The electric Ferrari got booed. Let that sit for a second, because a crowd booing a Ferrari is like a room full of sommeliers hissing at a bottle of Pétrus. It's not just disapproval; it's a violation of the natural order. And yet, according to the Dezeen Weekly crew, the real story isn't the hissing. It's that Jony Ive and Marc Newson had their fingerprints all over the thing. That's the razor clam in this spec sheet. Everyone's staring at the badge and the battery, but the actual design DNA belongs to the guy who made you care about a phone's chamfered edge and the guy who designed a watch you couldn't afford. That changes the question from "Is this a good Ferrari?" to "Is this a good Ive?" And those are very different answers.
We've been here before, sort of. The reaction to this launch feels like the same cultural whiplash we saw with Kylie Jenner's side-eye might be the only honest review of Meta's new glasses, where the public gut check ran ahead of the marketing machine. And it's the same tension that makes Six tiny EVs that dare to be small, sharp, and actually cool so refreshing: small, weird, opinionated design gets love, while the big, expensive, supposedly inevitable stuff gets scrutinized to death. A tiny EV hatchback can be charming because it's not trying to be everything. A $500,000 electric Ferrari has to be perfect, and perfect is a target nobody hits on the first try.
Here's our take, and it's not the one the headlines want. The booing isn't about electric powertrains. It's about expectation mismatch. Ferrari built its name on a specific kind of violence, a mechanical snarl that makes your chest vibrate. An electric motor is silent and instant, which is objectively better in almost every measurable way, but it doesn't have a soul in the way we've been trained to define it. So when Ive and Newson show up, you'd hope they'd solve that problem with pure form. But form without sound is just sculpture. And a sculpture that costs more than a house needs to be transcendent, not just tasteful. The crowd wasn't booing the car. They were booing the absence of the thing they came to feel.
What would we tell a reader who asked? Don't buy the hype, and don't buy the hate. Watch the next iteration. Ive has a habit of getting the first version wrong and the second version right, because he iterates with a ferocity that borders on obsession. The real question isn't whether this Ferrari is good. It's whether the next one, the one where he's had time to reconcile his minimalism with Ferrari's maximalist history, will make the boo-ers eat their words. That's the detail to watch. Not the launch, not the noise, but the quiet revision that comes eighteen months later. That's when we'll know if this was a stumble or a pivot. And honestly, a stumble from Ive is still more interesting than a home run from anyone else.
