The internet has spent a week treating Ferrari’s new all-electric Luce like a piñata, and now rival automakers are lining up to take swings. Nissan Ireland posted an Instagram comparing the Luce to the new Leaf, captioned “We admit, we’re flattered.” Then someone with authority apparently made a phone call, and the post vanished.
Mazda got there first and hasn’t flinched. The Japanese automaker simply posted a photo of its original 1960s Luce SS, a Giugiaro-penned beauty that Ferrari apparently named its $400,000 EV after. Ferrari quietly secured the international trademark for “Luce” earlier this year after Mazda let it lapse.
That’s a detail worth sitting with. Ferrari picked up a used nameplate from a mid-market Japanese sedan and stuck it on what’s supposed to be the most important car in Maranello’s history.
Mazda’s post is still up. The top comment, with over 4,500 likes: “Mazda making fun of Ferrari before GTA6.”
Nissan’s jab was sharper but shorter-lived. The side-by-side comparison showed the Leaf and Luce in near-identical two-tone black-and-blue livery, with similar rear hatch profiles and matching black rocker panels. In fairness, the resemblance is more coincidental than damning. But that didn’t matter. The meme was already loaded, and Nissan pulled the trigger.
Then deleted the bullet.
The retreat tells you something about the unwritten rules of the industry. Mazda can poke fun because its connection is the name itself, a legitimate, documented lineage. Nissan was punching laterally at a brand that occupies an entirely different universe of price, prestige, and margin.
Someone at Nissan HQ likely recognized that comparing your mass-market EV to a Ferrari, even mockingly, risks making the Leaf look aspirational for the wrong reasons.
Meanwhile, the pile-on keeps growing. Toblerone, the Swiss chocolate brand, got involved. AI renders have flooded social media showing how minor tweaks could rescue the Luce’s proportions.
And then there’s Luca di Montezemolo, the man who ran Ferrari for over two decades, who told Italian media the design is so bad that “not even the Chinese would dare copy it.” When your own former boss says that publicly, the styling clinic has failed in ways that no amount of engineering excellence can paper over.
Ferrari’s stock took a brief hit after the unveiling. The share price recovered, as it tends to, because Ferrari’s financial story has never really been about any single car. It’s about scarcity, margin, and a waiting list that functions as its own currency.
But the Luce is different. This is Ferrari’s first pure electric vehicle, the car that’s supposed to prove Maranello can survive the transition without surrendering its soul. Instead, it’s become a meme. An Apple mouse on wheels. A Nissan Leaf in a tuxedo.
The defense from Ferrari loyalists is predictable: wait until you see it in person, wait until you drive it, the specs will silence the critics. Maybe. Ferrari has earned the benefit of the doubt over decades of building cars that photograph worse than they look in the metal.
But the company has never faced a launch where Toblerone, Mazda, Nissan, and its own former chairman all agreed on the same punchline.
If the Luce sells out its production run, and it probably will, because Ferrari allocation works differently than normal commerce, none of this noise matters financially. But brand perception is a slower burn. Ferrari just handed every competitor in the EV space a free shot, and some of them are taking it while others are deleting the evidence.
Share this Story