Are Our Target Customers Real or Constructed?

Wolfgang Philipp: Imagine you have the ultimate setup, one of the most iconic brands in the world. Years of development. The best designers. The best engineers. Demand that exceeds supply. Customers waiting years for delivery. And then you reveal your latest vehicle. Instead of admiration, you get one of the biggest shitstorms in the brand’s recent history. And it’s not driven by the usual trolls and haters. It’s driven by designers, by journalists, by long-time customers, and even by former brand leaders. People who don’t just question the vehicle itself. They question the very idea behind it. The idea that Ferrari needs to reach a new kind of customer.

Which brings us to today’s topic „Are our target customers real or constructed?“ Felix, when you look at the reaction to Ferrari’s new Luce, what do you think is really happening here?

Felix Kilbertus: Hi Wolfgang, this is really an interesting question, isn’t it? I think for the last few days we’ve really been bombarded with reactions from everybody basically. People you know and people you don’t know. And the reception has been quite powerful. I think we need to pick that apart. Why is this reaction so strong? What is the reaction so strongly against? And how does it link to new customers and new target audiences?

I think a reasonable way to look at it is actually to start with Enzo Ferrari’s own assessment of what the brand’s customers are. And there’s this quote that I quite like where it says „Well, my customers are basically of three kind: the sportsman, the 50-year-old, and the exhibitionist.“ It’s of course his words but I think there’s a lot of truth to this description of a what we imagine a fairly common Ferrari customer to be like. So you have people that made money, maybe midlife crisis, the 50-year-old; you definitely have people who are all about performance, all about the sports, all about the handling; and of course you have people who really enjoy the show of factor the fame, the glamour, the sexiness that Ferrari is rightly associated with. But that’s not everybody. There is definitely different people that Ferrari is targeting here, at least that’s what they’re stating and I think it’s a very legitimate thing to go beyond your traditional target audience, especially when you have the opportunity to do a specific model that brings something different to a brand.

Wolfgang Philipp: That’s right but when I hear your quote – or Enzo’s quote – what comes to mind is, wouldn’t the Luce target at least two of them: the 50-year-old and the exhibitionist?

Felix Kilbertus: Maybe. I mean, it’s a different type of interpretation of it. But I think we need to go into why this is a good thing to have new target customers. And they very specifically target in their statements a new generation of customers, younger people, more female customers as well. Something that a lot of luxury and a lot of luxury sports brands really suffer from, like a 90 to 95 percent male audience in terms of actual purchase profile. So they do need to step out of that. Now the question for me is, is that the right way of doing it? Is it the right product? Is it the right power train? Is it the right design? Is it the right story? And this is I think where we need to pick things a little bit apart.

Wolfgang Philipp: Do we need to address new target customers? Because even if 95% are male, what’s wrong with it? I mean, it’s okay. It works. It worked for Ferrari so far and they are sold out every year.

Felix Kilbertus: They are, but I think they’re at the end of a cycle. So it is extremely important that every brand continuously challenges their core assumptions, especially in a time where the powertrain change will not spare Ferrari. Maybe not next year, maybe not in five years, but there is no avoiding looking into different powertrains. So if you build everything only on the idea of combustion engines or even on a specific type of combustion engine, the 12-cylinder, you will at some point become irrelevant. And this is why I think it’s very necessary to do it.

The question is, was it done the right way? The reason why I think it’s also necessary to go against your obvious customers sometimes is because you might get stuck in a stereotype. You might play to your hyper-fans and lose kind of the coolness of people who are a little bit different. Maybe the future tastemakers, maybe the future entrepreneurs, the future voices rather than today’s voices.

Wolfgang Philipp: To me, Ferrari is one of the very few brands that actually has this – or had this – take it or leave it approach. So you either like it or you don’t like it, but it’s not Ferrari’s problem.

And now with the Luce, for the first time, there is this shift towards selling a car to other people, or trying to sell it to a new target group. Verbatim they said, „We’re trying to reach a new target group.“ And there’s also this clip on the internet where they say the electric platform enabled Ferrari for the first time to build a car with five seats. I mean, the SP1 doesn’t lack four seats to be a great car or a great Ferrari.

Felix Kilbertus: When you now go into the concrete products in front of our eyes, I think there’s many things to say about that. Did you need to make this car to drive that story of a new clientele, a new powertrain? In my opinion, absolutely not. And I think it is highly debatable whether this was a wise choice to use this platform with this proportion, with this design. There’s very little that is logical in this constellation. Even the five seats. Do you really need five seats in the future Ferrari? I don’t know. And it doesn’t justify this sort of package, this sort of proportion. There’s many other ways of achieving five seats or four seats in different ways. So I would not take that too seriously, or at least not literally.

Wolfgang Philipp: The question we try to ask in this podcast is, „Are our target groups real or constructed?“ So, okay, Ferrari tries to reach a new target group. Who are they trying to reach? And what are the drivers, what are the needs of this target group? And what was the thinking behind it?

What do you think was the thinking behind it for the Luce? I mean, the idea „We want to reach a new target group“. This is the result, the Luce. What happened in between?

Felix Kilbertus: This is one of the few things that I think is very well done in the whole story of the Ferrari Luce. The idea to target something different. That makes a lot of sense to me.

I do think that the result is, frankly, from a design point of view, terrible. But the targeting of a new audience makes sense. Why does it make sense? A, because there are certain markets where you will not be able to do combustion engines for the foreseeable future. Certain markets in China clearly where there’s such a high penalty in terms of practicality, quite simply, to not be electric, that you need to be electric at some point. There will be certain pockets also in California, in the tech market where, you know, driving a combustion engine car is probably not something that people practically want to do.

