What's Behind You Doesn't Matter

Ferrari After the Engine

€7.1 billion in revenue, 14,000 cars a year, and the moment the most celebrated engineering brand on earth chose to simulate the thing that made it.

Huw AllenFounder, The Gist

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The prancing horse is one of the most recognised symbols on earth. You do not need to own a Ferrari, have driven one, or be able to afford one to know what it means. It appears on baseball caps worn by teenagers in Jakarta, on bedroom walls in council estates in Birmingham and on the gates of a factory in Maranello where approximately 14,000 cars a year are made by hand. The horse communicates something that transcends language, geography, and income: speed, beauty, danger, desire. It was borrowed from the fuselage of a World War One Italian fighter pilot called Francesco Baracca, adopted by Enzo Ferrari as a talisman for his racing team in the early 1930s, and mounted on every car the company has produced since 1947. For most of that history, the horse described something true about the experience of the machine underneath it.

In 1947, an engineer called Gioacchino Colombo designed a 1.5-litre V12 engine in his Milan bedroom in a matter of weeks. It was the smallest V12 ever made. Enzo Ferrari put it in the 125 S, the first car to bear his name, and on March 12, 1947, that car roared to life on a public road outside Piacenza, its distinctive growl echoing through the Italian countryside.

The Colombo V12 remained in production for 41 years. Its descendants powered the 250 GTO, the 275 GTB, and the Daytona. The sound it made, high-revving, naturally aspirated, unmistakable at any distance, became as much a part of Ferrari's identity as the badge on the bonnet. Enzo reportedly said, "I don't sell cars. I sell engines. The cars I throw in for free." He meant it.

On Monday, Ferrari unveiled the Luce in Rome. Four doors. Five seats. Four electric motors. No engine. No gearbox. No exhaust. Designed not by Ferrari's in-house studio and not by Pininfarina, the Turin design house that shaped Ferraris for 62 unbroken years and produced the 250 GTO, the Testarossa, the F40, and the Enzo, but by LoveFrom, the San Francisco collective founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Ive designed the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone. He has never designed a production car.

John Elkann, the Agnelli family heir who controls Ferrari through Exor, commissioned Ive because he admired how the Apple Watch had turned an analogue device into a digital product and wanted the same transformation for Ferrari. A five-year project, conducted in secrecy. The car weighs 2,260 kilograms. It measures just over five metres long, roughly the same footprint as a Tesla Model S. One analyst described the design as "a cross between a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla 3." The share price fell 7.8% on the day of the announcement. The stock is down 25% from its 2025 peak. Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who led Ferrari for over twenty years and oversaw its most commercially successful era before an acrimonious departure in 2014, was asked about the Luce on the day of the reveal. His response:

"I hope that they take off the prancing horse from that car."

An electric motor, unlike a combustion engine, produces almost no perceptible sound. In a conventional Ferrari, the engine note is not incidental to the experience; it is foundational. The rising scream of a V8 through a tunnel, the baritone rumble of a V12 at idle, the crack of an upshift at 8,000 rpm; these are the sensations that separate a Ferrari from every other fast car on the road. The Luce, being electric, produces none of them.

Ferrari's solution was to fit accelerometers to the rear axle; sensors that detect vibrations from the electric motors and amplify them through the cabin as a synthetic roar. The company that Enzo built on the principle of selling engines is now selling the sound of an engine that no longer exists, rendered in software and delivered through speakers.

Enzo was a racing driver before he was a manufacturer. He founded Scuderia Ferrari in 1929 to prepare and manage race cars. The road cars that followed existed to fund the racing; he regarded them as a necessary commercial obligation, never a calling. He sold the sports car division to Fiat in 1969 because the racing programme had become too expensive to sustain independently, retaining control of the team until his death in 1988 at the age of 90. The company he reluctantly commercialised now generates €7.1 billion in annual revenue, roughly half a million euros per car. The operating margin is 29.5%. The EBITDA margin is 38.8%. BMW manages 8 to 10%. Toyota roughly 10%. Ferrari's margins are closer to Hermès's than to those of any other automotive manufacturer.

The business model is deliberately maintained scarcity. Sergio Marchionne, the former chairman, stated that Ferrari would "always build one less car than the market demands." The order book extends through the end of 2027. Access to the most desirable models requires an established purchasing history; you do not simply buy a LaFerrari or a Daytona SP3. You are offered one after years of prior ownership, a formula recognisable to anyone who has tried to acquire a Hermès Birkin or a Patek Philippe Nautilus.

