Ferrari dropped its first electric car this week and the internet mostly hated it. That alone would have made for a busy news cycle. Then a four-door Lucid sedan went to a dragstrip and beat the fastest Corvette ever made four times in a row. A software developer outside Amsterdam turned out to be running a global payments app from a converted cow barn on solar power. And BMW and Mercedes finally got the side-by-side comparison they deserved. Big week. A lot of assumptions took a hit.
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The Ferrari Luce is a five-seat, quad-motor electric car with 1,035 horsepower in full performance mode, active suspension derived from the F80 supercar, and four-wheel steering. It was designed in-house at Ferrari then finished in collaboration with LoveFrom, the creative firm founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. There is no ignition button: you insert a key into a magnetized dock, an animation sequence runs across the displays, and the car is on. The flat battery floor, made possible by the electric platform, gives the cabin noticeably more interior space than the Purosangue. The windshield wipers park at the outer edges of the glass because the seamless canopy leaves no cowl to tuck them into. Active cooling vents at the nose open and close by drive mode, balancing drag and thermal management the way the gill system on the current 911 generation does. The Manettino dial changes display colors alongside the power mode: range at 50% output, tour at 70%, performance at full power. Every physical surface in the cabin is metal, leather, or glass. Pricing is estimated around $650,000. Ferrari delivered roughly 13,640 cars in 2024 with the large majority going to existing customers. The Luce is aimed at a different buyer, and a driving review is reportedly coming soon. That will settle more questions than the walkaround can.
Ferrari's stock fell roughly five percent the day the Luce was revealed. Former CEO Luca di Montezemolo, credited with rebuilding the modern brand, publicly called for the prancing horse badge to be removed from it. The podcast episode captures the reaction in real time, recorded immediately after the announcement. The argument is not that Ferrari should have avoided making an electric car. It is that the car they made has no Ferrari anchor: not the fastest in its price range, not the rarest, and not visually connected to anything in the brand's history. A Lucid Air Sapphire runs to 60 mph in under two seconds at roughly a third of the Luce's price. Every previous departure from Ferrari's formula, the California, the Purosangue, the Portofino, retained something recognizable in the way it drove or the way it sounded. The Luce carries none of those reference points. The engineering commitments are real: Ferrari built the motors in-house, the sound system captures actual axle vibrations rather than playing a synthesized track through the speakers, and the battery pack is designed to accept future cell technology as chemistry improves. The podcast's broader concern is strategic: the Luce targets new buyers in markets like China where four-door practicality sells better than sports cars, and if those buyers don't materialize at $650,000, Ferrari will have spent the brand equity that carried them through the California and Purosangue controversies without replacing it.
Software developer Wietse Wind runs a payments app for more than 1.1 million users around the clock from a data centre inside a converted cow barn just outside Amsterdam. The app has no maintenance window because it operates across every time zone. To back that guarantee, Wind and installer Danny Make from Elektrotechniek spent four years building a 150-panel solar array, 540 kWh of LiFePO4 battery storage, and a Victron Energy inverter stack capable of simultaneously powering two houses, an office, a data centre, a swimming pool, and up to five electric vehicles. The system runs off-grid for roughly ten months of the year, supplementing from an 80-amp three-phase grid connection during the other two when the system can also export back to the grid at peak prices. Baseline consumption is a continuous 20 kW just to keep the data centre and cooling running, spiking to 25 kW under high compute load. The two-subsystem architecture splits solar arrays by orientation, with separate controllers for each. A separate UPS provides 25 minutes of standalone backup. Wind built a full replica of the system in his basement to test every firmware update before it touches the live environment. Heat from the servers passes through a heat exchanger that warms the property's swimming pool. The system went through a flood when an old barn drain pipe failed, leading to all equipment being moved against the walls. Amsterdam data centre costs and rising electricity prices were Wind's direct motivation for building his own infrastructure rather than colocating.
The Corvette ZR1X arrived with numbers that were supposed to end the conversation: a 1,250-horsepower twin-turbo V8 hybrid running zero to sixty in 1.67 seconds on a prepped surface, a quarter mile in 8.67 seconds, at around $250,000. Vehicle Virgins lined one up against a Lucid Air Sapphire at Apex Motor Club and ran the test four times. The Sapphire won all four, on both drag and roll starts, crossing the line at around 160 mph. The Air Sapphire puts 1,234 horsepower through three electric motors and covers the quarter mile in 9 seconds on an unprepped surface, a number that already looked competitive before this test. The reason it wins is structural: no turbo lag, no gear changes at the moment of peak demand, and launch control accessible through a dragstrip mode in the touchscreen that any driver can activate consistently. The ZR1X needs boost to build, and in hot conditions that gap widens because heat hurts combustion engines and is essentially irrelevant to electric motors. On roll starts the ZR1X closes the gap because the turbos are already spinning, but the Sapphire still pulled ahead each time. Both cars cost around $250,000. One delivers full force the instant the throttle opens. The other has to work up to it. The ZR1X is an extraordinary combustion machine. It still lost to a sedan.
The BMW iX3 and the Mercedes GLC EQ are close enough in price and positioning that buyers routinely shortlist both without landing on either. Autogefühl's Thomas Majchrzak ran matched M Sport and AMG Line specs of each through a full week of driving, real-world efficiency tests, and a timed charging session. The iX3 opens with a clear structural lead: a 108.7 kWh battery against the GLC EQ's 94.5 kWh, and DC charging up to 400 kW that took it from 15 to 80 percent in roughly 18 minutes versus 22 minutes for the GLC EQ from around 12 percent. The efficiency gap at moderate speeds is more consequential than the battery size alone suggests: at 100 km/h the iX3 projected to around 725 km of range while the GLC EQ projected closer to 525 km, a 200 km difference that compresses to around 100 km at 130 km/h where the GLC EQ's two-speed transmission and air suspension lowering at speed help recover ground. The iX3's hands-free motorway driving up to 130 km/h was assessed as among the smoothest available today, with lane changes passengers barely noticed. Mercedes confirmed a comparable update is coming but gave no timeline. The GLC EQ's optional air suspension, shared in technology with the S-Class, handles rough surfaces in a way the iX3's standard setup cannot match. Acoustic-laminated front windows on the GLC EQ also produce measurably lower cabin noise at 160 km/h. Autogefühl's verdict goes to the GLC EQ for the air suspension, acoustic windows, and high-speed refinement, features that push the tested configuration to around 96,000 euros against the iX3's roughly 86,000. If range at moderate speeds, the better driver-assistance system available now, or the lower price are priorities, the iX3 is the rational choice. Both are genuinely good. The GLC EQ is better and costs more, and that 10,000-euro gap is worth doing the math on before deciding it matters.
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If you are following R2 production and delivery timelines, the tracker is live on the site. One place, updated as deliveries progress. Worth bookmarking if you have a reservation or are watching the ramp.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.