And it’s understandable. There’s amazing electric vehicles out there and there will be better and better ones. So I think that is completely legitimate. That’s the one thing I would not doubt, the idea of a zero emission electric Ferrari. I have no philosophical problem with that whatsoever.

Wolfgang Philipp: But why should it have five seats then?

Felix Kilbertus: That’s a completely different story. I think one way of looking at this product and comparing it maybe to the other, looking back over the last five years or so, what other premium and luxury brands did something similar? Because it now seems like, oh, Ferrari is the only brand that does such a thing. No, it’s actually the last brand that does such a thing. The last big brand in any case.

So think of the Rolls-Royce Spectre launch, for example, maybe five years ago. There the decision was clearly to go fully electric for the entire range and to start with the most emotional platform, the coupe architecture. And that was a very clever decision because the obvious one would have been to do another SUV, to do another thing where you sit on top of the batteries and talk about efficiency and range and all of these things. No, it was about doing the ultimate Rolls-Royce.

Think of then the Porsche Taycan. Brilliant packaging. It is a two row vehicle. It has batteries on the floor, but it’s so cleverly packaged that it looks beautiful. It is highly successful in terms of its design language it’s been copied by many, many brands in terms of packaging sometimes even in terms of design and it’s an extremely good vehicle. So yes, you can take your existing brand language, develop it, bring it to a new target customer without betraying your fan base or your branded entity.

There’s two other examples, more recent than that, there’s the Jaguar Type 01 or the concept that announces it, where it’s a different story. Where a brand needs to reinvent itself and makes a shift in terms of powertrain. And then you have a second recent launch which is the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe, another car where you in terms of architecture have a fairly practical layout, a much lower hip point, arguably much better proportions, even though the styling is highly debatable in the case of the AMG, while with Jaguar the jury is still out because we haven’t seen the production vehicle yet.

So it can be done. There’s no causal relationship between having a spacious car and making a fairly amorphous blob with fairly weird wheelbases and fairly unbecoming overall heights.

Wolfgang Philipp: I think we need to separate two things. One is the shift to electric and the other is the shift to a new target group. And I think Ferrari tried to reach two things with one car.

Probably it was not so easy to create the perfect electric Ferrari with two seats and 1,500 horsepower and a sufficient range. So then you go the SUV route. This is the package to have these kind of specs. And with this package comes a certain target group. And suddenly it’s a different game altogether, but the shift to the target group is not necessarily brand-driven, but it’s more technology-driven in my eyes.

Felix Kilbertus: From what I understand, talking to people in my network, is that that was exactly the intention of Elkann, of the chairman, to use that sort of Silicon Valley, radical, disruptive, double change, double leaping, as you said, in this product.

And you could argue already, is that necessary? Do we need a double leaping? And then you wonder, okay, if you read it in a benevolent way, when you say, okay, that’s a really daring thing. If we change powertrains, we also go after completely different customers with a different architecture.

It is the classic Silicon Valley story. You know, like you disrupt, you break things and you see what happens. I just think it wasn’t necessary to do that. You could also read it in a different way. But that would be my understanding, that there was really a will to do it Silicon Valley style and not the Italian way or the continental way or the European way.

Wolfgang Philipp: But a car with a five-year development cycle is not a software product with a three-month iteration cycle.

Felix Kilbertus: Unfortunately not, because if this was a minimal viable product, an MVP, I would be, „Yeah, sure, fine. Now let’s design this thing and let’s see if we can make it into something that is as attractive as it could be.“

Wolfgang Philipp: Okay. When we stick to our question of this episode, „Is the target group real or constructed?“, I understand the idea to target a new customer group.

But whoever should this be? I mean, most OEMs are addressing the same target groups anyway. And most of the time, these target groups, they come from the segments. They’re market-driven. And then you say, okay, we want to target this market, this is our target group. But it’s not a brand-driven target group. It’s not the Ferrari driver, whoever this is.

Obviously, they don’t want to target the current Ferrari driver anyway. So who should it be then? You need to have someone in mind, because otherwise it’s just this product-driven approach where you just go from „What can we do?“ and then try to make it the best way possible and you have all these different puzzle pieces: you have the interior in the best way possible, you have the exterior in the best way possible designed, and then you put it together but the bigger picture is missing, there is no greater idea behind this vehicle except for it’s electric and it has to be a great product.

Felix Kilbertus: I haven’t driven the thing, I haven’t seen it, I haven’t touched it. So I think let’s just talk about it in the most abstract way possible. Just we close our eyes, so to speak, and we just think about the target customer and the idea of an electric Ferrari.

I think that is the brilliant part of the story. There are areas where you target people that you can’t reach with your combustion engine Ferraris. Think of the city of London, zero emission. Think of certain places in China, Singapore, some tech people who are so into the obvious idea of electric powertrains and the efficiency and the intelligence that comes with it. There are people, I think, that can be targeted with this sort of idea.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yeah, but are they then the Ferrari clientele? I mean, a Ferrari is never the first car and the only car. So even if I live in London and I am not allowed to drive a combustion car, I have three other cars at my disposal who can do it. And I have the Ferrari for the racetrack with a private program and I still can drive a Ferrari. And if I’m the tech guy from San Francisco and I hate combustion cars and I think that EVs are the solution, then I will never drive a Ferrari anyway because I hate the concept of the very idea behind the brand.

Felix Kilbertus: I would not recommend anyone to buy the Luce, don’t get me wrong, but I think the idea is sound that eventually you need to make electric so exciting that you can easily imagine an electric Ferrari. I think it’s a matter of time. It’s not impossible is what I’m trying to say and I think it’s one step in the right direction.

