Ferrari’s First EV Sparks Backlash, and Even Its Ex-Chairman Says It May Be Hurting the Brand

Fortune, the Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, AP, and the New York Times contributed to this report.

Ferrari’s first electric car is barely out of the garage and already taking heat.

The new $640,000 EV, called the Luce, was unveiled in Rome this week, but the reaction online has been brutal. Memes flooded social media. Critics compared it to a vacuum cleaner, a camper, even an Apple mouse on wheels. Some said it looked more like a Nissan Leaf than a Ferrari.

That criticism got a lot sharper when former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo weighed in. Speaking to Italian TV on Monday, he sounded genuinely uneasy about the whole thing.

“If I say what I think, I’d cause harm to Ferrari,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re risking the destruction of a myth.”

Montezemolo, who led Ferrari for years before being pushed out in 2014, even suggested the prancing horse badge might not belong on the car at all. He also tossed in one last jab, saying it was “surely a car that at least the Chinese won’t copy.”

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna has taken a more polished route in response, saying real innovation does not always get an easy pass at first. He’s also been trying to calm the noise around the launch, insisting the Luce is just one part of Ferrari’s lineup, not a replacement for the gas-powered cars that made the brand famous.

Still, investors clearly flinched. Ferrari shares dropped as much as 8% on the Milan Stock Exchange Tuesday as the backlash spread, before recovering a bit later. The worry is not just that people online are mocking the car, but that the jokes could turn into a real sales problem – or worse, dent the aura that has let Ferrari command eye-watering prices for decades.

And Ferrari is not exactly selling to the masses here. The company makes only about 14,000 cars a year, yet it has a market value around $70 billion. That rarefied status depends on obsessive fans, long waiting lists and the sense that owning one is a little like joining a private club.

The company went all in on the Luce rollout. For the interior, it tapped former Apple design chief Jony Ive and his LoveFrom team. Ferrari also showed the car off to 1,600 customers in Rome, and the publicity tour has already included a look from Italian President Sergio Mattarella and a photo op with Pope Leo XIV beside a white Luce.

Ferrari says the car is no lightweight in the performance department. It’s supposed to hit 62 mph in 2.5 seconds, go 323 miles on a charge and recharge in as little as eight minutes, thanks to a 122 kWh battery.

Vigna says that kind of tech justifies the price. He also says the company isn’t abandoning combustion engines anytime soon. Ferrari still expects 20% of its models to be fully electric by 2030, with the rest split between hybrids and gas engines.

That may be the real story here. Ferrari is trying to move into the EV era without losing the mystique that made it Ferrari in the first place. Easy to say. Much harder to do.

Some analysts think the outrage will fade once buyers get a closer look. Ferrari heard the same doubts before launching the Purosangue SUV, and that ended up working out. But for now, the Luce has done something Ferrari rarely allows: it has turned one of the world’s most carefully managed luxury brands into a punchline.