COOLTURE
INSIDER

May 29, 2026  |  Issue 011

How a mythical brand can lose everything on a single gamble when it forgets who it is.

There is a restaurant in the small Italian town of Tortona, halfway between Modena and Turin, that deserves a plaque on its wall. In 1951, Battista "Pinin" Farina sat down for lunch with Enzo Ferrari. Two Italians, two obsessions, one table. What they agreed on that afternoon, a design partnership built on the idea that beauty and speed are the same language, gave the world the 250 GTO, the Daytona, the F40, the Testarossa. It gave the world Ferrari as we know it.

Seventy-five years later, Ferrari sat down with Jony Ive. And the world got the Luce.

Ferrari's greatness was never accidental. It was the product of a very specific, very disciplined alchemy, one that Enzo himself never fully articulated because he was too busy living it.

Road cars were not an end in themselves for Enzo. They were a means to finance his true passion: racing. That philosophy explains why Ferrari has maintained, since its origins, a direct connection between racing engineering and its production models. Every Ferrari road car was a downstream consequence of Scuderia Ferrari's obsessions. The V12 screamed because it had to scream to win at Le Mans. The body was shaped by aerodynamics before it was shaped by aesthetics. Function dictated form, and form happened to be transcendent.

This is the engine underneath the myth. Not just the literal engine, though those V12s are works of theology, but the logic engine. Race car first. Road car second. Beauty as a byproduct of engineering necessity, not a goal unto itself.

Pininfarina understood this intuitively. Sergio Pininfarina later summed up their goal: "We always tried to create a shape that would not age." They succeeded not by chasing trends but by translating function into timeless proportion. The 250 GT Lusso's long bonnet wasn't decorative, it housed a V12. The Daytona's low, sharp stance wasn't styling, it was aerodynamics. The F40's lack of paint thick enough to hide carbon fiber weave wasn't avant-garde minimalism, it was mass reduction. What looked radical was merely honest.

That honesty was Ferrari's signature.

Ferrari's most successful designs weren't created in a vacuum. They were arguments, clear, confident, perfectly timed, about what speed should look like right now, for these people, in this moment.

Post-war Italy (1947–1955): A continent rebuilding from rubble needs beauty as defiance. The early America series, hand-beaten aluminum bodies over racing chassis, told wealthy buyers that civilization wasn't just surviving, it was accelerating. Ferrari sold vitality.

The economic miracle (1955–1968): The 250 series arrives into an Italian boom, a glamorous racing world, and an American market desperate for European exotica. Luigi Chinetti, Ferrari's US importer, understood something Enzo initially didn't: the American rich wanted Italian poetry. The 250 GTO, built for homologation, born out of pure racing necessity, became the most valuable car ever made. Nobody planned that. It happened because every design decision was correct, not calculated.

The 1980s excess (1984–1988): The Testarossa's side strakes, literally air ducts for the flat-12's radiators, became the defining visual of a decade obsessed with visible wealth. Miami Vice put them on prime time. The Testarossa's strakes became shorthand for 1980s excess. The F40 arrived as their dark counterpart: no carpet, barely any paint, carbon fiber so thin you could see the weave through the lacquer. Enzo's last car. The last one he personally approved. It didn't try to be the era, it transcended it. And it became the greatest poster car in history.

Each of these cars was inevitable for its moment. Each of them was what Ferrari had to build given who Ferrari was.

Ferrari faced financial difficulties and was eventually acquired by Fiat in 1969. That wasn't the beginning of the end, Fiat's money kept the Scuderia alive, and some of Ferrari's best cars came after. But it planted a seed: the idea that production volume, market access, and shareholder value are legitimate factors in what a Ferrari should be.

For decades, that seed sat dormant. The brand stayed disciplined. Even the 308 GTB, the first Ferrari aimed at a broader market, the car Tom Selleck made famous in Magnum P.I., was still a pure sports car. Fiat democratized the price bracket without corrupting the philosophy.

The erosion came later. Slowly. Politely. The Purosangue SUV in 2022 was the clearest early signal, a five-seat family utility vehicle wearing the prancing horse, which Ferrari called an "FUV" to avoid saying the word SUV, as though branding could resolve an identity crisis. It sold out immediately, which proved the brand's pull was stronger than the product's coherence. That success was misread as permission.

Ferrari had to show that an electric car could fit its model of limited supply, high pricing, and emotional appeal, while expanding the range beyond traditional two-seat and four-seat sports cars. That sentence alone contains the problem. "Expanding the range" and "Ferrari's model" are in tension. Ferrari's model was never about range. It was about depth. One car, built perfectly, for one specific reason.

On May 25, 2026, Ferrari unveiled the Luce, Italian for "light", in Rome. A four-door, five-seat EV priced at €550,000 ($640,000), designed by Jony Ive's LoveFrom, described by Ferrari itself as "polarising" and aimed at EV owners rather than traditional fans.

Let that last clause sit for a moment. Aimed at EV owners rather than traditional fans. Ferrari, whose entire mythology rests on the loyalty of its traditional fans, who buy the car, then buy the hat, then name their child after the color, publicly stated its new product was designed for someone else.

Several prominent designers branded the cockpit "utterly inappropriate for a Ferrari," with one going further and calling it "soulless." The criticism centers on tone rather than quality. Few question the precision of the machining or the finish of the materials. That distinction is crucial. Nobody is saying Jony Ive makes bad things. He doesn't. The iPhone was revolutionary. The MacBook Air changed industrial design. But those products were solving the problem of technology. The Ferrari has always been solving the problem of humanity, the desire to feel alive, to flirt with speed, to hear a V12 breathe at 8,500 rpm and feel your hands go cold.

