Ferrari has replaced Enrico Galliera, its chief marketing and commercial officer of 16 years, with former BMW Italy boss Massimiliano Di Silvestre, effective July 1. The timing is hard to ignore: the move comes just weeks after the Luce, Ferrari's first fully electric car, received a reception so bruising that it wiped roughly 8% off the company's stock in a single day.
The Luce was unveiled in Rome on 25 May at a tightly controlled event for around 200 journalists. Designed by Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson's creative collective LoveFrom, the car represents a radical departure for Maranello: a four-door, five-seat grand tourer powered by four electric motors producing over 1,050 horsepower, with a 122 kWh battery delivering roughly 329 miles of range. The interior, which Ive's team designed with an emphasis on physical controls over touchscreens, was genuinely praised. The exterior design, however, was not.
Social media lit up with memes and the kind of "what would Enzo think" commentary that Ferrari has weathered before, but never at this scale. The problem, as Electrek's Jameson Dow pointed out, was not that the design is polarising, which many radical cars are at launch. It was that Ferrari had drip-fed every positive detail over months, the specs, the Ive-designed interior, the performance figures, leaving the exterior as the only genuinely new element on reveal day. That made the launch a referendum on the car's looks rather than its engineering.
Worse, Ferrari did not allow a single journalist to drive the Luce at the Rome event. The one thing that could have backed up the central claim, that this is a Ferrari first and an electric car second, was the very thing the company withheld. You do not need to be a branding expert to see the problem there.
Then came Bloomberg's report that Ferrari is using Luce orders as a loyalty test, with CEO Benedetto Vigna apparently signalling that clients who buy the EV will get priority access to more desirable, combustion-engined models down the line. It is a strategy that telegraphs lack of confidence in the product itself.
Di Silvestre's appointment brings deep luxury-auto credentials from his BMW tenure, and Ferrari has framed Galliera's departure as a personal decision. But the sequence, a divisive launch, a stock drop, a loyalty-test controversy, a marketing chief exit, tells its own story. The critical detail is that Vigna remains firmly in place. He is the architect of Ferrari's electrification strategy, and as long as he is running the show, the Luce is not going anywhere. Whether the next chapter is smoother depends entirely on whether Ferrari learns that when you build a car around driving emotion, you eventually have to let people drive it.
