Never before has a new sports car prompted such an international response — even the fallout from Jaguar’s disastrous rebrand in 2025 was largely domestic. People all over the world hated the Luce’s appearance, which was uncharitably compared with that of a much cheaper Japanese EV, and the ill-advised launch event, which for some reason involved the Pope. Interestingly, the public questioned who and what the Luce was for.

Interesting, because a majority of participants in this online pile-on can be assumed to be outside Ferrari’s target audience; with an expected price of around £500,000, the Luce is even more expensive than the manufacturer’s core V12 models, which the haters also can’t afford. But all of these people still feel as though they have some relationship with Ferrari and its products, and the disappointment and widespread confusion that met the Luce immediately upon its launch was still bad news for a brand supported almost entirely by this consensus on desirability, which in turn is based largely on good looks. The Luce will be commercially successful, but its reviled appearance has broken a link in that chain. 

It’s an upending of an industrial phenomenon that predates living memory. Italy’s century-long advantage in car design is systemic rather than purely stylistic; fueled by the historic trading wealth of its northern cities, the country’s bicycle and weapons factories spawned over a hundred known car-building workshops (and probably hundreds more fleeting startups that were never recorded) at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when the internal combustion engine gained mainstream traction. These small outfits were artisan producers, manned by skilled craftsmen drawing on knowledge from established local industries, which would build a rolling chassis, including drivetrain and engine, before taking it to a nearby carrozzerie, or coachbuilder, for bodywork to be added. 

Some of these bodywork specialists emerged from the nascent car industry, but many more were long-established suppliers of traditional broughams and state coaches to the European aristocracy, including the noble houses of pre-unification Italy. Both horse-drawn carriages and early motor cars were effectively the preserve of landed families and extremely successful businessmen, all of whom invested — both directly and through high-value commissions — in what could be described as the burgeoning supercar industry. This process created a geographical concentration of small industrial suppliers, specialized labor pooling, and finance, as well as an ecosystem that rewarded forward-thinking design. 

That might sound like a whole lot of the automotive cliché that is “heritage and pedigree”, which it sort of is. But over that 100-odd years, Italian car designers were becoming the best in the world at doing a specific thing — communicating the theatre of internal combustion in products optimized for desirability. Taut bodywork shrink-wrapped over hard points of a car’s physiology, with bulbous affordances for carburetors and sharp vents clawed into steel; an elongated and exaggerated nose to illustrate a longitudinally-mounted V12, or a pair of muscular haunches sculpted around a twin-turbocharged V8 at the rear. Italian car designers understood what people wanted, and want it they did.

The concurrent evolution of Futurism (inspired to some extent by Marinetti’s 1908 car crash) thrust the values and attributes of this violent new industry into the cultural mainstream, in Italy and around Europe. Artists imagined a world built in the image of this grand new technology, forged in the furnaces of industrialized northern Italy, a snub to antiquity and a direct rejection of the region’s horse-drawn Renaissance past. The seminal “modern” car and the first to enter MoMA’s collection, the Cisitalia 202 GT, was designed by Carrozzerie Pinin Farina (later Pininfarina) and became the blueprint for postwar “grand tourers”, conveying its capabilities and purpose with its long, low bonnet, set-back cabin and integrated coachwork hewn from a single sheet of aluminum. 

By then, Mussolini’s deliberate investments in car manufacturing, car infrastructure and car racing — enshrined in extensive car propaganda — formed a substantial part of Italy’s self-image. One of the era’s engineering and motorsport heroes, a young Enzo Ferrari, had risen to mainstream fame running Alfa Romeo’s racing team, which was named Scuderia (stable) Ferrari, and which borrowed a distinctive prancing horse motif from the plane of noted WW1 fighter ace Francesco Baracca, who had in turn cannibalized his family coat-of-arms. The intersection of mechanized warfare, motorsport, and the rapid popularization of driving propagated Italy’s obsession with the automobile and the meteoric ascent of its car industry. 

Forty years later, the F40 — a coked-up, wedge-shaped, 200mph hypercar with gaping air intake ducts and an exhaust that would occasionally spit flames during downshifts — became another fossil-fueled masterpiece, communicating to bystanders that it was built to noisily break the law. Designed by Pininfarina, it appealed to a new, brash species of capitalist, but used identical raw materials; internal combustion is an inherently violent and complex process, and, a lifetime after the emergence of Futurism, Italian car design could still make its furious business legible to the passer-by. 

