Marques Brownlee was in Italy driving the Ferrari Luce before most people knew it existed. He signed an NDA, had his phone cameras taped over by Ferrari staff, and filmed his impressions on a DJI Osmo the company handed him. A few days later the car was officially revealed to the world, and the internet promptly decided it was terrible. On the Waveform podcast, Brownlee and his co-host spent the better part of an hour trying to articulate why that reaction is both completely understandable and only partly fair. The Luce is a five-seat midsize electric crossover, powered by three motors per wheel and rated at 1,000 horsepower, with a starting price of around $640,000. It was designed not by Ferrari's in-house team but by Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom, with significant involvement from Marc Newson.
The central problem with the Luce is not the design itself but the expectation gap it creates. Ferrari carries six decades of poster-car iconography. The Luchino, the 308, the F40, the Enzo: each one looked like nothing else on the road and unmistakably like a Ferrari. The Luce does not. It is a smooth, aerodynamic shape with circular tail lights, flush headlights, and a glass canopy roof, and it could belong to a half-dozen other premium electric brands without any cognitive dissonance. That is a deliberate choice. Ferrari and LoveFrom reportedly decided that if the car was going to be electric and silent and configured as a tall crossover, trying to force it into the mold of a traditional Ferrari would only make both things worse. The Purosangue already occupied that awkward middle ground. The Luce commits entirely to being something new. Whether the market accepts that trade is the open question. Comparable electric luxury crossovers like the Lucid Gravity start well under $200,000, which means the Luce is priced more like a limited supercar than a volume model.
What Brownlee and his co-host found harder to dismiss was the interior. He called it the best cabin he has experienced in any electric car: a rotating center screen with a deliberate palm rest built into its handle, a key that magnetically aligns to a center console slot and glows yellow when you push it flush, a drive selector that illuminates when the key is seated. These are the kinds of tactile details that rarely survive the transition from concept to production, and they survived here. The exterior design still has bad angles, particularly the turbine-style wheels and the baby blue launch color. But the Waveform panel landed somewhere more nuanced than simple rejection: this car is probably the right bet for reaching a new type of Ferrari buyer who was never interested in the V12 models, and it would read very differently without the prancing horse badge. The badge is what makes the gap between expectation and reality feel so dramatic.
Bottom line: Ferrari bet on a new buyer and a new design language at the same time, at $640,000. That is a lot of variables to change simultaneously. The interior suggests LoveFrom knows what it is doing. The exterior suggests they were solving for aerodynamics and novelty rather than desirability. If this sells in any volume, Ferrari proved the point. If it does not, the Purosangue starts looking like a much safer model of brand extension.