Ferrari has entered the electric market. It isn’t going so well. This car was designed by Jony Ive, the guy who designed iPhones and iMacs and even Apple’s new corporate headquarters.
When you read about the design, about the craftily integrated front and rear wings, about the airflow under the car, you appreciate the attention to every tiny detail that went into the design. But there’s this:
The wind tunnel has its way. If you look you can see the gap in front of the windscreen that air passes through underneath the front wing. The construct on the rear is similar but subtler. The elegant integration of aerodynamics is artistically unimpeachable. But, this is a Ferrari. We are not here for subtlety or even elegance (Dino excluded). This car is ridiculously fast, but not as fast as other electric supercars. Notably this is the first Ferrari to seat five.
The super-low-profile tires you see above are part of the answer to the biggest question for electric performance cars: How do you make a car with a thousand pounds of batteries turn? Tesla, in this space, is including on their upcoming supercar a SpaceX version with actual fucking (electrically powered) rockets to improve cornering. They will not make a measurable difference.
Honestly, were I the boss of a supercar company, I would certainly embrace aerodynamics in my electric entry, but I would embrace my heritage more, and put fat soft tires on the road and have the four wheel motors tuned to distribute the thrust for cornering (maybe the Ferrari does that already, but I haven’t heard about it). While I find many supercars absurdly macho — angular and fiddly — there is a middle ground out there.
Ferrari fans are not terribly impressed, and I believe it goes beyond performance numbers or styling that goes out of its way to be like a jelly bean. There’s something a roaring V12 engine directly behind your head can do that no electric motor will duplicate. It’s loud! Loud in the way an arena-rock concert is loud, invigorating and unnerving and isolating.
And for the male Ferrari drivers (which is almost all of them), it makes their testicles vibrate. And that is what they are paying the big bucks for.