The Emilia-Romagna region went on to birth Ferrari, Lamborghini, Pagani, Ducati and Maserati, and following Italy’s post-war miracolo economico, the original artisan coachbuilders evolved into full-service design consultancies. Global manufacturers would outsource the aesthetics of new models to these organizations. Even humdrum household cars, like the original Volkswagen Golf and Ford Fiesta, were designed in Northern Italy by descendants of the region’s metalworking tradition. It’s hard to know what a 20th-century carrozzerie would make of 21st-century EV architecture, if an example could be rolled back in time, down a cobbled Turin street and through the doors of an oily workshop. It’s not clear what any of the industry’s great designers would choose to draw the casual observer’s attention to, in the absence of any clear mechanical drama or tense, contorted metalwork. The motor or motors of an electric car can go pretty much anywhere, and in the case of the Luce are somewhere unremarkable, behind the wheels and out of mind. The large battery is a graceless plinth on which to plonk a car-shaped effigy, and while the powertrain does need cooling, to an extent, this does not take place in a fun way; an electric car won’t gulp gallons of oxygen through aluminum nostrils like a petrol one does, nor exhale scorching air from its gills. The sports car, its societal meaning, and our expectations and understanding of its form, were for a hundred years defined by the needs of internal combustion. Without that rationale, Ferrari was bound to lose its edge.

That isn’t to say that an electric vehicle gives its designers a creative blank canvas. Regulations (primarily pertaining to safety but to a lesser extent efficiency) meet with practical considerations and manufacturing limitations to inform a car’s shape more coercively today than ever before. Mandated minimum radii (that is, pedestrian-protecting limitations on pointiness) make cars’ bodywork seem less chiseled than those of the past, hoods must be a certain height, and pedestrian impact must be mitigated. Flourishes like pop-up headlights and angular front edges have been banned, and the tiny cabins that gave older Italian GT cars their delicate proportions are now impossible to mass-produce legally due to the carefully regulated geometry that defines a new car’s interior. Lights have to be in certain places, pillars must be a particular thickness to conceal rigid roll protection structures, all compromising a car’s appearance. Globally, road fatalities are falling, a phenomenon due partly to these individually minuscule, iterative improvements to industrial design, but the result is homogeneity and aesthetic compromise. It is, quite literally, why we can’t have nice things.

Ferrari revisited the coachbuilding tradition by commissioning a Californian agency to create its Luce, a first for the company; all other production Ferraris have been designed in-house or by one of the Italian design firms. Founded by Sir Jony Ive (known for his work on the iPhone) and joined by Marc Newson (who has tried his hand at everything from shotguns, to airline seats, to public conveniences), San Francisco-based LoveFrom represents the 21st-century tech design tradition that emerged indirectly from Silicon Valley. Ferrari chose to outsource both the inside and outside of the Luce to them, with the brief to design a practical five-seater: clearly a mobility tool rather than the exotica that Ferrari has a century of confidence in creating. It’s a decision that consciously subverted the relationship between Ferrari, internal combustion, and Italian design, instead applying the Ferrari badge and some of its cachet to an electronic device, designed elsewhere, for an as-yet undefined generation of customers. 

It is easy, when asked what beauty is, to point at something unappealing and say, “not that”. To an extent, that’s what’s happening with the Luce — it’s difficult to articulate what it is about the photographs that disappoints people, and hard for the layman to comprehend why an iPhone-inspired Ferrari feels so aesthetically jarring. There isn’t much for anyone to read, just a smooth, sealed box containing electronics, that neatly conveys its purpose as a comfortable and reasonably fast vehicle for several people and their luggage, like a Nissan or Ford might. Journalists physically present at the Luce’s Rome launch event (all, on some level, conscious of the need to be invited back) insist that the Luce is better in real life, which is probably true. But like a trance DJ releasing a breathy acoustic album, Ferrari and LoveFrom’s technical performance play second fiddle to the expectations of the crowd. 

It would almost certainly be an easier sell if the Luce did something interesting. Its specifications are relatively impressive, with 1,035bhp produced by several motors, a 0-62mph time of 2.5 seconds, and a top speed of 193mph — all moderately unusual for a five-seater. But Chinese manufacturers have built tons of cars with four-figure horsepower, and a sub-three-second sprint time is no longer that cool. EVs deploy torque immediately, with none of the dithering or thermodynamic flamboyance inherent to internal combustion, but that means that any mainstream manufacturer using an electric powertrain now has access to similar technology. The cars you can buy second-hand from ring-road dealerships are almost as quick as the Luce, which robs Ferrari of its mechanical swagger, and in turn changes the foundations of its design language. Carrozzeria LoveFrom didn’t have enough raw material to work with when presented with the Luce, given that a Chinese-made SUV can achieve the same kinetic feats. Unlike historic performance cars, separated from the mundane by superlative stats, the Luce doesn’t really have anything to say.