One commenter described the car as "giving Waymo vibes." Another said the design is "somehow worse than I could ever have imagined." An analyst described it as looking "like a mix between a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla 3," adding: "We are lost in translation with Ferrari's new strategy."

Former Chairman Luca di Montezemolo said the new model was a betrayal of Ferrari's history: "I hope that they take off the prancing horse from that car." This from the man who shepherded Ferrari through the Schumacher dynasty, oversaw the F40's legacy, and built the brand's modern luxury positioning. He wasn't delivering a nostalgic lament. He was making a precise observation about category error.

Ferrari's shares fell over 7% on the first trading day after the reveal, millions wiped from valuation. Markets rarely react to aesthetics. When they do, it's because aesthetics aren't the real concern. The concern is: does the company still know what it is?

It's tempting to frame this as a story about a wrong hire. It isn't. Apple's golden era happened because Steve Jobs and Jony Ive balanced each other perfectly. Ive's genius is reduction, the discipline to remove everything that doesn't serve the essential function. At Apple, that function was usability. A phone that anyone could learn in minutes. A laptop you didn't need a manual for.

But Ferrari's essential function is not usability. It's the opposite. It's an intentional, glorious un-usability, a machine that demands something from you, that punishes you slightly for not respecting it, that sounds furious when you push it and rewards you with a sensation no other object on earth replicates. The reduction principle, applied to that, removes the point.

Ferrari confirmed that the name Luce introduces a new naming strategy for the brand as it enters the electric era, expressing a broader philosophy tied to clarity, simplicity, and future-facing design. Clarity. Simplicity. These are words for a product that needs to explain itself quickly to strangers. Ferrari has never needed to explain itself. The V12 did the explaining.

The 250 GTO was never meant to be beautiful. It was built to homologate for FIA Group 3 competition, which required a minimum of 100 road-going examples. The body was shaped in Scaglietti's workshop by bending metal over an aerodynamic necessity. Nobody sat in a boardroom and decided it should be iconic. It simply was, because it was honest, all the way through, from the 3.0-litre V12 to the last curve of its Kamm tail.

The Luce is a €550,000 product that feels, at its core, like a decision. A strategic decision, a market decision, a regulatory decision. It feels like the output of a consultancy slide deck titled "Ferrari in the EV Era: Bridging Heritage and Futurity." It is aerodynamically optimized, technologically remarkable, and emotionally empty.

Ferrari's other vehicles have found ways to increase aerodynamic efficiency without looking butt ugly. The 12Cilindri's integrated twin-flap system creates incredible downforce. Even the Purosangue has a flat underbody that directs air efficiently. While being aerodynamic is cool, most automakers sacrifice a little aerodynamics to make vehicles look aggressive, edgy, powerful, and fast. Ferrari always understood that the appearance of speed is as important as speed itself, because the person standing beside the car is also part of the experience. The Luce doesn't look fast. It looks cautious.

Great brands are not companies. They are agreements, between the founder's obsession, the designers' hands, and the customers' desire. Ferrari's agreement was simple and sacred: we build cars that make you feel what Enzo felt watching the 1908 Coppa Florio as a ten-year-old boy, trembling on the roadside in Bologna, watching machines move faster than anything he'd ever seen.

That feeling, visceral, irrational, irreducible, is what you buy when you buy a Ferrari. Not transport. Not technology. Not a sustainability statement. The feeling.

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna told CNBC the Luce launch was "a very, very important day" symbolizing "a new chapter" in the company's history. He's right. It is a new chapter. The question is whether this chapter belongs in the same book, or whether Ferrari has quietly, expensively, and with the best of intentions, begun writing a different story altogether.

Brands that lose their DNA rarely do so dramatically. They do it gradually, politely, each compromise individually defensible. The Purosangue was defensible. The EV transition is defensible. Hiring the world's greatest product designer is defensible. But somewhere between the Tortona lunch and the Rome unveiling, Ferrari stopped asking Enzo's question, what does this car need to feel like?, and started asking someone else's question: what does this car need to sell like?

Those are different questions. They produce different cars.

One of them produces legends. The other produces the Luce.

We grew up with Ferraris on our walls before we could afford them anywhere else. Posters, die-cast models, paused frames from Magnum P.I. and Miami Vice — the Prancing Horse was never just a car brand to us. It was a standard. Proof that something made by human hands could be simultaneously the fastest, the most beautiful, and the most emotionally devastating object in a room.

We've defended Ferrari in arguments nobody asked us to join. We've explained to skeptics why the price is justified, why the sound alone is worth the depreciation, why driving one, even once, even briefly, reorganizes something in your nervous system that never quite goes back to its original position.

So understand that what follows is not written with hostility. It's written with the specific grief of watching someone you love make a decision you can't agree with.

The Luce may find its buyers. The orders may come in. The technology underneath it is, by every honest account, extraordinary. Ferrari's engineers haven't lost the plot, they never do.

But a Ferrari has never been about what's underneath alone. It's always been about what it means to stand next to one. What it means to hear it. What it means that such a thing exists at all, this furious, impractical, glorious argument for passion over reason.

We want Ferrari back. Not the company, the feeling. We want the next generation to have their own F40 poster. We want Maranello to remember that the road car was always Enzo's reluctant gift to the world, and that gift was only worth giving because it never forgot where it came from: a racetrack, a obsession, and a lunch in Tortona that changed everything.

Forza Ferrari. Always. Even now. Especially now.

— The Coolture Team

Some play the game. Others change it.

∞

See you next week on another blood stirring dispatch of Coolture Insider. Enjoy the weekend!

*All images belong to the creators. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.*

COOLTURE
“Some Play The Game, Others Change it”