Ferrari’s First Electric Car Has a Name: Luce

Ferrari has been Chinese water-torturing us, dribbling out the details of what might be its most significant new model in a generation, that being its first battery electric car. Up until now it’s simply been dubbed “Elettrica.” Now, at an event held in the TransAmerica Pyramid high above San Francisco to unveil the interior and user interface, Ferrari chairman John Elkann noted that simply calling it the electric Ferrari was selling the car desperately short. The official name: Luce (say LOO-chay).

“Luce is ‘light’,” he said, “and the significance of it is multiple: It gives you a sense of the future. It gives you a sense of lightness. It gives you a sense of speed. It gives you a sense of novelty. It gives you a sense of the many different things that have altogether been part of this incredible project that today becomes one step closer to reality.”

We wonder if Ferrari considered any three-letter words, because one of the newsier aspects of the electric Ferrari is that the company has partnered with LoveFrom to codevelop the design. This design firm was co-founded in 2019 by Jony Ive—the design director at Apple for 30 years responsible for the iMac, MacBooks, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and industrial designer Marc Newson, who penned Ford’s 1999 021C concept. Both men are known to have a penchant for less-is-more design distillation (note Jonathan Ive’s four-letter spelling of his name), so the simple four-letter name no doubt appealed to them.

You can read our coverage of the interior design and technology by clicking here (and check out the images and video here), but you’ll have to wait until May to see what the exterior looks like.