Elettrica: Secrets of the Ferrari without an engine
The Elettrica will be a Ferrari without an engine, but engineers promise it will have a soul
[MARANELLO] For most carmakers, pivoting to electric cars is a matter of survival, but for Ferrari, it’s a gamble. What’s at stake is one of the car world’s most storied brands, and a business currently firing on all cylinders, with record sales and the best margins in the industry.
Ferrari chief executive Benedetto Vigna laid out the company’s vision for this electric future at its Capital Markets Day on Oct 9, a day after revealing the production-ready chassis and powertrain of the Elettrica, its first pure electric car, in a technical showcase.
Vigna signalled that Ferrari’s electrification strategy is not a retreat from combustion power but an expansion of choice, dictated by customers. By 2030, the company’s line-up will be 40 per cent internal combustion, 40 per cent hybrid and 20 per cent electric – a mix sustained by an ambitious product launch pace of four new cars a year.
Scheduled to debut in early 2026 and go on sale late that year, the Elettrica won’t replace screaming V12 engines, but sit alongside them as an addition to the range, opening what Ferrari called “a new segment in driving thrills” in a statement.
Creating the Elettrica, which has taken more than 10 years of work, meant “interpreting electric technology” according to its philosophy, Ferrari said. The four-door, four-seat grand tourer has a radically new architecture built around an aluminium chassis made with 75 per cent recycled material. Its battery is fully integrated into the floorpan, lowering the centre of gravity by 80 mm compared with an equivalent V8 model, which enhances stability.
Weighing roughly 2,300 kg (around 620 kg of which is for the battery pack alone), it will not be a featherweight sports car, but thanks in part to its 48-volt active suspension technology, engineers claim it will handle as if it were 450 kg lighter. Another move to make it dance: the Elettrica will have one motor for each wheel, which will give it the fine control to pivot sharply into bends and stabilise its way out of them.
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The motors will have a boost mode that allows them to push out more than 1,000 horsepower, sending the Elettrica from 0 to 100 kmh in 2.5 seconds and on to a top speed of 310 kmh.
Engineers enthused more about the torque delivery, however, saying that the rear axle alone is geared to have 8,000 Newton-metres at the wheels. The effect is a sensation of endless, elastic acceleration, not unlike being pulled by “a force that never fades”, they told The Business Times.
The battery will have a gross capacity of 122 kilowatt-hours, enough for more than 530 km of range. When cruising, the Elettrica can disconnect its front axle to run more efficiently. The 800-volt architecture allows ultra-fast charging at up to 350 kilowatts, which should be enough to add hundreds of kilometres in the time it takes for an espresso stop.
Ferrari took pains to say that every key component, from inverters to control software to the batteries and motors, was engineered in-house, making it clear that its electric cars won’t be a jumble of outsourced or worse, off-the-shelf parts.
But Ferrari knows the Elettrica will sell on emotion more than numbers. Ironically, it will use software and processing power to deliver it. A central control brain – that calibrates the car’s behaviour 200 times a second, working across pitch, roll and heave – will orchestrate the responses of the motors, steering and suspension dampers into what Ferrari’s engineers described as a single, fluid motion.
That integration, they said, will ultimately produce Elettrica’s soul. But will it sing like a Ferrari should?
Other carmakers sell the silence of electric motors as a plus, and some create a digital soundtrack to mimic the noise of engines. Ferrari will take the novel approach of taking what sound the Elettrica’s rear motors do make, and amplifying it so that the pitch rises and falls with accelerator input. Engineers called it a more “truthful” way to give drivers aural feedback.
For all that, Ferrari received feedback of its own on Capital Markets Day, when its share price fell as much as 16 per cent – a reaction many read as disappointment at Vigna scaling down the company’s 2030 electric-vehicle target from 40 to 20 per cent. For some investors, the worry isn’t that Ferrari is gambling the wrong way on electrification, but that it isn’t betting big enough.
Ferrari Elettrica
Motor Power More than 1,000 hp
Battery Type/Gross Capacity Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt /122 kWh
Charging Time/Type 12 hours (11 kW AC, estimated), 20 minutes 10 to 80 per cent (350 kW DC, estimated)
Range 530 km
0-100 kmh 2.5 seconds
Top Speed 310 kmh
Agent Ital Auto
Price To be announced
Available Late 2026
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