40% of Ferrari's customers opt into the Tailor Made personalisation programme, where a dedicated Personal Designer guides them through an unlimited palette of paints, leathers, stitching, and carbon fibre, adding between €50,000 and €100,000 to each transaction. Some commissions add considerably more. A bespoke paint colour alone can cost €25,000. Personalisation has been described in Ferrari's earnings calls as making a "strong positive contribution" to operating profit. Ferrari is, in the most literal commercial sense, charging its customers for the privilege of making their purchase more expensive.

Most of those customers do not use their cars the way Ferrari's reputation suggests. A significant proportion barely drives them. The cars sit in climate-controlled storage, appreciating in value, occasionally shown, rarely extended. The visceral, demanding, mechanical experience that defines Ferrari in the collective imagination is one that the majority of its owners rarely access. If the actual customer values the badge, its scarcity, personalisation, and appreciation more than the act of driving, the Luce makes rational sense. A silent, comfortable, five-seat grand tourer designed by the most celebrated product designer alive, priced at €550,000, limited in production, endlessly personalisable. The 7.8% share price drop is the market's way of registering that it is not entirely convinced the cultural meaning can survive the removal of the mechanical substance beneath it.

In December 2025, the European Union dropped its 2035 ban on new combustion-engine cars, revising the target from 100% to 90% zero-emission vehicles. Hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and range-extended EVs will be permitted beyond 2035. A "Ferrari amendment" already existed: a waiver for niche manufacturers producing fewer than 10,000 vehicles annually. Ferrari does not have to make the Luce. The regulation that was forcing the transition has softened. Ferrari is choosing this direction because the trajectory is visible even if the deadline is relaxed. It has simultaneously halved its own 2030 EV ambitions from 40% of the lineup to 20%. Porsche and Lamborghini are scaling back their electrification plans. The luxury end of the industry is collectively discovering that its customers are not requesting this transition. It is arriving regardless.

The elimination of a product while demand persists is a pattern older than the automobile. The global fur market peaked at $14.7 billion in 2013 and has since collapsed to $3.4 billion. Gucci declared fur "outdated" in 2017; Prada, Burberry, Chanel, and Versace followed suit within a few years. The demand still exists, particularly in Asia. The permission to meet was withdrawn by regulators and by the broader culture. In 2025, fur aesthetics returned to the world's fashion runways, in synthetic materials. The desire survived.

The substance was replaced by a simulation. The look endured. The animal did not. Leaded petrol was a superior fuel additive; it raised octane, protected engine valves, and improved performance. It was banned globally because the health consequences were deemed unacceptable, regardless of the engineering benefits. In each case, the product worked. In each case, society decided the cost outweighed the function. Ferrari's accelerometers belong to the same lineage: a simulation engineered to preserve the sensation of something the world has decided it can no longer have.

The history of the automobile is, in miniature, the history of participation being replaced by convenience. Power steering removed the physical effort required to turn the wheel. Automatic transmission removed the need to select the right gear. ABS removed the art of threshold braking. Traction control removed the consequence of too much throttle. Lane departure systems removed the requirement to steer with full attention.

Each step was safer, smoother, and more efficient. Each step was progress and moved the driver further from the act of driving, until the car became, progressively, a white good with wheels, optimised for comfort, engineered to ask nothing of the person behind the wheel except that they remain loosely conscious. Ferrari, for seventy years, resisted that trajectory. The engine was unbridled. The steering was communicative. The car gave you everything it had and asked whether you were equal to it. The Luce completes the arc. It is a Ferrari that asks nothing of you except that you pay for it.

Enzo Ferrari took the prancing horse from a dead fighter pilot's fuselage because it meant speed, danger, and the negotiation between human will and mechanical force. He had a saying about racing: what's behind you doesn't matter. He was talking about the car in your mirrors. Seventy years later, it is the company's entire inheritance that sits behind them: the Colombo V12, the naturally aspirated scream, the machine that asked whether you were equal to it. All receding in the rear-view mirror of a silent, five-seat sedan. For seven decades, the badge described the experience of the car it was mounted on. From this week, it commemorates it.