Overhead view of the new Ferrari Luce, a fully electric vehicle distanced from the car's design DNA that has been panned by industry observers and fans since its launch May 25, 2026. Image credit: Ferrari
Ferrari's stock fell 6.27 percent in Milan trading on May 25, the day of the Luce electric vehicle’s launch, wiping approximately $4 billion in market cap.
Former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo said the brand risks destroying a legend.
Analyst Anthony Dick called it the sharpest market reaction to a car design ever recorded.
This is not a product story. It is a brand architecture story – and it has been told before.
The Ferrari Luce from the front. Image credit: Ferrari
Cat nipped
Eighteen months ago, Jaguar erased six decades of British automotive heritage in a single rebranding exercise.
The leaping cat disappeared.
The heritage language vanished.
A tagline — Copy Nothing — arrived that paradoxically copied every luxury fashion brand's aesthetic simultaneously.
The market reaction was structural. Order pipelines were disrupted.
The brand spent the following year attempting to recover positioning it had given away in a single strategic decision.
The luxury business watched. It learned nothing.
The Ferrari Luce costs an estimated $638,000. Image credit: Ferrari
Ferrari unveiled the Luce — its first fully electric vehicle, priced at $638,000 — in Rome earlier this week. Creative authority over the exterior and interior was handed to LoveFrom, the agency founded by Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson.
Sir Jony's design philosophy — inclusion, clarity, the democratization of beautiful objects — is architecturally opposed to Ferrari's mythology, which has always rested on deliberate inaccessibility and visceral, slightly reckless beauty.
The result was compared across social media to a Honda Accord, an Apple Store minivan and a luxury toaster.
Pierre-Olivier Essig at AIR Capital wrote: "We are lost in translation with Ferrari's new strategy."
Ferrari Luce driving mode. Image credit: Ferrari
Lamborghini, for context, cancelled its planned EV due to lack of demand.
Porsche reduced its EV targets.
Ferrari launched into a retreat by its direct peers.
This pattern — heritage brand, external creative authority, mythology sacrificed for relevance — is not new.
What is new is the speed with which the market now prices mythology damage.
Pope Leo XIV with Ferrari chairman John Elkann in front of the new ferrari Luce EV car. Image credit: Ferrari
Horsing around
The Mach-E counter-argument deserves direct engagement.
When Ford applied the Mustang name to an electric crossover in 2021, loyalists reacted with the same outrage now directed at the Luce.
In 2024, the Mach-E outsold the gas-powered Mustang by 17.6 percent.
The argument follows that Ferrari's mythology will absorb the Luce the same way that Ford's absorbed the Mach-E.
It will not.
By second-quarter 2025, the gas Mustang had reclaimed its sales lead as Mach-E sales fell 19.1 percent year-on-year.
More fundamentally, Ford is a volume brand extending a popular nameplate.
The Ferrari Amalfi bearing the trademark sinuous, lithe lines of the brand – a DNA not passed down to the new Ferrari Luce EV car. Image credit: Ferrari
Ferrari is a mythology brand whose valuation — more than $80 billion — rests almost entirely on symbolic distance and irrational desire.
The mechanisms are categorically different. The commercial logic that applies to Ford is architecturally dangerous when applied to Ferrari.
The deeper issue is structural.
As premium and contemporary brands have increasingly replicated the visual codes of luxury — aided by advanced supply chains and accessible manufacturing — the aesthetic distance that once separated true luxury from premium has eroded.
Every brand looks expensive now.
The brands navigating this pressure successfully are those that have made the opposite choice from Ferrari.
Ferrari Luce driver's seat view. Image credit: Ferrari
Reality from myth
French fashion and leather goods maker Hermès deepened scarcity, tightened distribution and leaned harder into institutional myth-making as the pressure to democratize intensified.
Revenue growth that consistently outpaces peers who chose differently is not coincidence. It is the commercial proof of mythology discipline.
Ferrari had that discipline.
Rear view of the Ferrari Luce. Image credit: Ferrari
The question that the Luce raises — for Ferrari and for every luxury brand watching this moment — is whether the decision was made with full architectural awareness of what mythology costs to spend and how difficult it is to rebuild.
The Jaguar comparison suggests the industry has not yet developed that awareness at the institutional level.
The same mistake, made twice, 18 months apart, by two of the most storied automotive brands in existence, is not bad luck – it is a pattern.
Patterns have implications for every brand in this space — including those building luxury from scratch in emerging markets where the architectural decisions made in the first three years determine positioning for the following three decades.
Abhay Gupta
THE LUXURY BRANDS that will define the next decade are those that distinguish between evolution and erosion before the board meeting, not after the share price reacts.
Ferrari and Jaguar have both provided the industry with a clear, expensive illustration of what happens when that distinction is made too late.
Read more about the Ferrari Luce's specs here
Abhay Gupta is a columnist for Luxury Marketer. He is founder and chairman of Luxury Connect. Reach him at [email protected].