The Prancing Horse and the iPhone Designer
On Ferrari, the Luce, and how to destroy a brand in one presentation.
There is a particular kind of corporate failure that only happens to great brands. Not the failure of incompetence — any company can fail through incompetence. This is the failure of people who are too clever, too connected, too convinced of their own vision to notice that they are dismantling the thing they were entrusted to protect.
Ferrari had that failure on May 25th, 2026, in Rome.
What they presented
The Ferrari Luce is a four-door, five-seat, fully electric sedan. Starting price: €550,000. Power output: 1,036 horsepower across four motors. Interior: designed by LoveFrom, the creative studio of Sir Jony Ive — the man who gave the world the iMac, the iPhone, and the AirPod.
On paper, this is a serious car. Ferrari built a dedicated 880-volt platform from scratch. They filed 60 new patents. They assembled it in a new E-Building at Maranello. The engineering credentials are, as always with Ferrari, impeccable.
None of that matters.
Because what Ferrari unveiled in Rome was not a Ferrari. It was the car that Jony Ive would have built if Apple's Project Titan had survived. The screens have Apple Watch crowns. The infotainment panel has an iPad vibe. The Gorilla Glass and the button language and the entire philosophical grammar of the interior belong to Cupertino, not Maranello.
And the exterior? Hagerty called it "crude, ill-proportioned and inappropriate." Bloomberg quoted analyst Pierre-Olivier Essig: "a mix between a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla 3." Autoweek noted that "even yellow doesn't save it."
By close of trading on May 26th, Ferrari shares were down 6%. Peak intraday loss: 7.8%.
The market said what the press was thinking.
The Montezemolo moment
The morning after the launch, Luca di Montezemolo — the man who ran Ferrari from 1991 to 2014 and presided over the F50, Enzo, and LaFerrari — walked onto the Confindustria assembly stage in Rome.
He suggested Ferrari remove the Prancing Horse from the Luce.
Let that land. The most successful Ferrari CEO in the company's history, the man who rebuilt the Scuderia and the road car division simultaneously, publicly proposed that this car should not bear the name.
This is not an aesthetic opinion. This is a brand verdict from the person who understands the brand better than anyone currently running it.
The actual mistake
It is worth being precise about what Ferrari got wrong, because "going electric" is not the answer.
Porsche went electric and produced the Taycan — a car that looks, drives, and feels like a Porsche. The DNA survived the powertrain transition because Porsche understood that electrification is a technical decision, not a philosophical one. You change what is under the body. You do not change what the body means.
Ferrari handed the interior of their most important car in decades — their first electric vehicle, the one that would define the brand's relationship with the future — to an outside studio whose entire aesthetic vocabulary was built at Apple. LoveFrom has never designed a car. Their guiding principle, by Ferrari's own admission, was "simplification, with smooth, pure shapes."
Simplification. For Ferrari.
Enzo Ferrari did not build the most emotionally charged automotive brand in the world through simplification. He built it through obsession, through excess, through the conviction that a car should make you feel something before you start the engine. The tension in a Ferrari — the slightly uncomfortable seating position, the instruments angled toward the driver, the sense that this machine was built for one purpose and everything else was a concession — is not accidental. It is the product.
The Luce simplified it away.
The venue problem
There is something almost poetic about the choice of Rome for the unveiling.
Ferrari won its first race in Rome in 1947 — the Ferrari 125 S at the Baths of Caracalla, driven by Franco Cortese. That is the origin story Ferrari invoked to frame the Luce as a new beginning. Seventy-nine years of history, back where it started.
But the 125 S was a racing car that happened to be road-legal. It was rawness and ambition made metal. Presenting its spiritual successor as a five-seat luxury sedan — wider than a Taycan, heavier than anything Ferrari has ever built, designed by the man who made the iPhone — in a Calatrava-designed sports complex, for an audience of financial analysts and lifestyle journalists, is not a return to origins.
It is the opposite.
What this is really about
Ferrari is a publicly traded company. It has been since 2015, when the Elkann family listed it on the New York Stock Exchange. Since then, the pressure has been consistent: grow the addressable market, expand the customer base, move upmarket into the ultra-luxury space where margins are protected and volumes can increase without diluting the brand.
The Purosangue was the first step — a Ferrari SUV that caused similar controversy and sold out immediately. The market rewarded it. The logic followed.
