Ferrari’s first electric car has already completed several thousand miles of on-road testing and company boss Benedetto Vigna promises it will be made “in the right way” to ensure buyers can “have a lot of fun”.
The Italian firm has yet to give any details about what form its first battery-electric vehicle will take, but Vigna confirmed it will be revealed late next year before going on sale in 2026.
Recent spy shots show what are understood to be Ferrari EV test mules using modified Maserati Levante bodywork and give some hints as to the form the final car might adopt. Whether it will be obviously comparable with the Levante in silhouette remains to be seen.
Notably, though, Ferrari used Maserati’s SUV as the basis for the first Purosangue prototypes and that car is radically different from its Italian contemporary – while still sitting high off the ground and having rear seats.
It is possible Ferrari could seek to emulate the characteristic dynamic qualities of its combustion cars by centralising the mass of the batteries in the chassis – much in the way that its current cars are either front-mid-engined or rear-mid-engined. Vigna said he expects the new EV to appeal to both existing Ferrari customers and tech-savvy newcomers to the brand.
He added: “There is not a pattern really. People buy a Ferrari because when they buy a Ferrari, they have a lot of fun. They don’t buy a Ferrari because A, B, C, D or a single element. It’s a combination of things. When we do electric cars, we will produce them in the right way.
“Consider that we have prototypes already on the road that have done several thousand kilometres, and we have in our company very qualified clients: test drivers. The first clients of our cars are the test drivers. They drive a lot of cars, and they can easily make a comparison between one and another, so for us this is an important metric that we are making a reference to.”
A recent report by Reuters suggested that the new EV will be priced from $500,000 (£395,000) and claimed that a second electric model is already under development. Vigna called those reports “a surprise” and declined to confirm any of those details. He added: “The way we define the price of a car is one month before we launch it.”