The Luce, Ferrari’s first electric car and one of its most polarizing models, isn’t just selling. It’s selling out.

The five-seater EV designed by Jony Ive, Apple’s longtime design chief, was mocked and widely panned when it debuted in May, sending Ferrari’s stock price lower. But all that criticism hasn’t dampened demand, according to CEO Benedetto Vigna.

The 2027 production run of the Luce, which starts at about $615,000, is “fully allocated,” Vigna said Tuesday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, meaning every car Ferrari plans to build next year already has a buyer. “If someone comes, he has to wait one year to get the cars,” Vigna added. The first deliveries of the Luce are expected to begin in the fourth quarter.

Just how many Luce cars that represents is unclear. Ferrari has never publicly disclosed how many Luce vehicles it plans to produce. The Financial Times reported earlier this year, citing unnamed sources, that Ferrari planned to sell just under 500 units this year. The company’s longer-term target is to sell 2,500 units by 2030, or about 600 a year, according to the Financial Times.

Speculation on who these buyers are — ahem, the founders of multibillion-dollar AI labs, perhaps? — will have to remain just that Luces are spotted in the wild. Vigna wouldn’t provide a breakdown of who these Luce customers are, only noting it was a “good mix in terms of client, it is a good mix also in terms of geography.” He later added that there is no specific pattern or demographic of Luce buyers.

While Luce deliveries have yet to begin, Ferrari’s existing lineup and growing demand for personalized options helped fuel its financial performance in the third quarter. Revenue from customizations, which executives said accounted for more than 21% of revenue from cars and spare parts, helped boost profits. The company said deliveries of the F80, its limited run hyper-car, and customization reflect its clients’ “ever-deepening desire” to make each Ferrari uniquely their own. As a result, the company raised its full-year guidance, saying it now expects adjusted earnings of at least €3 billion ($3.36 billion), up from €2.97 billion.

Ferrari, which enjoys some of the highest profit margins in the auto industry, reported third-quarter revenue of €1.9 billion, up 7% from a year earlier, and net income of €431 million, up 13%. Operating profit was €563 million, for an operating margin of 29.7%, meaning the company kept roughly 30 cents of every dollar of revenue as profit from its core business.

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Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.

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Source: TechCrunch · Kirsten Korosec

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