On Thursday, at a SpaceX rocket test site in Texas, Tesla’s new Roadster rose on jets of compressed air, flipped over a row of parked cars and came back down on its wheels. It was a showman’s reveal, built for the livestream. Nearly eight years earlier, an engineer in Maranello had drawn up a Ferrari that used the same sort of jets for a different purpose, to sharpen its driving dynamics by pressing the car into the road so it could corner, brake and accelerate harder.
Ferrari chief executive Benedetto Vigna confirmed the design in an interview with Hindustan Times in New Delhi, where the Italian supercar maker on Saturday unveiled the Luce, its first all-electric car, and brought its Universo Ferrari exhibition to India for the first time.
“Yes, there is a patent from Ferrari in 2019 from our colleague. I know it very well,” Vigna said, referring to Fabrizio Favaretto, the Ferrari engineer named as the inventor. “It was talking about a car that is using… (technology) like the one you have seen.”
To be sure, the patent describes a car that stays on the ground. Its jets give a car on its wheels extra thrust and direction, using the same technology as the thrusters on Tesla’s Roadster. Two carmakers reached for the same engineering but while aiming for very different effect. For Ferrari, whose cars hung on posters above the beds of generations of children, the jets were a way to hold the road a little harder at the very moment it tries to let go. For Tesla, the company that taught the world to take electric cars seriously, they were a way to leave the road altogether.
Favaretto’s design starts from that moment. Once tyres reach the edge of their grip, a car cannot accelerate, brake or corner any harder. His answer is a tank of air that could be stored at 700 to 900 bar, several hundred times the pressure inside a car tyre, feeding nozzles that fire the air out at supersonic speed. A jet near the car’s centre of gravity points upwards and pushes the car down for grip. Side jets push back against the forces that throw a car outwards in a corner, a front jet brakes and a rear jet accelerates. A jet under the floor speeds up the air flowing beneath the car, lowering the pressure there and pulling the car towards the road. A compressor driven by the wheels refills the tank under braking, recovering energy the brakes would otherwise lose as heat. The whole system, by the patent’s reckoning, adds about 40-45kg.
Ferrari first filed the idea in Italy on December 27, 2018, and in the US a year later, on December 23, 2019, as “High-Performance Car with Gas Pushers”. The US application was published in July 2020 and later granted as US patent 11,072,381. Around the same time, Elon Musk said he planned to put thrusters from SpaceX, his rocket company, on the Roadster. Automotive websites reported Ferrari’s patent in 2023, but Vigna’s comments are the first time the company has confirmed it on record.
On Thursday, Tesla took the same physics in its own direction. Its second-generation Roadster used compressed-air thrusters to hop over five Tesla vehicles, and production is due to begin in 2028.
Asked about Tesla’s demonstration, Vigna set out the test Ferrari applies to anything it builds. A new technology has to earn its place in a Ferrari by what it gives the person behind the wheel, he said, and whether it serves the thrill of driving or the show. “What is important is that we understand if the technology we bring forward is a technology that delivers unique emotion, driving thrill, or something that is more on the sensational side,” he said. “When you develop technology, you start from the human beings. If you start from the technology per se, you may forget [its intent].”
It is a very Ferrari answer, and Favaretto’s patent was written to that brief. Each of its jets exists to make the car grip, corner, brake or accelerate harder, and the patent keeps them for the moments that test a driver most: pulling away, a very sharp bend, an emergency stop. None of them is meant to lift the car off the ground.
Innovation vs production
Vigna’s test is easier to pass with a patent than with a car people are asked to love, and Ferrari’s own step into new technology has met a colder welcome of late. The five-seat Luce was styled by LoveFrom, the design studio of former Apple designer Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Four motors give it 1,035hp, and its 122kWh battery is rated for about 529km. Its reveal near Rome on May 25 drew a hostile response. Ferrari shares fell 8.4% in Milan the next day amid criticism of its design, and former chairman Luca di Montezemolo warned that the company risked “the destruction of a myth”.
Five months on, Vigna stood by the car. “True innovation is never democratic,” he said, repeating a line from a newspaper article he wrote three days before the launch. “If all the people see innovation, then you call it production.”
“I wouldn’t have changed anything,” he said. “I am not surprised at all.” The only thing he would have got wrong, he added, was the number of social-media impressions. “If you want to stay a leader, you have to push the limit forward. Otherwise, you become a follower.”
He believes the car wins people over in the metal. People who see the Luce in person react differently from those who have seen it only online, he said. “The 2D pictures or video do not do it justice.” It is an old article of faith at Maranello that a Ferrari has to be met in person to be understood, and Vigna is asking the Luce to be judged the same way.
Vigna said orders were coming from many countries and were “particularly strong” in China, where buyers are more used to electric cars. All 88 cars in the first Chinese allocation sold out on launch day in June.
Indian buyers can now judge for themselves. The Luce is on show at Universo Ferrari at Yashobhoomi, the India International Convention and Expo Centre, from October 17 to November 1, alongside the F80 hypercar, which also makes its India debut. Ferrari has not announced Indian pricing or a sale date for the Luce.
Vigna said the clients he had met in India were pleased about the free trade agreement with the European Union. “This FTA is something that I see as very good news for us,” he said. India also features in Ferrari’s engineering. “We already have many Indian colleagues that are giving a strong contribution to what we do,” Vigna said. He is meeting students from IIT and other universities this week, and praised their “energy” and “optimism”.
He described the Luce as an addition to Ferrari’s range. “We are adding an electric car to our sports car portfolio. We are not switching to electric,” he said. Asked why rival supercar makers are slowing their electric-vehicle plans, he declined to criticise them. “Technology can move fast. Human beings move slower,” he said. “Each client will select the preferred way.”
On India, Vigna leaned on the Hindi phrase “Hoga Kaise Nahin? (Why won’t it happen)” to define Ferrari’s approach the country and in Asia, attributing it to energy and determination he encountered here.
One robot and a nutshell
Vigna does not believe self-driving cars will kill the joy of driving. Ferrari makes about 14,000 cars a year in a world of 8 billion people. “If you want to have fun, if you want to live emotion, you have to drive by yourself,” he said. “We will always have people that want to drive themselves. What is important for us is that we are relevant also for them.”
At Maranello, he said, every car on the line is different. “You don’t see robots. There’s only one robot,” he said. It places the windscreen on the frame. “All the rest are human people with their skill.”
He likens a company to a nut. The shell is the strength of the brand, the kernel holds the values to protect, and the people are the interface between them. “If you don’t do anything, it goes down,” he said. “We are all guardians of our brand.”
Vigna, who came to Ferrari from the semiconductor industry and grew up in a small Italian town, had one piece of advice for an engineer from small-town India. He has never met a person so ignorant that he could not learn from them, he said. “Keep learning everywhere, from everyone, always.”