In my opinion it will be at best seen as an MVP, the first attempt to do something. But they do a couple of clever things, using regenerative braking as an emotional engagement, almost like shifting gears in a petrol car. So that’s very clever and you have to say that’s beautifully executed.

There’s also the idea that the sound is actually deriving directly from the mechanics of an electric powertrain rather than something that simulates something else like the fake V8-sound that the AMG has just introduced to a fair amount of indignation, and rightly so. The thinking there is not bad, it’s just not convincing overall, but brilliant details.

Wolfgang Philipp: I think there are a lot of great ideas in the car and I also want to say the idea to have an electric Ferrari is not wrong from my perspective.

To me, it’s not about the technology anyway, because technology to me is just a tool to bring a brand to life. And this can be done with combustion engines and electric engines.

The question is, what is your meaning? What do you try to convey with the brand? And the Luce has a slightly different idea than other Ferraris. And I don’t doubt that it’s possible to build an amazingly impressive electric Ferrari, probably with superior dynamics and all the features electric engines provide.

This is the irony of the whole thing, because electric mobility is completely misframed. It’s always been this no-other-option-solution for the last decade. And it’s been framed as something that has to replace the combustion engine and make it obsolete, but based on regulations and not based on superiority.

And this to me is the birth problem of the electric mobility because it just has the wrong frame. And the moment you frame something as „this will replace something you love and we will take it away but now you have to love the new thing“, it’s no longer working.

Felix Kilbertus: But I think we’re beyond that. In my opinion that was the big impact of Tesla that proved, okay, there’s a new emotionality. Teslas do certain things much better than other cars – not everything – but what Tesla basically did, like it created a new type of emotionality for people who hated cars before.

That is the big, big thing that Tesla achieved. Some sort of emotionality attached to electricity, getting it away out of this sort of eco and guilt-based mobility that was still dominant before Tesla. If you remember the Toyota Prius or even the EV1 from General Motors, many of these cars, as brilliant as they were, they always smacked off having to give something up, suffering a little bit for the sake of the greater good. Even the other eco-initiatives, the one-liter Volkswagen prototypes, the three-liter Volkswagen Lupo, those were base-spec, ascetic cars.

And Tesla proved that completely wrong. It was a different message. It’s not about saving the planet. Yes, we don’t produce any CO2, but it accelerates differently. It has a lot of fun. It’s full of gadgets. It turns the traditional game upside down, whether you like Tesla or not. But they achieve that different look on electric mobility.

So I think we’re beyond that. It’s just that there is not enough intelligence yet in creating truly sporty EVs. Because for the moment – and that is once again still linking it to technology and its limitations – electric cars currently become incredibly heavy. And that’s the one thing that in my book, any sports car that is electric at the moment suffers from the excess weight.

There’s maybe one or two exceptions. There’s a British race car, forget the name now, that is ultra lightweight, ultra narrow.

Wolfgang Philipp: Longbow.

Felix Kilbertus: Maybe the Longbow. That drives circles around anything that is regularly shaped and weighed, that is the first glimpse of a future of doing electric sports. And I think that’s why the Luce is just a very, very clumsy step, not going into any of the other numbers which are not leading, at least not on paper.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yes, but Ferrari’s take on building the ultimate Tesla then is not so successful from the perception. What speaks against a two-seater Ferrari with light batteries that only have 100 kilometers of range, but deliver 2,000 horsepower and after driving these 100 kilometers, you are grateful that the battery is empty because your brain is fried and you need a break?

Felix Kilbertus: That’s a very good point. Also, because if you compare the autonomy of a battery vehicle from any brand with the autonomy of the petrol vehicle, sometimes the electric ones are better. So once again, I know from Rolls-Royce, the Spectre had a higher range than the Cullinan. The Cullinan is petrol based and it doesn’t have a longer range in actual driving than the Spectre. And that’s the thing. Like we forget that these numbers, they are important, but it’s not just about the range, of course.

So why is it not a two-seater? Why is it not something else? I think that’s one of the strategic goals of the Luce, that it does not compete with the Ferrari ICE cars. Because in the end of the day, because it clearly targets something else – it protects the ICE cars. Because the ICE cars are no longer the benchmark in terms of dynamics, in terms of acceleration, in terms of 0 to 100 and so on. If anything, it does two things first and foremost, A it anchors the brand in the ultra luxury segment at 640,000 euros it clearly says well even our electrics are extremely expensive this is a luxury brand if you can’t afford it you’re not a customer, it’s a very powerful statement.

And the second one is it avoids that problem if Ferrari did a two-seater, a lightweight two-seater electric they would get into trouble because all of a sudden you’re like „Oh but why do I get the inferior product with a noisy engine when the electric one can do anything I do and better?“, so I think they’re delaying very consciously making their hero cars – their best-selling petrol cars – obsolete.

Wolfgang Philipp: Okay that’s an interesting point, because to me this would be the solution, right, for Ferrari, if they had this super desirable electric Ferrari that is superior to its ICE brothers and it can be priced as high as the Luce anywhere or even higher. The ultimate weapon, electric, and give electric a completely different frame than it has now, because now it’s like „Oh, I don’t need this, we don’t want this, and here’s the hate button“ and 1,348 people click it.

With an electric two-seater, the ultimate car, even with 100 kilometers of range, which wouldn’t contradict the use case of a Ferrari, it would be the solution to the problem, right? Because then you can still have Jonathan Ive design it and it’s no longer „We take something away from you or give you something you don’t like“.

Felix Kilbertus: I think this is what I remember reading a few years ago, that the original plan was to do the – what was then called the Elettrica – which became the Luce.

That was supposed to be the first electric Ferrari. And then, if you read between the lines, they then also said, well, the second one will come afterwards. What they’ve decided now is that the second one apparently is cancelled. So this one is the first one. And we shall see.

