The latest info we had on Ferrari’s first-ever EV involved a reveal date that went beyond the year 2025. If this new report holds any truth, it looks like Ferrari sped up the process and a debut is slated to happen in 2025.
Automotive News Europe reports that Ferrari’s boss, John Elkann, told shareholders that Ferrari’s first all-electric vehicle is going to arrive in 2025.
As with any upcoming car from Ferrari, details are scarce. We know there’s intention from Maranello to develop and sell an EV from a patent that surfaced online in 2020.
According to the documents, it would have taken Ferrari more than five years to deliver the vehicle, which was designed with four electric motors – one for each wheel: “an electrically powered road vehicle comprising four drive wheels and four reversible electric machines each of which is mechanically entirely independent of the other electric machines and has a shaft directly connected to a corresponding drive wheel.”
The patents also suggest a super-accurate form of torque vectoring which is possible since each wheel is powered independently by its own electric motor. What is more, the battery pack would sit in a dedicated area flanked by the rear wheels.
This whole story comes to contradict what former Ferrari CEO Louis Camilleri said during the company’s third-quarter earnings release (November 2020): “ My own sense is that, you know, to sort of say 100-percent electric, that’s pushing things. I really don’t see Ferrari ever being at 100-percent EV and certainly not in my lifetime will reach even 50-percent.”
In a way, this makes sense. People are still paying a lot of money for gasoline power in the higher echelons of the industry (by the way, Ferrari’s net profits in the third quarter of 2020 were about $200 million), so from the business standpoint, changing the recipe makes little sense for the Prancing Horse.
If we look at the bigger picture, though, more and more carmakers of every ilk are starting to pour money and effort into coming up with all-electric cars, including Ferrari’s archrivals. This could have been a wake-up call for Maranello and accelerating the R&D of its first-ever EV might be its way of reacting.
In any case, Ferrari isn’t a stranger to electrification. The SF90 Stradale, its most powerful car ever, pairs a 4.0-liter V-8 with three electric motors for a grand total of 986 horsepower and a 0-60 mph sprint time of just 2.5 seconds. On top of that, a mysterious LaFerrari-bodied test mule was spotted recently testing on-track with what could have been a V-12 hybrid powertrain.
What we’re trying to say here is that there’s enough know-how at Ferrari for an all-electric car, and if Automotive News is right, then we should get ready for Maranello’s first-ever EV earlier than anticipated. With Lamborghini betting hard on its supercapacitor technology, this should make for one hell of a battle.