The Big Picture Is a Ferrari minus the internal combustion snarl still a Ferrari?

Angus MacKenzie

The Big Picture

Can a Ferrari without a screaming engine truly be a Ferrari?

ppointed Ferrari CEO last year, Benedetto Vigna

Ais an interesting choice to lead Italy’s most iconic automotive company. For a start, he’s never worked in the car business.

A trim 53-year-old with a ready smile, Vigna is a physicist with decades of experience in the microchip industry. The closest he got to automaking during his 26-year career at Swiss company STMicroelectronics was to lead the development of a low-cost three-dimensional motion sensor intended for airbag systems. He later refined the design so it could serve within the wireless controllers of Nintendo Wii gaming consoles.

As with many Italians, though, the Prancing Horse holds a special place in Vigna’s heart. “Ferrari has always been with me, since I was I child,” he says, recalling the small model Ferrari he always carried in his pocket to race among the stones near his house in southern Italy. At 14 he jumped into a car with four of his friends and, without telling his parents, rode almost 500 miles north to Imola to watch the Formula 1 San Marino Grand Prix. “My true incentive for understanding physics was to find a way to improve our TV’s terrible reception on race days,” he jokes.

Vigna is now tasked with guiding Ferrari through an era of profound change for the automotive industry. Few of the certainties of the past can be relied on to construct a business road map for the future.

Fortunately, Maranello is in a good place right now. Cars like the 296 GTB, a plug-in hybrid with a V-6 internal combustion engine—a powertrain that would have caused howls of outrage from the purists a few years ago—reveal a coolly confident Ferrari at the top of its game, a company unafraid to embrace cutting-edge, even controversial, technologies to create the best-performing, best-handling, best-driving sports cars it knows how to build. Yet the 296 GTB is in many ways still a traditional Ferrari; Vigna will oversee the launch of Ferraris that are anything but traditional, cars that could be the most polarizing vehicles ever to wear the Prancing Horse badge.

It’s tempting to suggest the new Purosangue crossover, the first production four-door Ferrari in history, is one of them. But the Purosangue is, once you get past the door count and the ride height, also a relatively traditional Ferrari. Just a single screaming full-throttle run to the 715-hp V-12’s 8,250-rpm redline proves this.

Vigna’s real challenge will be to persuade the world electric-powered Ferraris are real Ferraris. He says he wants 40 percent of the firm’s model range to be electricpowered by 2030. However, he’s careful not to say he expects 40 percent of all the Ferraris sold by 2030 will be electric-powered. He knows Ferrari is an emotional marque, perhaps one of the most emotional consumer brands in the world, and much of that emotion is underpinned by the explosive vivacissimo of air and gasoline meeting spark ignition. Can an electric-powered Ferrari ever deliver such emotion? Vigna believes it can. For a start, electric Ferraris, he says, will not be silent supercars. “Each electric engine—I like to say electric engine, not motor—has its own signature,” he says, adding that the company is working on patented concepts to make those signatures an integrated and desirable element of the electric Ferrari experience.

Beyond that, Vigna says, Ferrari’s electric cars will boast motors whose design is based on learnings from the Ferrari F1 team’s long experience with bleeding-edge hybrid technology. And those motors will all be built in Maranello, as will the inverters, which will use siliconcarbide technology to allow high voltage and high power. The batteries will also be built in-house, handcrafted to be fully integrated within the vehicle structure, reducing weight. The cars will use the racing team’s most advanced aerodynamics concepts to reduce drag.

Vigna’s point is that Ferrari is no EV neophyte. “Our electric journey is not starting now,” he says. “It started in 2009 with Formula 1. The full electric Ferrari will be … a Ferrari.” Q

The 296 GTB (above) is a plug-in hybrid, but few would confuse it for anything but a Ferrari. CEO Benedetto Vigna hopes to achieve the same thing with full electrification.