I think that they realized that the second one wasn’t quite there yet, where you really have a new dimension where they’re completely better in terms of what a sports driver would want than the petrol car. And I think they need the time to transition to figure that out.

So I think the Luce’s role is really to protect the petrol cars. It’s the price anchor. I think there’s also a story about the CO2 emissions and giving it breathing space to grow. Because as you know, that there are certain numbers limitations that Ferrari is close to in terms of growth potential.

So by targeting new powertrains and new customers, they have a bit more breathing room. And then we can talk, okay, what other strategic goals could be behind this launch? And I think it does target a younger, more status-symbol driven customer, people that flex for the sake of having something that is contrarian. It’s sort of the Balenciaga sort of a logic where you have something that is deliberately non-mainstream, slightly odd aesthetics, deliberately weird, but you show your flex by being a tastemaker and you don’t have classic good taste but you show your strength by having challenging taste.

Then also a very important one which I call the entry ticket into the exclusive Ferraris, so since Ferrari has the luxury of choosing their customers. Because once again, Enzo Ferrari always realized this and he said it in his own way saying like „Ferrari will always produce one car less than the market demands.“ This is one of those things where they have so much demand that they can direct customers into higher and higher price brackets.

And they have a program of highly exclusive cars that you don’t get access to until you’ve bought a Puro Sangue, a Luce and other products. And because of that high price anchor point, it helps them improve the marginality in terms of how much money you can make per unit, if you know that you capped at a certain maximum unit for a low volume manufacturer, like Ferrari.

Wolfgang Philipp: Okay but then you need the desirability of the product. But I also want to ask with the target group: Aren’t those people Ferrari always tried to keep people selling their Ferraris to? You had the Ferrari and then you weren’t allowed to sell it to certain people, or not everyone gets a Ferrari, who just has the money. And now it’s like this approach to give it to those very people who were previously not wanted to be seen in a Ferrari.

Felix Kilbertus: I think it’s a generational thing. So I think I’m too old to judge this too directly to understand the appeal of this iconoclastic, for lack of a better term, bad design appeal. It’s not my world, but there’s a certain attraction to it, doing something that slightly shocks and therefore you’re breaking the codes.

And yes, arguably Ferrari had done that before, but not as aggressively as with this kind. I think that’s a relatively recent phenomenon as well. And I would argue that this is also due to the way we consume and live our lives digitally nowadays. There’s that component. I’m trying to understand something that aesthetically I do not understand.

Wolfgang Philipp: Let’s go to the consequences a bit of this question. So you try to reach new target customers. Are they real or are they constructed? So what’s happening now?

Felix Kilbertus: Honestly, I think that the target customers are actually real. There might not be a lot of them, but I think they’re real customers.

It’s the sort of new wealth that we’ve seen over the last 10, 15 years that allows for that sort of customer thinking and customer behavior. So I think that in this case, as we said, it’s people that want city access.

It might be a more female clientele because of its perceived practicality. It might be the younger, more iconoclastic mindset that wants to show differentiation from the older people that are associated with the brand. So it gives permission of ownership to different people, which in itself is a clever thing.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yeah, I think the shitstorm actually formed a specific target group for the model. And now you also have the anchor price, everybody knows this car is expensive, so no matter what you think of it, it has a certain perception.

Felix Kilbertus: I think that in this case they will probably find themselves to be reasonably successful and there’s a danger that they might actually think that that’s because of the design and that would be indeed a sad story – because it is not.

Wolfgang Philipp: Let’s go into the design a little bit. I’ve watched certain clips available on the internet and the Interview with Jonathan Ive and Flavio Manzoni, and we will link the video in our show notes.

You’ve said it before, there are a lot of great ideas in the design, and I don’t think the design is so bad from a big picture point. There are some great ideas, I mean, this shell approach that you have the underbody and then you have the upper body and this gives the car a certain seamlessness. You don’t have this cluttered surfaces. It’s like one fluid surface.

From my perspective, we really have to differentiate design and the car concept, the SUV, because let’s imagine this design was applied to a two-seater a Ferrari or this design approach? What would be bad about the design then? Because I think we mix up the things. We see an SUV and say, „This is not a Ferrari, it sucks.“

Felix Kilbertus: Let’s try to be systematic here because we need to talk about the product itself, its architecture, its proportion, its interior and its exterior. I would say it’s not a problem of powertrain electric, yes or no. Now, is it about how many seats you put into the car? Also not the problem, because we’ve seen it with the Jaguar, with the Porsche and so on. You can make multi-seat cars and you can make them highly desirable and attractive. Not the problem.

It is that specific package that I think is nowhere near as good as it should be. It’s clumsy. Don’t forget, this is a five meter car and it only has five seats. This is by no means better than what an S-Class does or an EQS or any traditional big car. So it’s a heavy, big thing, and it’s high. It’s not even low and big. So it has no architectural merit. I would go as far as saying that the Puro Sangue is an architectural masterpiece, because you fit an extremely big, powerful engine, great proportions and a reasonably spacious interior into something that is highly attractive. So I think that is great architecture.

I would say the first big problem is really the proportion and the silhouette, how high the car sits and how the relationship of overhangs to wheelbase to rear overhangs to the tension points in the cabin sit.