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As cars become appliances with largely indistinguishable raisons d’être, historic brands seem to be searching their archives for a time when they were truly successful; often, this turns out to be the second half of the 20th century, where cars were aspirational household acquisitions and domestic car manufacturing was a source of national industrial pride. But aesthetics alone won’t sell a car, as Honda found out with its daftly-named “e”, which was a cute, chunky EV based loosely on the (‘iconic’) Mk1 Civic, but which cost too much and which had too small a battery. Consumers aren’t swayed by heritage any more, and in the electric era, manufacturing giants with identities rooted in internal combustion are scrabbling to retain their relevance. 

It is therefore difficult to say what Ferrari could have done differently. Regulations prevent it from returning in any meaningful way to its design tradition without resorting to naffness or pastiche, and the absence of a petrol engine neuters its ability to communicate the mechanical drama that defined its notoriety for decades. So it’s left with the Luce, a Ferrari-themed mobility solution, designed overseas, seemingly reviled by the sorts of people who will never own one, but probably popular enough with the super-rich, who might. The first 88 Luce allocations made available in China were purchased immediately. In the short term, Ferrari NV will be fine, and will sell every Luce that it builds, but the absence of raw head-turning allure brings a new directionlessness to the wider Ferrari mythos and historically hegemonic European industrial tradition that affects all of us, whether we’re driving these storied machines or merely gawping at them as we walk through wealthy neighborhoods. If the latest half-million-quid Ferrari isn’t cool, even to hoi polloi, then the age of the sports car — and by extension, a consensus of desirability that lasted a century — is waning, just as horses faded from our streets a century ago.

It has been a terrible few months for most of the world’s once-leading automobile companies. In September, Volkswagen gave notice of plans to shut at least three of its 10 German factories and cut wages by 10%, breaching a 1994 agreement to protect jobs in its home country until at least 2029, prompting rolling two- and four-hour strikes. As production ground to a halt again at Mirafiori in November, Stellantis made public that the Vauxhall plant at Luton would close in April 2025, canceling the company’s prior plan to produce Vivaro electric vans there. In the same month, Ford indicated it would cut 3,800 jobs in Europe by 2027, while Nissan announced 9,000 job losses and a 20% cut in worldwide production. A senior official at Nissan is reported to have said that the Japanese company has “12 or 14 months to survive.”

Beyond Germany, the crisis in the European automobile sector has been long in the making. Employment at Vauxhall Luton peaked in the Sixties, and the plant ceased producing cars in 2002, as did Ford Dagenham. Fiat’s five-storey Lingotto factory, which began mass auto production in Italy in 1923, closed in 1982. Today, the building serves as a leisure complex, hosting the largest roof garden in Europe. In 2011, Fiat threatened to close down the Mirafiori plant too unless workers voted for a restructuring plan. When, three years later, Fiat merged with Chrysler, it acquired a company that had been propped up with US federal government money since the 2008 crash. The subsequent union of Fiat Chrysler Automotive with Peugeot in 2021 to form Stellantis saw more than 10,000 job losses in Italy.

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But the crisis also constitutes a more short-term failure around electric vehicles (EVs). It was only four years ago that Fiat Chrysler Automotive made a €700 million investment in producing an electric Fiat 500 at Mirafiori. Nissan’s Leaf was the best-selling EV of the 2010s, but since 2020 sales globally have slumped. Demand for Volkswagen’s ID 5 in the European EV market crashed by 28% in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023.

When, in 2019-20, European governments legislated for Net Zero 2050, they envisaged a rather different future. Of the 101.7 million barrels of oil the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that the world consumed per day in 2023, more than 60 million was used for road transportation. Consequently, any serious move away from fossil fuels always required the automobile industry to be making and selling EVs at scale. It is scarcely surprising that Norway is the only European country that has made sustained progress in de-carbonizing road transport because its hydrocarbon wealth provides the fiscal leeway to make EVs affordable for a reasonable proportion of citizens. In Sweden, where EV penetration was also comparatively high, growth slowed notably in 2024 after it had ended the purchase-incentives regime in late 2022.

By itself, the sluggish demand in much of Europe for EVs would constitute a big problem for an automobile sector required to stop selling ICE cars no later than 2035, and 2030 in the UK. But China’s astonishing rise over the past three years as an EV manufacturer means that even the slow electrification of road transportation in Europe is accelerating European de-industrialization, rather than serving, as so many European politicians hoped, as an agent of re-industrialization. China has by far the largest domestic EV market in the world. On the IEA’s figures, of the 25% increase in global EV sales in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023, nearly 80% came from China. By contrast, sales in Germany during the same period fell. Chinese producers are now ascendant in their own country, with the Shenzhen-headquartered company BYD alone taking 30% of the market. Meanwhile, Chinese exports have grown astonishingly rapidly, rising 1,600% from 2019 to mid-2024.