The Luce is the second step. It targets a buyer who currently spends €300,000 on a Bentley Flying Spur or a Rolls-Royce Ghost — someone who wants a statement, not a lap time. Someone for whom Jony Ive's name is a genuine selling point. Someone who will appreciate the iPad dashboard and the Apple Watch crown and will never take the car anywhere near Fiorano.
This is a rational financial strategy. It is also, over a long enough timeframe, brand suicide.
Luxury brands die from the top down. They do not collapse when the wrong people buy them. They collapse when the right people stop wanting them — when the people who defined the aspiration, who gave the brand its cultural weight, who made everyone else want to be associated with it, quietly look away.
Ferrari's audience of enthusiasts — the people who have spent forty years arguing about engine placement and tyre compounds and whether the F355 or the 360 was the better car — looked at the Luce and saw something that did not need the Prancing Horse.
Montezemolo said it out loud. Everyone else was thinking it.
The colour tells you everything
Ferrari presented the Luce in turquoise blue.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand where Ferrari's colours come from. At the dawn of international motor racing — the Gordon Bennett Cup, held between 1900 and 1905 — each competing nation was assigned a colour. France received blue. Germany white. Britain, having arrived late and found all colours taken, chose green as a tribute to its Irish hosts. Italy's colour became red: Rosso Corsa, racing red, earned in 1907 when Prince Scipione Borghese drove a crimson Itala from Peking to Paris across 9,000 miles of desert, steppe and mountain, arriving victorious in the French capital. Italy adopted the colour of his car in his honour. That red travelled from the Gobi Desert to Maranello, and stayed there for a century.
There is only one other colour acceptable for a Ferrari at an official presentation: yellow. Not as a marketing choice, but as a historical fact. Yellow is the colour of Modena — it has been since the Este Duchy, centuries before the automobile existed. Giallo Modena. The city's colour, the province's colour, the colour Ferrari uses because Maranello sits within its borders. When a Ferrari appears in yellow, it is a statement of provenance, of territory, of where it was born.
Turquoise is neither of these things. Turquoise is, historically, the colour associated with the Savoy dynasty — the royal house of the Piedmontese and, later, unified Italy's monarchy. And blue, as any historian of motor racing knows, is the colour of France. The Agnelli family were Piedmontese. John Elkann holds French as well as Italian citizenship. One hesitates to suggest that the choice of a turquoise-blue for the Luce's reveal was deliberate heraldic commentary. But if it was accidental, it is a remarkable accident. And if it was not — if someone in the room knew exactly what they were doing — then it is a provocation so refined it amounts to contempt.
The choice of colour at a car unveiling is never accidental. It is the single most deliberate visual decision a brand makes — the one that frames every photograph, every headline, every first impression. Ferrari chose to introduce their most important car in a generation in a colour that is not red, not yellow, and historically belongs to someone else entirely.
A Ferrari in turquoise blue is not a provocation. It is not a statement. It is a concession — the visual equivalent of telling your oldest customers that this one is not for them. Or perhaps it is something more pointed than a concession. Perhaps it is an inheritance (the Elkann's) made visible.
The giants who worked in the shadow
There is a deeper insult buried in the Jony Ive announcement, and it takes a moment to see it clearly. To see it properly, you need to begin not with Pininfarina but with the Futurists.
The Futurist movement, launched by Marinetti in 1909, built its entire aesthetic philosophy around the machine, the engine, the racing car. "A roaring automobile is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace," Marinetti wrote — and meant it. The bolide, the racing machine at full speed, was not merely a vehicle but a new form of beauty, a new relationship between man, metal and velocity. This was not abstract theory. In Modena, it had a specific face: Enrico Prampolini, born in the city in 1894, who became one of the most significant figures of Italian Futurism, signing the Manifesto of Mechanical Art in 1922 and the Manifesto of Aeropittura in 1929. Prampolini understood that the machines emerging from the workshops of the Po Valley were not products — they were a cultural statement, an Italian declaration about what the future looked like and who was building it. The connection between Ferrari and the Futurist tradition is not metaphorical. It is biographical, geographical, philosophical. The racing car was the supreme object of Italian modernism before Ferrari had built a single one.
What followed, over the next eighty years, was the history of Italian automotive genius — a lineage of men who shaped not just cars but the entire visual language of speed and desire. Battista Pininfarina, who defined the long-bonnet, narrow-waist silhouette that became the template for every sports car that followed. Leonardo Fioravanti, who designed the Daytona, the Dino, the Berlinetta Boxer, the Testarossa — arguably the four most visually significant Ferraris ever built — and did so as a craftsman whose name most casual observers could not tell you. Marcello Gandini at Bertone, who influenced an entire generation of Ferrari competitors and collaborators. Sergio Pininfarina, who maintained the relationship between the coachbuilder and Maranello for six decades, through hundreds of models, with a consistency and depth of understanding that cannot be replicated by a studio that has never designed a car.
