When Ferrari revealed its first electric car in May, the reaction was brutal enough to knock 6% off the company’s share price. Two months later, the Luce has sold out its entire 2026 allocation, roughly 500 cars, proof that ridicule and demand are not the same thing.

Ferrari itself declined to comment, saying it would address the car’s reception at its half-year results on 31 July, but the numbers had already leaked ahead of the presentation.

For Ferrari, the timing is convenient. A sold-out order book is exactly the message investors will want to hear at Friday’s results, after a reveal that briefly turned the company’s most anticipated launch in years into a punchline.

The Luce is a strange object by Ferrari’s standards. It is a four-door, five-seat car, a family shape from a company built on two-seat sports cars, and it starts at €550,000, or around $640,000, which places it near the top of the range.

Its look is the part that caused the trouble. Designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson through their LoveFrom studio, the Luce drew savage reviews at its Rome unveiling, with critics unable to reconcile the aerodynamic, slab-sided body with the badge on the nose.

The badge itself became a flashpoint. Luca di Montezemolo, the former Ferrari chairman, suggested the company should “at least take the prancing horse off,” a line that captured how far the design strayed from what buyers expect of the marque.

The backlash carried real costs. The reveal wiped billions from Ferrari’s market value, and within a month the company had replaced its marketing chief, a casualty of a launch that went badly enough to need a scapegoat.

None of which, it turns out, stopped people buying it. The 2026 quota was full in under two months, and orders now stretch toward the end of 2027, a level of demand that makes the online mockery look like noise.

China did much of the buying. Demand there led the sellout, a reminder that the market for six-figure status objects does not always share the tastes of the enthusiasts who fill comment sections.

Underneath the divisive shell is a serious machine. The Luce makes more than 1,000 horsepower from four motors, carries a 122 kWh battery on an 880-volt architecture, charges at 350 kW, and covers more than 530 kilometres on a charge, reaching 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds.

The engineering, Ferrari argues, is why it looks the way it does. A former executive said the shape was “driven by aerodynamic requirements” and needed to be “digested,” the polite version of asking the public to trust the physics over first impressions.

The sellout fits Ferrari’s strategy, which is the opposite of most carmakers’. Where rivals chase volume, Ferrari deliberately builds fewer cars than it could sell, and it halved its 2030 EV target last year, betting on scarcity rather than scale.

That scarcity is the whole trick. By capping the Luce at around 500 units, Ferrari made selling out almost a foregone conclusion, and turned a hostile reception into a story about exclusivity rather than rejection.

The deeper question the Luce raises is about identity. A four-door, five-seat electric Ferrari asks whether the brand’s magic lives in its engines and two-seat proportions or in the badge itself, and the answer, for now, is that enough buyers will pay either way.

It also lands against a gloomier backdrop for electric cars. Demand for EVs has cooled in much of the world, and even Porsche has seen deliveries slide, which makes a sold-out, $640,000 electric Ferrari a useful piece of counter-programming.

The Jony Ive of it all adds a final twist. The designer behind the iPhone is now shaping both OpenAI’s first hardware and Ferrari’s first EV, and in at least one of those, the market has already voted with its chequebook, whatever the critics made of the drawings.

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