Ferrari Stock Falls 8% in Milan as First EV Splits the Market

Ferrari shares fell about 8% in Milan and roughly 4% in New York on Tuesday, May 26, hours after the Italian carmaker pulled the cover off the Luce, its first fully electric production car. The Milan close near €290.55 wiped out close to £3 billion of market value in a single session, the steepest one-day move in the stock since the 2022 macro selloff.

The irony sits in plain sight. Ferrari’s pricing power, the entire reason a 550,000 euro five-seater is even possible to launch, rests on the noise, vibration and combustion theatre that an electric drivetrain by definition cannot reproduce. Tuesday’s tape was the first time the market has been forced to price that contradiction.

The Selloff Erased Almost a Year of Gains

The reveal happened Monday evening at the Vela di Calatrava arena in Rome. By Tuesday’s open in Milan, RACE shares were already gapping lower; the New York listing followed in muted but unmistakable sympathy.

Two things make the move worth attention beyond the size of the candle. First, Ferrari has historically traded as a luxury name rather than an auto name, with a multiple closer to Hermes than to Stellantis. Single-day moves of this magnitude rarely happen on product news. Second, the Milan tape moved harder than the New York tape, which suggests European institutional holders, the ones closest to the Italian press cycle and the dealer network, were the first to trim.

Carwow estimated the day’s mark-to-market damage at roughly £4 billion. Whichever figure you take, the verdict was the same: the most expensive vehicle Ferrari has ever offered to private clients met its most expensive day in the equity market.

Two Voices That Carried More Weight Than the Tape

The selloff was not just about a chart. It was about who was speaking against the car within hours of the reveal.

Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s chairman from 1991 to 2014 and the man most associated with the brand’s modern luxury ascent, broke a 12-year silence on company strategy to call the Luce a betrayal of the badge. His quote ran across Italian and international wires the same morning the stock opened.

If I were to say what I really think, I’d be doing Ferrari a disservice. We risk destroying a legend, and I’m truly sorry about that. I hope they at least remove the prancing horse from that car.

That is Luca di Montezemolo, former chairman of Ferrari N.V., quoted across Italian outlets on May 26. He added, separately, that the Luce was at least a car the Chinese would not bother to copy, a barb that travelled faster than any analyst note.

Italy’s deputy prime minister and transport minister, Matteo Salvini, posted his own attack within hours, invoking the founder by name and calling the design and price tag a betrayal of what a Cavallino car is supposed to be. A serving cabinet minister and a former chairman, in the same news cycle, both questioning the product is the political risk that algorithms do not price, and the kind of thing portfolio managers reach for the sell ticket on first and ask questions later.

This is the part of Tuesday that mattered most to the equity desk. Ferrari’s premium over the rest of European autos has always been a soft moat made of brand custody. When the people who built that moat publicly say the new product is not part of it, the multiple compresses faster than the fundamentals justify.

Inside the Luce: Four Motors, Five Seats, One Big Battery

Strip out the politics and the engineering brief is the most ambitious sheet Ferrari has ever filed for a single car. The Luce is a five-door liftback, the first production Ferrari with five usable seats, built on a bespoke 800-volt architecture and assembled at Maranello.

Power and Range

Four independent permanent-magnet motors, one per wheel, are developed in-house. The front pair makes 105 kW each at up to 30,000 rpm; the rear pair makes 355 kW each at up to 25,500 rpm. In launch-control mode total system output peaks at 1,050 horsepower, with a Performance setting at 986 hp for sustained use. Ferrari quotes 0 to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds, 0 to 200 km/h in 6.8 seconds, and a top speed above 310 km/h.

The 122 kWh structural battery, co-developed with Korea’s SK On, sits low in the floor and acts as a chassis member. WLTP range is quoted at 530 kilometres (329 miles), and the 800-volt pack accepts DC fast charging at up to 350 kW. An eight-year, unlimited-mileage powertrain warranty backs the powertrain hardware.

Shape, Sound, and the Ive Touch

The exterior and interior were shaped in partnership with LoveFrom, the design collective founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson, alongside Ferrari’s Centro Stile. Drag coefficient lands at 0.254 cD, the cleanest figure on any road Ferrari, achieved without active aerodynamics. The cabin runs OLED displays and real physical paddles, with the right paddle stepping torque delivery through five levels and the left paddle stepping regenerative braking the same way.