These men did not hold press conferences. They did not give TED talks. They did not have their design philosophy explained in brand manifestos and lifestyle magazine profiles. They came to Maranello, understood what Ferrari needed, and made it real. Their names appeared in small print, if at all. The car was the statement. The designer was the instrument.
Ferrari's decision to feature Jony Ive as a selling point — to market the Luce with his name in the headline and his philosophy quoted in the press release, as a mid-level brand in search of a premium selling point might do — reveals precisely how far the brand's confidence in its own identity has eroded. A Ferrari designed by Pininfarina did not need Pininfarina's fame to validate it. The car validated itself. Fioravanti designed four of the most beautiful objects of the twentieth century and remained, to the general public, essentially anonymous. That anonymity was not a failure of recognition. It was the correct order of things.
A Ferrari designed by the former Chief Design Officer of Apple, announced with his name above the car's name, is a Ferrari that no longer believes the Prancing Horse is enough.
That is the real failure. Not the turquoise. Not the four doors. Not the 122 kWh battery or the iPad dashboard or the Apple Watch crown on the infotainment panel.
The real failure is the insecurity that made all of those decisions feel, to someone in Maranello, like the right ones.
The name they hid, and what it meant
In 1971, at the Turin Motor Show, Ferrari unveiled the 365 GT4 BB — their first mid-engine production supercar, penned by Leonardo Fioravanti at Pininfarina. The car was so beautiful that during its development the entire team at Maranello had taken to calling it by a name they could not officially use: BB. Brigitte Bardot.
The tribute was genuine and unironic. These were engineers, craftsmen, and designers who looked at what they had built and reached for the most charged image of feminine beauty available to them. Sergio Pininfarina later confirmed it without embarrassment: "She was a splendid animal, a splendid woman." The BB designation was officially translated as Berlinetta Boxer — a technical alibi to preserve the romance beneath the nomenclature. Ferrari thought naming a car after a woman was simply not done. So they hid it. Kept it internal. Let the insiders smile and the public read the spec sheet.
That story contains an entire philosophy of what Ferrari was. The desire was present. The beauty was present. The connection between the car and the most visceral, unreasonable, physical aspects of human attraction was not just acknowledged — it was the starting point. A car so beautiful it named itself after Bardot. A car that made Sergio Scaglietti, who had built Ferraris by hand for twenty years, feel something new.
Now look at the Luce.
Five seats. Family dimensions wider than a Taycan. A turquoise blue that belongs in a design hotel lobby. An interior designed by the man who made the iPhone — smooth, pure, simplified. An object of admirable restraint and intellectual coherence that produces, in the people looking at it, no particular feeling at all.
The desexualisation of the Ferrari is not incidental. It is the product of a deliberate repositioning toward buyers for whom the erotic charge of the object — the low roofline, the impractical seating position, the engine note that arrives before the car does — is not a feature but an inconvenience. The new Ferrari customer has a family. The new Ferrari customer needs five seats. The new Ferrari customer wants Jony Ive's name on the dashboard and a colour that will not embarrass them at the school gate.
The men who called their prototype Brigitte Bardot would not recognise this calculation. They would not understand a Ferrari designed around the school run. They would look at the turquoise Luce and ask, quietly, what exactly it is that this car wants from you.
The answer, for the first time in Ferrari's history, is: nothing in particular.
The simplest marketing lesson
There is a principle in brand management so obvious it should not need stating: you do not hire the person who defined your competitor's aesthetic to design your most important product.
Apple and Ferrari are not competitors. But they occupy adjacent positions in the same cultural space — objects that people desire not for utility but for what they represent. When you invite Jony Ive into your design process, you are not getting a neutral collaborator. You are getting Apple's grammar, Apple's vocabulary, Apple's philosophy of what an object should feel like in your hands.
The result looks exactly like what it is: a Ferrari that wants to be an Apple product.
It is beautifully made. It is intellectually coherent. It has 1,036 horsepower and 60 new patents and a dedicated E-Building in Maranello.
And it has no business wearing the Prancing Horse.
michelerovatti.com · Writing since 2012
The Dream of Never
Culture, Capital, and the Refusal of Limits
by Michele Rovatti
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