Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna interview: “It’s our job to push forward EV innovation, but autonomous cars? No, never”
Yes, I find it hard to believe that Ferrari has been overwhelmed with demand for its first-ever electric vehicle, the Luce, and I’d be far more willing to countenance the suggestion that it might be regretting the decision to go down the electric path, as it seems Lamborghini and Porsche now are.
So I was in some shock when the company’s CEO – the wildly enthusiastic, intensely Italian, tech-mad, physics professorial Benedetto Vigna – told me that customers have come to him demanding an EV, and refusing to consider buying a Ferrari if it doesn’t make one.
In a wild and wide-ranging interview, Vigna also assured EV Central, in stentorian tones, that his beloved brand will Never, Ever build fully-autonomous Ferraris, insisted that the Luce won’t make awful fake sounds that will make the Tifosi cry and insisted that one of its secret weapons is a proper, actual gearbox, and not at all a fake one like that found in Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 N.
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As I say, he’s a tech guy; before taking over Ferrari in 2021, he worked in motion-activated user interfaces for more than 20 years, producing important innovations, like the motion sensors used in the Nintendo Wii, and the accelerometer in early iPhones.
As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that he seems genuinely excited about the Luce in a way that his more petrol-slurping, less-nerdy predecessors might not. Nor is it surprising that Apple’s legendary designer Jony Ive has had well-remunerated input into its cool new interior.
That’s not to say that he’s entirely responsible for the EVs existence, or for the company’s refusal to back away from the whole project, despite various delays and the inherent sense that Ferrari building an EV is like F1 morphing into Formula E.
No, he’s just meeting, and predicting, customer demand.
“We could say ‘we don’t have any clients asking us for this,’ like other people do, and thus we would save money, but then who will push forward this world?” Vigna asks.
“I think it’s the leaders that have a responsibility to push forward, a responsibility to show courage and to push forward this innovation.
“And for us, the client is the most important thing. So, we have people and they are telling us, ‘I will become your client if, and only if, you have an electric traction car, otherwise I will not. I will not take an ICE , because I have to be consistent with the messaging that I’m giving to my son and my daughter’.”
(Presumably this messaging does not involve the way Mum and Dad are still flying around the world endlessly, sometimes in private jets.)
“And when you see our clients, they are often aged around 45, or 50. It means that their daughter and their son are in the teenager phase. And this changes them, they change their minds, because, you know, there is a responsibility, you need to leave a world with a different kind of air quality,” Vigna continued.
“So, I think for us, it’s important that we have the ICE, we have the hybrid and we have the electric.
“What is important is that on this electric, we do something that is unique. We don’t do a gadget-like car, we don’t do a sofa on four wheels, we don’t do a data centre on four wheels, or a mobile phone on four wheels. It is something that is done for the people.”
Clearly, the clients he’s talking about here are new ones, because, as I pointed out, gently, to him, Ferrari’s traditional buyers are in love with emotion of the brand, which comes from a combination of design, performance, driving joy and – very much in equal measure – the fantastic, and loud, noises its cars have always made.
Vigna conceded that this was a good point before going on to explain exactly what Ferrari looks at when it’s developing its cars – the design, the performance and the “driving thrills”.
“And what are the generators of the driving thrills in a car? There are five,” he insisted.
“One, longitudinal acceleration. Two, lateral acceleration; when you do cornering, okay, because most of the time, the electric car, they are heavy and so they are not nice, but our car is different, our car is light.
“Three is the braking, you have to brake in the right way. Four is the gearchange, and five is the sound. And they are all equivalent.”
In terms of the sound, the physics graduate and CEO became very exercised about the fact that people think electric motors are silent but they are not, and insisted that his Luce’s “engines – you call it a motor, I call it an engine” will sound fantastic.
“Plus, we take care of the dynamics, because in our Luce, for each wheel we have three motors. Yes, three! So we have 12 motors in total; one is to spin the wheel, one is to steer, and another one is for active suspension,” he enthused.
“And the we have a gearbox, in our car, and it is real. We can shift up and we can shift down.”
It all sounds very exciting when Vigna gets very excited about it, but he does seem like a man who’s particularly titillated by finding technological answers to difficult questions, after all, he personally holds more than 200 patents.
This love of tech did make me worry out loud about the possibility of him introducing self-driving Ferraris, but saying this aloud made him damn near pound the desk.
“We will not make fully autonomous cars. We. Will. Not. Make. Fully. Autonomous. Cars,” he intoned (sounding very much like a former Ferrari CEO who said the same thing about SUVs).
“Why? Because we want the people to have fun, not the chips. I think people buy the car because they want to have fun.”
He’s surely right about that. If you’d told me before meeting him that Ferrari was going to produce a truly wonderful EV that will make even its most strident, old-school fans happy, I would have laughed in your face. But after speaking with Vigna, I’m daring to dream.