I don’t disagree with your reading of saying there is something special about the idea of having a bubble which wraps the passengers and a sort of shell that protects it. But this is something that you hear in every design college, in every presentation where you’re saying, „Oh, but the cabin is like a bubble that wraps the passenger.“ That’s the most obvious thing that every car does. And there’s very good examples of cars that have done it better, earlier and much more successfully in terms of execution. So think of the Citroen Activa, for example, from 40 years ago. Interestingly also, a black bubble roof, a very beautifully leanly styled red exterior with a black shield up front and a black shield in the back, four-wheel steering, butterfly doors. So the idea, it’s not a bad idea, it’s just that it’s a very banal and old idea that is not newsworthy in 2026. If I had seen that in 1967 from Ferrari, I would have been, oh my God, this is pretty bold. In 2026, this is arguing banalities and people seem to get away with it because they’re blinded maybe by the star power of the designers and the power of the brand.

These are the conceptual critiques I would have. Then if we talk about the interior, my reading is that the interior really lives from its materials. It has beautiful leathers and beautiful digital, physical switches and elaborate startup mechanisms. And all of this is delightful. From a UX perspective, it is delightful. From a materials perspective, it is delightful.

From a shape and form factor, it is once again deeply nostalgic and looking backwards. And it’s very generic at it. A little bit like with the exterior going back at least 40 years in car history. It references generic 50s and 60s steering wheels, every Nardi steering wheel looks exactly like it. The graphics look like every Italian or almost every European 70s and 80s digital dashboard, so nothing Ferrari about that – if anything that’s what made Ferraris cheap in the 1980s, just sort of cheap parts-bin quality that they had in common with the Fiats and everyone else. And even when you look at The seats, the seats look like generic sports seats from the 60s and 70s. And you’re like, OK, if that’s the future, if that is the design message that brings us into a new world, it utterly fails because it’s nostalgic. It’s looking backwards and it’s looking at generic things.

What’s worse for me in the interior is the form factor of the steering wheel and how it’s clustered. It’s actually referencing basically driving simulators, the stuff that you’ve seen in the 90s and 2000s. Everything is old. Everything is looking back. Nothing is new about it. And the interior is the best part of the car.

Wolfgang Philipp: What would looking forward look like for you?

Felix Kilbertus: Looking forward would mean to have more generous shapes. It’s, I think, the form factor of rounded rectangles, the form factors of something that you recognize because they’ve been around for 50, 60 years. That is not the future for me.

I think nowadays you have such incredible technology. I’ll give you one example. Think of what is possible nowadays with textiles: 3D weaving, jacquards, three-dimensional stitching, 3D printing on textiles. You have absolutely no limitations on what a seat could be in the future. So it could be tailor-made to you. It could be the softest thing and the most adaptable thing. It could breathe and it could be almost like a robotic hand that gently holds you, gives you ultimate comfort or perfect posture. No, they’ve decided to do a 1950s leather seat. Incredible. What a lost opportunity. That’s just the seat.

Wolfgang Philipp: What are, from your perspective, other drivers for this extremely wide and big dimensions of the car? And another question is; what I’ve experienced now a couple of times, that when you see a new model, the picture, it has a different appearance, as when you see the car in reality then.

I had a completely different impression of the car after seeing the videos than the first images. When you see the car in more depth. Is the verdict that the Luce is not a great design, is it too early, because nobody has actually seen it in real life?

Felix Kilbertus: I think it’s not too early to make a call on this. You’re right, there’s always a moment of truth when you see these cars in the flesh for the first time.

One of my favorite things is looking at vintage or original launch photography of cars. Because the photographer hasn’t seen the car yet. And it’s usually good photographers. They’re not bad car photographers. But there’s always a unique struggle. If you don’t know the object yet, you don’t yet necessarily know how to best photograph it. And yes, you can do standard photography, but sometimes something deeply new, unusual surfaces. Think of Bangle’s cars when they first came out at BMW. They were terribly photographed because no one knew how to photograph these surfaces yet. So you could say, yes, let’s be careful, let’s look at the Luce. However, we’ve seen so many images of it. AI has immediately created all the missing views. We’ve seen video launches. We’ve seen it next to the Pope. We’ve seen it next to the Italian prime minister and so on. It’s fair to say that it’s just a badly proportioned blob from an exterior point of view.

The reason why I say look at the dimensions: the biggest giveaway for me is the wheels and the tires. So these are 23 inch front wheels 24 inch wheel rear wheels and the cabin is around 155 high. Now the wheels look tiny, the whole car looks badly placed, and to give you a feeling those wheels are bigger than what Rolls-Royce has. So the Spectre is the same height as the Luce. It has the same wheel dimension, 23 inches. Actually, the Luce has bigger wheels. Think about it. But it doesn’t look like that. So it’s really the quality of the wheel design is so bad that the car looks small. That is one of the things that you want extreme care taken. That’s the plinth of the car. The sculpture can’t speak if the plinth is badly designed. It starts really from there. It’s the way it sits on its wheels.

Yes, there is an interesting idea in the glass house. Yes, when you do a Y0, like a center section of the car, it’s interesting to see that the windscreen goes all the way down to the front bumper in a seemingly aerodynamic device. But these ideas we’ve seen since the 1980s. We’ve seen it even on the Citroën Activa. We’ve seen it on the Fiat Capsula we’ve seen it on a number of 80s cars. So there’s nothing special about it. And you also have it in production you have it in production with Polestar – by the way electric cars that are highly attractive and well designed. So it’s not a problem of this being is it hard or easy to say that it’s good or bad design.

You can criticize it in terms of taste and you can criticize it in terms of technique. Think of music, when two musicians don’t like each other’s music style. They can still say „I don’t like country music, but wow, what a beautifully played show. Great technique.“ The problem with the Luce is that it’s technically badly put together: in sections, in proportions, in transitions, in graphics. That’s really unfortunate. That’s all there is to say.

Wolfgang Philipp: Why would a brand like Ferrari come up with a technically bad design solution? I mean, they have all the resources to make sure that the execution is immaculate, world class. So if it’s not world class, how can this happen or why is it happening?

