(May 28): Ferrari NV chief executive officer Benedetto Vigna said its first electric model, set to cost €550,000, is already getting orders from old and new customers after the car’s look triggered a wave of criticism.
The super-car maker this week offered a full glimpse of the Ferrari Luce for the first time. The battery-powered vehicle’s design, a departure from Ferrari’s traditional look, drew unfavourable comparisons to electric models already on sale. The company’s shares slumped.
“The Ferrari Luce has nothing to do with electric cars you have seen from other players,” Vigna said on Thursday at an event in Modena, Italy. “You have to see it and drive it to understand that it wasn’t copied — not the interiors, not the exterior, not the performance.”
The Maranello-based carmaker’s first EV marks a major break from Ferrari’s heritage of combustion-engine sports cars. Former chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who left in 2014, also weighed in on the Luce, saying the vehicle risked destroying a legend of carmaking.
Aside from the shape of the four-door, five seater car, led by former Apple Inc’s chief product designer Jony Ive, success or failure will ultimately be decided by Ferrari’s customers, long used to navigating a company that is sticking to making far fewer cars than it could sell.
“Look at the people writing to us, the people placing orders,” Vigna said. “Some are existing clients and others are new.”
Vigna acknowledged the company may have drawn too much attention to the EV, which was unveiled in a three-step process over months.
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“Maybe there was excessive exposure of the Luce,” he said. “Maybe some people understood that Ferrari was going only electric.”
“We will continue to make all types of powertrains,” Vigna said. “The final answer comes from clients.”
Vigna also defended the vehicle’s expected price of the Luce. “Innovation has to be paid for,” he said. “If you don’t pay for innovation, you wrong the people working on it, the supply chain that makes it possible and the technology itself.”
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