On Sunday in Rome, at the Vela di Calatrava — the towering concrete “sail” stadium opened for the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee — Ferrari Chairman John Elkann took the wraps off the first Ferrari ever built without an internal combustion engine. The launch event featured tortellini by Italian chef Massimo Bottura, clips of Formula One stars Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc racing the car, and (the WSJ’s Stephen Wilmot reports drily) “lots of lights.”
The car is named the Luce — pronounced loo-chay — Italian for “light.” Starting price is €550,000 in Italy, equivalent to roughly $640,000 in the U.S. before options. That makes it among the most expensive Ferraris that aren’t part of a limited production run. It is not your father’s Ferrari.
It is also, we think, one of the more strategically interesting product launches of the year — not because we expect to put a Luce in a model portfolio, but because of what the Ferrari decision says about three different markets we do invest in.
The car itself
The Luce is the first Ferrari ever to seat five people — an option ruled out for decades by the rear axle in the traditional powertrain configuration. The acceleration is genuinely otherworldly: under 2.5 seconds zero-to-sixty, with a top speed above 190 mph, powered by four motors (one for each wheel). Range, intentionally, was made a lower priority — just under 330 miles between charges, well behind BMW and Volvo’s latest releases of over 500.
The most distinctive engineering decision: the engine roar — so critical to the Ferrari identity — is supplied by what the company calls an “external amplification system” that pumps the natural sound of the electric axles out to the street, and can also be turned on inside the cabin in “performance mode.” The company likens the approach to an electric guitar. We think it’s a tell about how seriously Ferrari is taking the question of what makes a luxury object feel like itself when its underlying technology has changed.
The Jony Ive angle
The Luce’s entire upper half and many of its fittings are made of glass. Much of that glass is supplied by Corning — the same Corning (GLW) that we already own across our Tier B sleeves for its AI-fiber and Gorilla Glass franchises. The physical design was done in collaboration with Jony Ive and Marc Newson through their post-Apple design house LoveFrom. Elkann told the WSJ he started talking to the duo after admiring their work on the Apple Watch, which he called “probably the most successful example” of an analog product being reinvented digitally.
This is the second major Jony Ive product to ship in the last twelve months — the OpenAI “io” device acquired last year is the other — and we think it is a marker. The Apple-pedigree industrial-design school, which spent two decades teaching the world that screens should be flush and corners should be perfectly radiused, is now being hired by the most prestige-conscious legacy brands in the world to translate their physical objects into the AI / electric era. Expect to see more of this. The luxury houses that get the translation right keep their pricing power; the ones that don’t become Kodak.
“As a car becomes electric, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be a consumer electronics object, which is probably one of the mistakes that the industry has been making in the last 10 years.” — John Elkann, Chairman, Ferrari
That Elkann quote is, we think, the most important sentence in the WSJ piece. It is a direct shot at Tesla. It is also a thesis about luxury: the buyer of a $640,000 car is not buying a faster iPad. They are buying an object whose every detail signals continuity with a 78-year-old Italian craft tradition. Ferrari is betting that the EV transition does not require the death of that aesthetic — it requires its careful preservation in a new medium. We agree.
Why Ferrari is doing this when Porsche, Lamborghini and McLaren stepped back
The remarkable thing about the Luce launch is that it arrives exactly as the rest of the high-end car industry is retreating from EVs.
Porsche has explicitly hit the brakes on its EV roadmap in response to tepid demand. Lamborghini and McLaren both recently told the market they don’t yet see much of a serious EV market in their segment. Mass-market manufacturers like Ford (F) and Jeep-owner Stellantis (STLA) that rushed into EVs have taken billions of dollars in write-downs as they shift focus back to combustion engines and hybrids.
Ferrari is doing the opposite. The company opened a roughly $230 million dedicated EV factory at its headquarters in Maranello, Italy, in 2024. It hired former microchip executive Benedetto Vigna as CEO specifically to manage the transition. And it has put its single most important new product launch of the decade on a fully electric platform.
The argument isn’t that Ferrari thinks the broader EV market is healthy. The argument is that Ferrari thinks the luxury market is structurally different. Mass-market EV demand depends on charging infrastructure, total cost of ownership, and range anxiety. None of those constraints meaningfully apply to a buyer paying $640,000 for a car that will be one of three or four in their garage. The Luce buyer has a home charger. They can absorb the depreciation. And they will buy the EV variant for the same reason they bought the carbon-fiber variant ten years ago — because Ferrari built it, and because owning the new Ferrari signals that you are first.