Felix Kilbertus: From what I understand, and I might be wrong, there might be other information out there eventually. But from what I understand is that the decision was made really by the chairman, by John Elkann, to do a bit of a Silicon Valley style disruptive sort.

So they chose the design approach deliberately to create something different. So they know that they have a brilliant design team. They know that there’s suppliers out there, whether it’s Pininfarina or ItalDesign or many other independent design studios out there. And it was not a problem of money, clearly, but it was a clear decision. And that decision was taken probably many, many years ago, more than we probably would imagine. And that decision was either never challenged or was never successfully challenged, because clearly it was a conscious decision. That is something that I’m certain of.

Wolfgang Philipp: This decision is also a good trigger to once come back to our question, „Is our target group real or constructed?“ So what was John Elkann’s need to find a new target group?

This is my biggest question because to me, Ferrari is one of the very few brands that has found its gold vein over decades. And they just need to keep going, keep digging in their gold vein and be happy and see their share price go up. Most of the time when car companies fail or start to decline, we see that the driver is actually the stock market with this extreme short-term decisions. So you have three months to show that it’s going up. And this is not the case. So Ferrari has all green arrows going up. And then you say, no, you know what? Let’s find a new target group, whoever this target group is.

But Ferrari has no need to find a new target customer because they are sold out. Even in the long term, when there’s a need for Ferrari to go electric – okay, yes, it might be so – but then you still can electrify your gold vein you’ve already found.

The point where I disagree with you is that the target customer might not be necessarily different in the electric age, when you have the right product and you manage to create fascination even with an electric powertrain. Because to me it’s never the technology in the first place, the question to create an amazing brand experience. It’s just a tool. But the question is how you apply this technology and what you make out of it.

Felix Kilbertus: I think there’s no reason why the Luce looks the way it does. That’s something that we can also talk about, what could have been done differently.

In terms of the share price, yes, that is a good news story. The shares dropped by, what, 8%, 9%. They’re basically back to where they were. If you look at it over a year, the shares are still down 30% because they may be overvalued, because maybe they’re at the end of a growth cycle. So I wouldn’t necessarily look too much at the share price at this point.

It is a powerful brand. They had no need to do things so radically. There’s a tiny side in me, a romantic side in me that says, I do admire both decisions like this, where you say, we don’t need to make radical decisions. We want to take radical decisions. So I admire that. But there’s a difference between taking risks, calculated risks and unnecessary risks. And I think the Luce, the way it becomes a new thing, took a couple of unreasonably risky approaches. And I think that has to do with personal preferences. That’s the romantic side, once again, of the car industry. A powerful chairman can decide to ignore the best advice, the best information available.

To bring it back a little bit more into a design process, how do you build safety into your design process? There’s a number of ways that could have been used to add extra safety. One is by simply doing focus groups much earlier on, testing the sort of design. But even more effectively, it would have been to look at alternative ways of doing it, looking at other architectures. Can we do something lower? Can we do something longer? Can we do something more spacious? Can we do something more aerodynamic, more elegant? And it would have been very cheap in relationship to the actual development cost to hire outside opinions, but also to let LoveFrom, Sir Johnny Ives and Mark Newsom, be challenged by the Centro Stile by Flavio Manzoni’s team, who, from what we know, have had very little involvement in the process.

Wolfgang Philipp: You’ve mentioned Jaguar. We can tap a little bit into this at the end of our episode, because this is a completely different situation for the brand. So they have lost their gold vein and they are digging normal stones for years. And now they need to find their gold vein again. And so I understand they need to shift.

Probably here is the question a little bit more obvious. Is the target group real or constructed? Because there was a similar outcry with Jaguar and it’s the same result to me actually. But Jaguar has a lot more to lose from this. Ferrari has several model lines. They don’t have all their eggs in one basket. And now Jaguar has just this one very model, the 01. And it has to fly.

Felix Kilbertus: They’re almost exact opposites in a way. Ferrari is in a position of extreme success at the moment in every possible measure. Exclusivity, price, margin, imagination. It is a national institution, not only in Italy. It’s really like a myth and so many people emotionally engage with it. There’s an irrational component to it as well. There’s almost a feeling of betrayal when someone, like your family member, kicks you out by doing something unusual. It’s very personal, the reaction.

And Jaguar doesn’t have that sort of brand power. Jaguar was never, unfortunately for them, as mythologically charged as Ferrari. It is highly emotional – and when the Type 00 was presented, that was probably the second biggest shitstorm in terms of automotive history. I think the Ferrari is the biggest one so far. But why is it different? A, because Jaguar had no more sales. Jaguar decided that the sales are so bad that it would be more efficient to not sell anything for a year, close the factories, retool everything, start from a fresh chapter, taking the time to reposition the markets in a much higher price bracket. With respect to the Luce, it’s actually reasonably priced above 100,000 pounds, euros, dollars, whatever you want to use. And apparently there’s a three model strategy behind it that will come to market.

So Jaguar is all about survival and reinvention. So they bring it back in a very radical way. They bring it back to the founder spirit, copy nothing. It’s a hit or miss strategy, but it’s admirable. And they’re not that badly put because they do have the backing of a powerful investor behind them. And Land Rover obviously generates healthy profits and so on.

It is different from the Ferrari because they’re trying to do only one of the two things: they’re trying to find their original spirit and they’re trying to find the original customers in the 21st century – the cool people, the wealthy people, people who have swagger, like in the 40s with the XK120 and then maybe in the 60s with the E-Type. But Jaguar has lost its mojo many times, think of the 80s, think of the 90s. They had to invent themselves many times.

