Ferrari launched its first all-electric car last week, the Luce, and the internet responded with the kind of collective revulsion usually reserved for parking tickets and airline food. The Jony Ive-designed grand tourer has been dragged across every corner of automotive social media, called everything from overwrought to soulless.
And yet at least one person at Jalopnik messaged his colleagues at 6 AM on launch day to say the Luce “looks sick as hell.”
Brad Brownell, a senior writer at the outlet, has planted his flag on the most thankless hill in car culture right now. He genuinely likes the thing. Not loves it, mind you.
He’s careful to note he doesn’t think the Luce qualifies as good design or particularly pretty. But he calls it “a big step in the right direction” for a company he believes hasn’t produced a truly beautiful car since the 250LM in 1964.
That’s a spicy take worth sitting with. Sixty-two years of Prancing Horse design — the Daytona, the F40, the 458 — reduced to “a bit of ungainliness, some indelicate lines, or a few too many embellishments.” It’s the kind of statement that gets you uninvited from Monterey Car Week.
But Brownell’s argument is less about the Luce itself and more about what it represents: Ferrari finally doing something genuinely different. He sees the design language as raw material. Shrink it down, drop it a foot, widen it, shorten it by a couple of feet, and suddenly there’s potential for something legitimately beautiful.
The Luce, in his reading, is a concept sketch that happens to carry a price tag.
He’s not alone in this broader instinct. He also likes the Jaguar Type 00, another polarizing design from a legacy brand trying to reinvent itself through radical aesthetic departure. There’s a pattern here: a certain strain of enthusiast who would rather see a storied marque swing wildly and miss than play it safe with another iteration of the same visual formula.
The timing of this confession was deliberate. Brownell used it to frame a reader question about which ugly cars people would defend to the death. The Pontiac Aztek, the Fiat Multipla, the Nissan Cube, the Porsche 996 and its fried-egg headlights, which Brownell himself drives and admires.
Every generation produces a handful of designs that split audiences clean down the middle. Time has a funny way of rehabilitating a few of them.
Whether the Luce gets that redemption arc is far from certain. Ferrari’s first EV carries enormous expectations, and the backlash to its appearance has been fierce enough to overshadow discussions about its powertrain, its technology, and its performance. When people can’t get past the body, nothing underneath matters to the conversation.
The deeper tension is one Ferrari will have to reckon with. The brand built its identity on beauty as much as speed. Customers paying north of $300,000 expect a car that stops traffic for the right reasons.
Telling them the design will look better in a few years, on a smaller car, is not exactly a sales pitch.
Brownell knows he’s outnumbered. He acknowledged he’s “one of the only people on the planet” who actually likes the Luce’s design, and said he’s ready to resort to fisticuffs to defend it. That kind of lonely conviction is either the mark of someone who sees something the rest of us don’t, or the automotive equivalent of insisting the emperor’s new clothes are magnificent.
The comments section will sort it out. They always do.
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