The collector / depreciation risk
The honest concern with EV Ferraris is the secondary market. Ferrari has historically built cars on the principle that they are “forever” — the company estimates that 90% of vehicles it has ever made are still on the road. Hybrid-electric Ferraris (the SF90 and 296 lines) have depreciated faster on the secondhand market than the combustion variants, sparking real concern that battery Ferraris might not retain their appeal as solidly as those without.
Ferrari has acknowledged the risk. In 2024 the company addressed those worries with an extended warranty program for its plug-in hybrids, including eight-year battery replacements. It has said it will provide similar assistance with the Luce’s electronics and battery. Our read: the warranty is meaningful protection but does not eliminate the collector-market risk, and a Luce bought today should not be modeled as an appreciating asset the way a 488 Pista or a 1995 F50 might be. It is a use-asset and a status object, not a portfolio piece.
The read-through to Capital Wealth portfolios
We do not own Ferrari (RACE) in the model book today, and we are not adding it on this news. The stock has been one of the best-performing names in European equities for the last decade, currently trades at over 40x forward earnings, and the Luce launch is already in the price. But three names we do own get read-through from this story:
Corning (GLW). The glass on the Luce’s entire upper half is largely Corning. This is the same Corning whose AI-fiber and specialty glass franchises have made it one of our quieter Tier B Fundamentals Core holdings since the spring rebalance. The Luce contract is small in dollar terms but huge in halo: when Ferrari and Apple both reach for the same glass supplier, every other luxury OEM in the world notices.
Stellantis (STLA). John Elkann chairs Stellantis too, through the Agnelli family’s Exor holding company. Tuesday’s WSJ also ran a B1 piece on Stellantis’s Leapmotor partnership and the broader $70 billion turnaround under new CEO Antonio Filosa. Stellantis is a deep-value cyclical recovery play with a strong dividend — it is in the Dividend tier of the portfolios for income-oriented clients. The Luce launch is a soft signal that the Elkann family is taking the EV-vs-combustion question seriously across both portfolios, which improves our conviction in the Stellantis turnaround.
Constellation Energy (CEG), NextEra (NEE), Vertiv (VRT), GE Vernova (GEV). Every EV sold — whether a $640,000 Ferrari or a $40,000 Ford F-150 Lightning — pulls forward demand for electrons. The Luce is one car, but the underlying point holds: the electrification of motion at the high end is structural, even if quarterly sales numbers wobble. Our power-grid overweight benefits from any version of the electric-mobility story that doesn’t reverse.
What we’re telling clients who ask
If you are a client who has been on the Ferrari waiting list for a 296 or an SF90 — and a few of you are — the practical advice is unchanged: the waiting list for new Ferraris now runs toward the end of 2027, and Ferrari prioritizes existing buyers for special-edition allocations. If you have ever wanted a Luce, the path runs through having already bought from Ferrari at least once. That has not changed.
If you are asking whether to buy Ferrari stock on this news: not at 40x. The story is in the price. We’d rather get the Ferrari read-through through Corning, through Stellantis, and through the power-grid names we already own.
And if you are asking the broader question — whether the Luce launch tells us the EV thesis is back — the careful answer is no. It tells us that the luxury EV thesis is back. The mass-market EV thesis is still in the “tepid demand” phase Wilmot describes, and we are still positioned more in the supply-chain (chips, batteries, grid) than in the OEMs (the carmakers themselves). The Luce is a beautifully built advertisement for our portfolio strategy — it just isn’t the portfolio.
“You need to bring forward the flag of innovation. It is too easy for a luxury company to live in the past.” — Benedetto Vigna, CEO, Ferrari
That same logic applies to portfolio management. The Luce launch is a useful Italian reminder that the firms most likely to compound through this cycle are the ones willing to absorb short-term margin pressure to build the next decade’s product. We see that pattern in Ferrari, we see it in Corning, and we see it across the AI infrastructure names we hold. It is the same playbook George Anders described in his 1920s essay on the opposite page of Tuesday’s WSJ — which we wrote up in the companion piece in tonight’s edition.