A bullet of the headline numbers, for the desk that wants to compare in one glance:

• 1,050 hp peak in launch mode, 986 hp on a sustained Performance setting
• 122 kWh structural battery on an 800V architecture, 350 kW DC fast charging
• 2.5 seconds 0 to 100 km/h, top speed above 310 km/h
• €550,000 European start price, customer deliveries scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year

An accelerometer captures genuine vibration from the rear chassis and motors, runs it through a filter algorithm, and replays a synthesized voice inside and outside the car. It is the only place on the spec sheet where the engineering brief is openly defensive: even Ferrari knows what the Luce is missing. Compare that with what Porsche’s new electric Cayenne Coupe trades away in personality for the same kind of engineering brief, and the pattern across the segment is the same: huge numbers, quieter cabins, harder questions about identity.

Lamborghini’s Hybrid Bet Looks Smarter by the Hour

The clearest external response came not from a Ferrari fan club but from Sant’Agata Bolognese. Stephan Winkelmann, Lamborghini’s chief executive, told CNBC the day after the Luce reveal that his decision to cancel the all-electric Lanzador concept and shelve the planned battery Urus had been validated by the reaction in Maranello.

Winkelmann was careful with the phrasing. He declined to comment directly on the Luce and said “every brand, every company has to decide for themselves.” But he also said the move from combustion to plug-in hybrid was “a very important one” for his company and that “it worked out.” Translation, in the language of luxury OEM calendars: Lamborghini sees no commercial reason to chase the segment for at least another product cycle.

Aston Martin and Bentley have both pushed their first full-battery programmes back, and the third volume name in the price tier, McLaren, has not committed to a deliverable date at all. Ferrari is now alone at the top of the high-performance EV pricing ladder, which is either a moat or a trap depending on what the order book does next.

A useful frame: every other comparable brand that planned a 500,000 euro plus battery car between 2024 and now has either cancelled, delayed or quietly redirected the budget. The signal carries less weight when one brand changes course. When five do, the question shifts from “is Ferrari early?” to “is Ferrari alone for a reason?” The same dynamic shows up in lower price brackets, where Porsche’s GTS-trim Macan Electric pricing has tested where the ceiling sits on what high-end buyers will pay for a quiet drivetrain.

Wall Street Splits Cleanly Down the Middle

The sell-side reaction landed in two camps within 24 hours.

The split is the story. The bulls argue that Ferrari has done this before, that the FF and the GTC4Lusso were also called brand mistakes on launch day and that the order book swallowed both. The bears argue this is different because the powertrain itself is the offence, not just the body style, and that an order book built on one product cycle is not the same as one built across a generation.

Two figures help calibrate. Ferrari delivered just over 13,750 units last year, fewer than a single Porsche production day. The company’s operating margin, north of 28%, is closer to Hermes than to any volume manufacturer. Both numbers exist because scarcity is policed, not because the cars are cheap. If the Luce sells out its first allocation in days, those numbers stay intact and Bernstein looks right. If it does not, the multiple has further to fall than the percentage move on Tuesday suggests.

Q4 Deliveries Will Settle the Argument

Ferrari is taking orders now. Customer deliveries are scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year, which means the data that matters most, the speed at which the first allocation books out and the price at which secondary-market examples trade, lands inside the same calendar year as the reveal. That is unusually fast for a luxury launch cycle.

Benedetto Vigna, Ferrari’s chief executive since 2021, has framed the Luce as additive rather than substitutive. The company’s 2030 mix target sits near 40% combustion, 40% hybrid and 20% electric, a deliberately conservative balance that says the badge is not betting the brand on one drivetrain. The combustion side of that pipeline still has product runway, which is why concept cars from rivals such as the BMW ALPINA V8 grand tourer reveal continue to draw waiting lists at the same time the Luce draws ridicule.

Vigna’s track record buys him time. Ferrari’s revenue and operating income have both compounded in double digits since he took over from Louis Camilleri, and the company’s 6-K filings on the multi-year share buyback programme through this year show capital return discipline that public-market holders have rewarded with a higher multiple. None of that disappears because of one Tuesday.

What changes Tuesday is the asymmetry of what the order book now has to prove. If the first allocation books out cleanly inside the next two quarters, the design backlash gets remembered as noise and the stock retraces the gap inside a year. If the allocation drags, the multiple resets, and the next product, expected to be a more conventional hybrid two-seater, gets priced not as the rule but as the rescue.

For now the data point that matters is one number nobody at Ferrari has yet disclosed: how many of those €550,000 cars have been ordered in the seven days since the cover came off. Until that figure arrives, every other view, the politicians, the former chairman, the analysts, the chart, is opinion. The order book is the verdict.