magazine reports the Luce will rotate and slide on command, and quotes Ferrari's vehicle dynamics manager saying torque is reallocated 200 times a second. The sound is not pulled from a library. According to Top Gear, an accelerometer on the inverter casing at the rear axle picks up powertrain frequencies and amplifies them, with the company trying 50 pickup points before choosing one. The interior draws the warmest praise in the whole review. Top Gear credits LoveFrom, the design agency co-founded by Sir Jony Ive, and singles out a steering wheel built from 19 pieces of machined aluminium and a dashboard substrate milled from solid stock rather than pressed.
The packaging decisions are where the styling argument actually lives. Top Gear reports there is no frunk under the front lid. It also notes that the wipers sit at the side of the screen rather than across its base, an arrangement the channel says is about maintaining clean aerodynamic flow over the nose while keeping cabin noise down, and it gives the resulting drag coefficient as 0.25. Inside, the chassis mode selector changes the colour of the instrument lighting as it cycles, green for dry and a warm orange for sport, on a Samsung OLED panel that the reviewer praises for the way the light fades out slowly rather than switching. The infotainment screen pivots towards the driver and keeps physical switchgear. Top Gear's overall placement is that the Luce feels closest to an electrified version of Ferrari's SUV rather than to any of its two-seat cars.
Bottom line: Two independent drives, filmed months apart and published within days of each other, have landed on the same conclusion: the Luce is a properly sorted Ferrari wearing a shape a lot of people do not want. That is a marketing problem rather than an engineering one, and marketing problems are the cheaper kind. Ferrari will sell every car it builds either way. The genuinely interesting question is what happens to the second electric Ferrari, because the company has now proved it can make one drive properly and has no obvious reason left to be brave about the styling.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.