Ferrari’s week has been rough. The Luce, the brand’s first four-door electric car, landed to a chorus of criticism that ranged from its powertrain to its proportions. But buried beneath the noise, a different electric Ferrari surfaced — one that nobody seems to hate.
A 2024 Ferrari Testa Rossa from The Little Car Company just hit Bring a Trailer, and it might be the most charming thing wearing a prancing horse badge right now. It’s a three-quarter-scale replica of the legendary 250 Testa Rossa, built under official Ferrari license with direct access to the brand’s Classiche archives. It is electric, it is tiny, and it is delightful.
The timing is almost too perfect.
The Little Car Company operates out of a decommissioned RAF airfield near Bicester, England, where it builds scaled-down recreations of some of the most revered cars in history. The origin story traces back to 1926, when Ettore Bugatti built a miniature racing car as a birthday gift for his son Roland. TLCC’s parent company, Hedley Studios, restored that original Bugatti Baby and has since turned the concept into a cottage industry of obsessively detailed small-scale machines.
This particular Testa Rossa runs a 12-kW electric drivetrain. Pull the restrictor fuse and it tops out at 50 mph — genuinely quick when you’re sitting inches off the ground in something the size of a go-kart. Range sits around 70 miles per charge, enough for a spirited afternoon on a kart track or a slow cruise through the neighborhood.
The details are what separate this from a rich person’s toy and push it toward art object. The 12-inch wire wheels are genuine Borrani pieces. The leather hood straps are period-correct and the foot pedals were sourced directly from Ferrari.
Everything about it says that someone cared deeply about getting it right, which is more than critics have been willing to say about certain full-scale Ferraris this week.
Ferrari only ever built 19 customer examples of the original 250 Testa Rossa. Any one of them would now cost more than a country estate. This miniature version won’t approach that territory, but TLCC’s creations don’t come cheap either — previous examples have traded in the $40,000 to $60,000 range, depending on specification.
The seller included a video of a similar car being drifted around Rockefeller Center beneath the Christmas tree, which is exactly the kind of absurd spectacle that makes people fall in love with cars in the first place. No range anxiety discourse. No debate about whether an electric motor belongs in a Ferrari. Just pure, grinning joy.
That’s the tension Maranello is wrestling with right now. The Luce is supposed to represent Ferrari’s electric future — a $300,000-plus flagship meant to prove that battery power and the prancing horse can coexist. The reception has been mixed at best.
Meanwhile, a three-quarter-scale toy with a fraction of the power and none of the pretension is generating nothing but goodwill.
The auction closes June 3. Whatever it sells for, the little Testa Rossa has already done something the Luce hasn’t managed: it made an electric Ferrari universally likable. Sometimes the answer to a brand identity crisis isn’t a technological moonshot. Sometimes it’s just a beautiful shape, honest craftsmanship, and the good sense not to overthink it.
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