The entire automobile industry is slowly but surely moving toward an electrified future. In just a little over a decade, Tesla’s influence has been so strong that even the companies most well-known for turning fossil fuels into sweet combustion engine music are making the change too. One of those brands, Ferrari, has its own game plan for transitioning and the CEO, Benedetto Vigna just laid (most of) it all out.
Viga directly attributed the shift towards electrification to Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk in a recent interview from Ferrar’s headquarters. Speaking to Bloomberg he says that “Tesla shook up the industry and accelerated processes and decisions. They were faster and more agile.” He aims Ferrari to be similar but without limiting customer choice by going all-electric too fast.
“It’s all about how quickly you understand the environment around you and how quickly you adapt and make decisions, partially with the brain and partially with the gut. If you believe you need to wait to have the whole range of elements to make the final decision, well, it’s too late,” he says.
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To that end, he says that the very first all-electric Ferrari model is still on track for a 2025 debut before it reaches customer garages in 2026. At the same time, he says that even Ferrari can’t “impose any choice on clients” which is why it’ll continue to offer internal combustion engines, hybrids, and EVs for as long as it feasibly can.
At the heart of any Ferrari EV has to be the emotional component he says. That’s one of the major hurdles in fact, and one that many in the supercar world are trying to overcome. “Electrifying cars is relatively easy from [a] technological point of view. The real point is how to extract the best emotion for the use of this technology you want to provide to the driver,” he says.
At the same time, he doesn’t see a threat to Ferrari other than one that could affect the entire luxury goods market. He called that out saying “There is a threat for the luxury industry overall, which is how will new generations react to luxury goods?” To that end, he’s planning to take the bull by the horns so to speak by cutting emissions sharply by the end of 2030.
He’ll have to navigate those waters while also ensuring that future Ferrari models still provide the thrills and emotional components that deserve the prancing horse badge. We can’t wait to see the results.