Ferrari is in a completely different position. Ferrari never left its mojo. Ferrari has always embraced change. There was a big shitstorm in the late 60s with the Ferrari Modulo. And again, another shitstorm with the Testarossa that was deemed ugly, square, brutal. And now people are in love with it. The six-cylinder Ferrari was so radically wrong that Enzo Ferrari decided to name it Dino as the junior Ferrari. So Ferrari has always been bold and is in a position of strength. So it’s all the more puzzling to compare the Luce and the Jaguar.

Wolfgang Philipp: I hope you’re right with the Jaguar, because from my perspective, they are trying to do three things: Upgrading their brand, taking the shift to electric and finding new target customers.

Felix Kilbertus: You’re right, when I look at what Jaguar has become, producers of station wagons and diesel cars. But for me, it’s back to the roots. So they’re not trying to find something unusual. They only focus on the new powertrain. So they’re reinventing themselves. While Ferrari is saying like, no, no, we’re not reinventing ourselves. We’re just trying to find new target customers.

Speaker: Now, looking back over these thoughts, what are the most important insights? What key points can we take away from today’s encounter?

Felix Kilbertus: I think it’s always important that there’s a plausible target group because a target group is always an assumption in the future. So you don’t quite know for sure whether the target customer will then do exactly as you predicted. And there’s always shorthands, as you know, but there’s also a certain technique to it. You can say that there is a generation that in five years from now will have had that experience, will have had that sort of background, will have had that sort of money. What’s terrible is if you do something that becomes too hard to believe, too much of a stretch. But nonwithstanding the aesthetic problems of the car, I think in Ferrari’s case, the target group is probably real.

Wolfgang Philipp: From my perspective, the moment brands search for a new target group, there’s a different problem. And to me, it’s the meaning of the brand, as always, because when you don’t know what you are about, you start to look around and hope for answers, hope to find some hints where to go to or who to target, or who your customer might be. And this is always bad.

What we see now with Ferrari, I mean, I don’t want to comment on the design or judge it, but now you have two different directions in the brand. So you have the ICE route and the electric route and you somehow have the same badge on it. But there are two different target customers. This is always bad for a brand to become schizophrenic, because from my perspective, it’s not a problem to exclude people with a brand.

We’ve touched on this in the last episode because brands are always exclusive. They are always for a certain kind of people. And if they don’t reach the Silicon Valley tech billionaire because he hates ICE cars and is electric only, that’s okay. Because you have your strong focus, you know who you are, you have your own attitude and mindset and convictions and this is it, love it or leave it.

This is how Ferrari became so successful in the first place because it didn’t try to become the preferred option for every possible customer who has money and probably even needs five seats. It’s the same with Jaguar, so it’s not a Ferrari problem, because the moment you try to look outside to find what your brand should be about, this is always starting to get very expensive for the brand, and painful. And one might argue these people will never, ever be able to buy the car and they are not your customers anyway, so why care? But in this case, you need to look very carefully who these people are. And the moment your own target group starts to show these signs of discomfort, it’s not a good sign.

Felix Kilbertus: Two things to say about that. So one, it is a testament to the power of the brand that the shitstorm had, the size and intensity that it had. Compared to the other highly problematic car design that was launched in the last few weeks, the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe, nobody cares. And that is, for me, a much more serious situation because it means that AMG as a brand became less relevant than it can afford to be, because nobody cares. It’s just like, oh, it’s a fake V8. It looks terrible – who cares? I think they are risking much, much more than Ferrari with the Luce.

So if I had to criticize these two cars from a design perspective, I would be particularly harsh with the Ferrari because I think there’s a craft element that lacks in there. But I would be probably more severe in my judgment with the AMG because they were done by professional car designers. So in the Luce, you can almost use it as an excuse saying like, „Well, these guys don’t know any better.“ They should know better. But a lot of the discussion was, „Oh, should product designers design cars?“ That’s not the problem. It’s just you need to get the right people from a craft’s perspective in, to make the intention of a product designer come true, which might be minimalism, which might be elegance, which might be aerodynamicism, which might be packaging things in an interesting way. But you need the craft to execute that.

So there is a bit of a double irony that we’ve seen so many controversial electric cars and car launches with problematic design, messaging, branding consequences. And I think it brings me back as a key takeaway that at the moment, car design is really at the end of a long cycle, but not yet at the beginning of a new cycle. So we’re seeing old recipes failing. We see – and I would include the Luce in old recipes failing, not in new recipes failing – for all the reasons we’ve said before, because it’s backwards looking and not forwards looking. So it brings us to the larger picture. How do we make sure that from a strategic point of view, brand strategy, design strategy, but also addressing future generations and their needs and desires and dreams, how can we make attractive mobility happen again? Whether it’s cars or other things.

Wolfgang Philipp: My answer to this is that the technology is just a tool. So I think there’s this overthinking about electric mobility. You see this in the AMG with this inauthenticity, the fake sounds, V8-imitation.

And also with the Ferrari, „We need to find a new target group.“ This is basically the same thinking from a bigger picture, but it’s a different expression. So they say, okay, we cannot do the same as we’ve done before, but we need to find a new target group to make this happen.

What I like about the Ferrari approach is that it’s authentic. As you said, they try to generate the sound from real car noises, and also it doesn’t have a grill with LEDs in it. That’s a big bonus nowadays. So it even uses the air intake to create downforce or at least to reduce drag. So there are very authentic elements that are sadly missed in other designs. But there again, there’s this shift in thinking to say we need to find a new target group. We cannot target our old target group because they will probably hate it anyway.

