Precious few cars in history have caused as much of a stir as Ferrari's first EV. The Luce has been almost universally panned online, not for a design that is objectively bad, per se, but for a car that lacks the passion and beauty befitting a Ferrari.
It might be impossible to make an electric car meet that mantle, but there are methods with which to try—the most popular of which is fake engine sounds. After cleaning up the audio and removing Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton’s voices from the Luce launch video, we can finally hear what its artificial powertrain sounds like. And it's... perfectly whelming. Listen below.
While we don’t know much about the Luce's different drive modes or potential engine synthesis tricks, the sound we hear in Ferrari’s video is very much a generic, futuristic EV sound with maybe (and heavy emphasis on maybe) some V12 tones from its distinct-sounding F140 engine. It may only sound that way because of the sound’s proximity to the Luce, because it could also sound like almost any Hyundai product.
More technically, there doesn’t seem to be any synthesized gear shifts in the sound, nor does Ferrari claim there will be any. There could be other fake sounds that we don’t hear, which we won’t know about until the Luce reaches our hands. While it does have massive shift paddles, Ferrari says those are only for variable regenerative braking, not for anything fun.
Motor1's Take: Perhaps, if the Luce had a simulated V12 from the 812 Competizione, or maybe even the Ferrari F2004’s 18,000 rpm V10 engine, it would provide some solace for Ferrari making an electric car. Nonetheless, the Luce’s fake sound doesn’t inspire much hope in the shenanigans of that nature.
