The timing was not coincidental.
Stephan Winkelmann, who has led Lamborghini since 2020, told CNBC that the decision to kill the Lanzador and abandon plans for a fully electric Urus was "the right way to go" for his company. He was careful to add that "every brand, every company has to decide for themselves," and he declined to comment directly on the Luce or on Ferrari by name. But the context was unambiguous. He gave the interview two days after Ferrari's reveal drew one of the most hostile receptions any vehicle from Maranello has received in living memory.
The Lanzador was Lamborghini's electric car. It was revealed as a concept in 2023, scheduled for production in 2028, then pushed to 2029, then delayed indefinitely, then cancelled outright in February 2026. The fully electric Urus, which had also been in development, was scrapped at the same time. Winkelmann cited customer demand, which he described as being "close to zero" for a fully electric Lamborghini, and the state of battery technology. He explained to CNBC: "By observing the market, we saw that the acceptance curve for our type of customers is not increasing, and that therefore we decided to move away from a fully electric car into a hybrid with a plug."
The hybrid pivot is what Lamborghini is now. The Revuelto is a V12 with three electric motors. The Temerario is a V8 hybrid, its crank configured in the flat plane arrangement. The Urus SE runs a V8 sourced from Porsche with electric assistance. All three cars retain the internal combustion engine that defines what a Lamborghini actually is. None of them require their owners to listen to a recording of an engine instead of an engine.
Ferrari went a different way. The Luce is a fully electric, car with four doors and five seats producing 1,035 horsepower with a 122 kWh battery, designed by Jony Ive's LoveFrom collective and unveiled in Rome on Monday. The response from the internet, from collectors, and from the financial markets has been brutal. Ferrari's stock fell in the days following the reveal. Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who ran Ferrari for 23 years and oversaw some of the most celebrated cars the company has ever produced, told Italian media that the Luce's design was so poor that not even Chinese manufacturers would copy it. He had already publicly called the Luce a mistake before the reveal. Afterwards, he repeated the sentiment with additional force.
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Ferrari's current CEO, Benedetto Vigna, pushed back. He said customer interest was strong and orders were accumulating. Ferrari's F1 drivers, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, were reportedly shown the car before the reveal and asked for their input. Their responses, when published, were supportive. These things may all be true. They do not address the central question, which is whether the buyers who made Ferrari what it is will want a a £500,000-plus electric car designed by the man who built the iPhone.
Winkelmann's position, diplomatically phrased as it was, amounts to this: the supercar customer buys with their ears as much as their eyes. The Lamborghini V12 is not background noise. It is the product. An electric motor, however powerful, does not replace that, and the market for premium electric performance cars is not demonstrably large enough to justify dismantling the thing your brand is built on.
He is not wrong. The question of whether Ferrari is wrong will take years to answer properly. The Luce will not reach customers until late 2027. Orders placed today will tell a clearer story than social media posts do. But the speed with which the backlash emerged, the drop in Ferrari's share price, and the fact that a rival CEO was on television within 48 hours effectively saying "we saw this coming" suggests that Ferrari has, at minimum, badly miscalculated the public launch.
Lamborghini makes fewer than 10,000 cars a year and has never needed to be everything to everyone. That constraint, which once looked like a limitation, now looks like a defence.
Sources
- CNBC — Ferrari backlash: Lamborghini CEO says canceling its EV plan was 'the right way to go' (primary source; Winkelmann interview)
- Motor1 — Lamborghini Boss: Delaying EVs Was 'The Right Way To Go'
- Carscoops — Ferrari's Luce Got Savaged, And Lamborghini's CEO Couldn't Resist
- Autoblog — Lamborghini May Have Dodged A Ferrari-Sized EV Problem
- AutoEvolution — Lamborghini CEO Joins Ferrari Luce Critics
- TopSpeed — Why Lamborghini Was Smart to Kill Its First EV
