Ferrari this week un­veiled the Luce, its first fully elec­tric pro­duc­tion car, a roughly $640,000 five-seat EV de­vel­oped over five years with de­sign in­put from Jony Ive’s LoveFrom, for buy­ers who have long felt the fam­ily hatch­back lacked suf­fi­cient crafts­man­ship and bar­ri­ers to en­try. The com­pany said the Luce uses four in-house elec­tric mo­tors, can reach 60 mph in about 2.5 sec­onds, and will be sold along­side Ferrari’s ex­ist­ing petrol and hy­brid mod­els, al­low­ing cus­tomers to choose the dri­ve­train that best com­mu­ni­cates they have do­mes­tic staff.

Early re­ac­tion from Ferrari loy­al­ists sug­gested the com­pany had not so much ex­panded the mar­que as en­tered the fam­ily crypt at night and pissed on dusty hel­mets. LoveFrom’s in­volve­ment only deep­ened the in­jury, with ob­servers strug­gling to de­ter­mine which el­e­ments of the de­sign re­flected Ferrari’s rac­ing her­itage and which re­flected Jony Ive’s life­long con­vic­tion that all ob­jects should re­sem­ble a pre­mium ap­pli­ance in a Pixar movie. By Thursday, own­ers’ fo­rums had set­tled into a tone of re­strained grief with posters as­sur­ing one an­other that the brand re­mained com­mit­ted to per­for­mance, her­itage, and the even­tual ar­rival of a se­cret new model de­signed to ac­tu­ally look like a Ferrari that would al­low the en­tire episode to be retroac­tively un­der­stood as a bril­liant “Ferrari Classic” manuever.