This to me is wrong because electric should be the new Turbo, because then it has a completely different role. Then it’s an upgrade to the existing mobility and it has a completely different meaning. And then you create this intrinsic desire of this technology and it’s not this repelling „Take it or you will get it anyway in 10 years.“

I really have a problem with this misconception of electric mobility because it also divides people. The technology itself, it has its advantages and it has its downsides as every technology, but it’s squeezed into this frame that’s so unattractive to these core target audiences. You’ve said it before, that Tesla reached a new target audience, but this is not the target audience buying a Ferrari right now. And if you want to reach these audiences – and I’m convinced they are not dying out, they will be there in 50 years from now, these audiences will exist, who like this kind of fascination – you have to give them something that ignites them and not just convinces them logically: „And now you even get three extra seats.“

Felix Kilbertus: It has to do with the freshness of the brand, the relevance of the brand. If you only do what you always have known to do, you will not evolve anymore. Think of Louis Vuitton. They started with strong innovation. They had a synthetic material out of which suitcases were made much better than leather and then they became stuck in this monogram plastic material.

So a very admirable quality and something that certainly helps design to evolve is to be brave and to embrace the slightly uncomfortable because you’re always on a bell curve, you always have the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority. If you let yourself be dominated by the early and the late majority only, like in no time you will go into the irrelevant, into the late majority, and into the laggards. You can’t be there.

And Ferrari is one of the brands that fought this battle even against its own founder. So Enzo Ferrari was the last one to have rear-engined F1 cars. Until the British cars started winning against him, he was convinced, „No, the engine has to be up front.“ He was the last person to admit that aerodynamics had anything to play with. He famously said, „Well, aerodynamics is for people who can’t build engines.“ So he was a very, very stubborn man, but he changed his mind as soon as he saw the facts, what needs to be done. So I think going for a different generation for younger people in different areas of the world, I think that’s completely legitimate.

I do like your Turbo story, by the way. I think it’s interesting that the turbo is an interesting technology, very dangerous stuff when it came out. Think of the Porsche Turbo that was famously called the Widow Maker. When Ferrari did its first turbo cars, the 288 GTO, it was a big scandal. People were like, oh, I want my naturally aspirated V12 or a 12 Boxer. So it’s always a struggle to do something new.

But I agree with you. Electrics, electric powertrains, hybrids, AI, robotics, all of these things are fantastic tools. And once again, we’re coming to the romantic side of automotive and mobility and humanity in the end of the day. It’s the fascination of doing something better, different, new, exciting that hasn’t been there before. And that’s why at heart, I agree with the idea. Let’s do things differently. Let’s be brave. Let’s do things that surprise and attract new people to the brand. But I would be the first one to say, well, that’s not it. It can be done so much better unless it’s a cynical plot to say, well, we need to make sure that our combustion engine cars look as good as they do today.

Wolfgang Philipp: I think brands don’t have to find new target groups, especially in times like these where technology changes anyway. They need to keep up addressing their own target group. And to me, finding new target groups is just an excuse for not being able to do that. This is lazy thinking and it’s not about being not innovative or backwards by focusing on the current target group, because they evolve also in the same speed, probably even faster.

Felix Kilbertus: That’s an interesting point, because that’s where I think the strategy that we mentioned before, you know, targeting younger people and the techies; A common fallacy is to think that people of a certain age are more conservative than people that are younger. Especially today, that’s not true, because there is a sort of a digital divide, where people who have a bit more experience, who have also pre-digital experience, actually know more about more things than people who are used to the Chat GPTs. And, you know, a few years ago, we would have criticized Wikipedia.

So there is something where you say, if these people are so young and so rich, maybe they have no taste or maybe they don’t have the education yet. And that’s why I think the Luce is particularly problematic, is because that would have been an amazing opportunity to educate people from a new generation, not necessarily a new target group, from a new generation, into what has this brand done over almost 100 years. Not to look backwards, but to go into the romantic madness of this brand and its founder. Half the car industry has been shaped by this mad genius, whether it’s Ford out of revenge, not being able to buy it, or Ferruccio Lamborghini being scorned by Enzo and showing him how things are done. So it is a unique brand, and I think it’s a lost opportunity to address, as you described, the necessary evolution of any brand.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yes, and there are many more opportunities to come for Ferrari. So I’m very optimistic for the brand. Sometimes you have to get a kind of setback to come back stronger.

And also, I’m still not so convinced that the car is really bad in real life. When you see it in flesh, and you see the dimensions, and it’s also hard to judge because some people are really tiny, and then when you see them on the picture… and then you say, „Wow, what’s happened to the car?“ And then you see a different picture and then it’s smaller again, the car. So for me, it’s hard to judge how big the car really is. And I don’t even know the size of the Pope.

Felix Kilbertus: Yeah, I disagree with you on this one. I think it’s safe to say that this is a terribly styled exterior and a highly doubtable interior with some brilliant ideas, in all fairness. But the overall result is poor. I’m fairly safe. But yes, there might be a surprise or two when you see it. There might be also simply the Balenciaga story. You see that car in a cool color in front of the right nightclub somewhere in southern Tokyo and you’re like, all right, it is cool. But, you know, imagine something that is not only cool because it’s strange, but cool because it’s just absolutely incredibly, not only modern, but beautifully and nicely thought through. There’s room for improvement.

Wolfgang Philipp: The car has already its reputation, which is never a bad thing to have one at all. It will not be forgotten as certain other new launches in the previous months. And it has its place in a lot of memories now.

Felix Kilbertus: It is for sure a historical launch. That is certain.

Wolfgang Philipp: Every kid knows what a Luce is.

Felix Kilbertus: Yes, it’s not a Mazda, as we’ve learned.

Wolfgang Philipp: Okay, thank you, Felix. Talk to you next time.

Felix Kilbertus: Wolfgang, amazing as always. Speak soon.