As you know, I live in Italy. Yesterday was a bad day to live in Italy.

Father, son, and the Ferrari 499P, the Le Mans Hypercar (LMH), at the Museo Ferrari in Maranello, Emilia Romagna (early 2025). Credit: Pam Ring

Ferrari unveiled its first electric car, the Luce (pronounced LOO chay, meaning “light”), at a fancy event in Rome on Monday night. By yesterday evening, Ferrari (RACE) shares tanked 8.37% to €284.05 in Milan, losing €5 billion in market cap.

The car was supposed to be a triumph. Five years of work. A fresh chapter. The “light” that would guide Ferrari into the electric future. That’s what the marketing department thought, anyway.

Then the photos hit X, and the laughter started. As far as I can see, it hasn’t stopped.

A Honda Accord EV with a Prancing Horse

The Luce looks like "a mix between the Honda Accord EV and the Tesla 3," Pierre-Olivier Essig, head of research at Air Capital, told Bloomberg.

Credit: Vogue Italia

Former Ferrari president Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was salty. “If I said what I really think, I’d be hurting Ferrari. We risk destroying a legend, and I’m deeply sorry. I hope they at least take the Prancing Horse off that car. It’s at least one car the Chinese won’t copy,” he spouted at the 2026 Confindustria assembly in Rome.

Yes, the man who built modern Ferrari just asked his successors to take the venerated yellow badge off the new model… in public… in front of the press.

That’s as close to a public excommunication as we get here these days.

Embarrassed Italia

I can’t explain to you what it’s like to live in this country and watch this happen. Ferrari isn’t just a car here. It’s how Italians see themselves. It tells them, “We still make beautiful things. We still know what we’re doing.”

Sir Jony Ive’s four-door, five-seat sedan looks like the car he wanted to design for Apple with the wrong badge on it.

The interior is reportedly lovely. Brushed aluminum. Minimalist. Tactile switches. A steering wheel machined from a single piece of recycled aluminum. Very Apple. Very thoughtful.

Very much not a Ferrari.

A Ferrari is supposed to make a 14-year-old boy stop walking. The Luce makes him ask if the Uber is here.

The Smart Guys Already Bailed

Here’s the part that will make every Ferrari shareholder howl in agony like Pacino in Godfather III.

Lamborghini scaled back its EV plans. Porsche cut its electrification targets. Both said the same thing: rich people signaled weak demand for electric supercars.

And yet, Ferrari walked straight into the punch. It spent 5 years and untold billions building exactly the car its two closest rivals decided not to build.

Why? EU rules made it almost impossible for Ferrari to ignore EVs. The whole Green New Scam apparatus that Brussels built to “save the planet” has done one thing very well. It forced European carmakers to build cars Europeans wouldn’t buy at prices Europeans can’t pay.

Ferrari is the most prestigious carmaker in Europe. The EU bullied it into making a Honda Accord for show. Luckily, it’s not meant to be mass produced.

Meanwhile, in Shenzhen…

While Europe was busy lecturing Ferrari into a Tesla rival nobody asked for, the Chinese were toiling deeply and cheaply into the night.

BYD’s European sales tripled in early 2026. In January, it cracked the top 3 EV brands on the continent, behind only Volkswagen and BMW. Five years ago, almost no one in Europe had heard of BYD. Now it has its own fleet of car carriers, including one ship that holds 9,200 vehicles. China shipped 922,000 passenger cars to Europe in 2025. In just the first 2 months of 2026, exports rose another 62%.

Brussels designed tariffs to slow them down. Instead, the tariffs taught the Chinese to set up shop here permanently.

The score so far: the West mandated EVs, then made them ugly and expensive. China is now putting better, cheaper, faster, and better looking ones in European garages.

The Real Mechanism

Let’s call this The Maranello Capitulation.

That’s when two things happen:

1. A regulator forces a luxury brand to chase a mass-market product it has no business making, nor intends to sell to the masses.
2. The mass-market players who actually know how to make that product are running circles around everyone.

The Luce costs €550,000 and will cost $640,000 in the United States when it debuts. You’d have to be an EV evangelist with cavernous pockets to buy one. I'd rather set that money on fire than drive a Luce.

Normal rich folk would probably rather pay €240,000 for the new Ferrari Amalfi. 

The Ferrari Amalfi, Credit: Car Magazine

What This Means for You

First, don’t feel sorry for Ferrari. The company will be fine. It still sells out everything it makes. The board has the option to quietly shelve the Luce after one model year and pretend it never happened. That timer is ticking like Marissa Tomei’s body clock in My Cousin Vinny.

Second, watch the broader Western auto sector with cold eyes. Germany, France, and Italy bet their industrial base on a regulatory dream that the buying public never signed up for. The bill is coming due. Volkswagen is offering its empty factory space to Chinese partners. Stellantis is building Chinese cars in Spain. The “hollowing out,” which we discussed last week and is on steroids in Europe, has started.

Third, you already know who the long-term winners are. China’s industrial policy is brutal, subsidized, and unfair. The West simply can’t compete with the Chinese money printer. BYD is a freight train barreling into the continent that invented the automobile.

Fourth: here’s the vindication. When you said the EV mandate was a scam, you were right. When you said the government (in this case, Brussels rather than DC) would wreck industry by chasing a green fantasy, you were right. Talk about malinvestment on an economy-wide scale…

The proof is sitting in a showroom in the Eternal City. It has four doors, five seats, and a Prancing Horse on its hood the founding family wants ripped off.

Wrap Up

Yesterday in Rome, the most iconic brand in Italian industry showed the world what happens when apparatchiks force good engineers to make a car they don’t believe in, to please regulators they didn’t elect, in a market they already lost to people who didn’t play by the same rules.

The stock dropped 8%. The memes are now in the millions. And somewhere in Maranello, Enzo Ferrari is turning in his grave fast enough to power an Italian village.

It’s time to let the consumer choose, and the producer make. The bureaucrats need to get out of the way… Pronto!