China’s productive success cannot be explained simply by the labor cost advantages of late industrial development. Tesla aside, Chinese cars are technologically superior because the Chinese government systematically worked for them to be. As an industrial strategy for high-tech manufacturing, Made in China 2025 and the Five-Year Plan for 2021-25 have been highly successful. The Chinese state financially supports not just domestic EV firms but all parts of the supply chain from metal mining and processing to battery production. In comparison, European political efforts were financially paltry and much more fragmented, leaving its manufacturers dependent on Chinese-dominated supply chains. Escaping this dependency is extremely difficult, not least since China’s 2020 Dual Circulation strategy was in part a project to entrench permanently Chinese firms into the high-value parts of supply chains and force foreign reliance on them. These companies also benefit from the Chinese state prioritizing energy security and price over any political preference for one energy source over another substitutable for it. With coal still providing around 60% of China’s electricity and constituting more than 50% of the country’s overall energy consumption, China’s industrial energy costs are significantly lower than those in Europe, most of which is much more dependent on natural gas.

More than a coherent economic strategy to advance the existing European car industry, the tariffs on Chinese manufacturers provisionally imposed by the European Commission in July 2024, and made permanent in October, are a desperate political response to the crisis. When, in May 2024, the Biden Administration placed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs entering the American market, Chinese manufacturers had barely any EV market share and no Chinese EV manufacturer has an operational plant for exports in either Mexico or Canada to access the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The EU, by contrast, is already China’s largest export market, while BYD will begin producing EVs in Hungary in the second half of 2025 and Turkey — equivalent to the EU’s Single Market for export purposes via the country’s long-standing customs union with the EU — by the end of 2026.

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For the German car industry and its present government, then, European protectionism is a strategic defeat, risking retaliatory action in the world’s largest car market in which until very recently German companies thrived. Even, as the China EV shock intensified, Volkswagen made more than half of its profits in 2023 in China. Quite simply, if Volkswagen cannot even try to compete in the Chinese market, it cannot remain a global auto player. In this sense, the European car crisis is a symptom of the much bigger story of historical European relative decline driven by the rise in Asian living standards under late industrialization.

Ironically, the UK government has thus far adopted the free-trade-leaning approach the Scholz government would have done if Germany were not in the EU without the UK having domestically-owned manufacturers who compete in the Chinese market. But this openness to more Chinese exports is a nightmare for British-based car firms wishing to sell in the domestic market, especially when they already cannot meet the EV sales required under the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate that subjects all companies selling in the UK to probably the most demanding regulatory framework anywhere in the world for ending ICE sales. The week before Stellantis announced the closure of Vauxhall Luton, representatives from the major car manufacturers met with then transport secretary Louise Haigh and business secretary Jonathan Reynolds pleading for more latitude. Finding none on offer, Nissan blasted the Government’s inertia. As the job losses at Luton materialized, Reynolds retreated, promising an urgent consultation on the toughening of the targets due to take effect in January. Since in 2025 the cheapest Chinese EVs yet – one from Leapmotor in which Stellantis has a 20% stake and the other BYD — will arrive in the UK market, it is hard to see how Keir Starmer’s government can possibly retain both the ZEV and openness to China without wrecking what remains of the British car industry. If one single dread consumes the Labour Cabinet, it must be the closure of Nissan’s Sunderland plant even as it was little more than a year ago that Nissan announced it would build three EV models at the north-east site, supported by £2 billion of support for investment from Rishi Sunak’s government.

Over in Italy, Giorgia Meloni never suffered from the illusion that Net Zero in general and EVs in particular would open a path to re-industrialization for European economies. Immediately after taking office, Meloni stridently opposed the EU’s proposed ban on new ICE sales from 2035. Having found too few allies to stop the EU Council adopting the regulation in March 2023, she has continued to denounce the policy as “self-destructive” and promised Italian voters she will make Brussels “correct these choices”. With the likely arrival of the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz in the Chancellery after the German general election on 23 February, she will find a powerful ally. Meloni has also been an arch pragmatist about the Chinese threat. Although she supported the Commission’s tariffs, she travelled to Beijing in July 2024 to reset relations after taking Italy out of the Belt and Road seven months earlier. At the top of her agenda is procuring Chinese investment in the Italian car industry, with negotiations in progress with the state-owned Chinese manufacturer Dongfeng Motor for a plant in Turin.

The production and consumption of cars have long marked decisive junctures in Western political history. When in 1908, Henry Ford made mass ownership of cars affordable with the Model T, he imagined he was saving American democracy from the perils of a bitter class divide around the automobile. When, in March 1943, workers at the Mirafiori plant in Turin walked out on strike, they began a labor revolt across the north of Italy that domestically undid Mussolini’s regime four months before the Allied landings in Sicily. Symbolically, cars represented historical progress conceived as individual and democratic freedom. For much of the 20th century, the commercial competition between car companies represented an epoch of competing Western visions of modernity. Inspired by Ford but not wishing to be American, Fiat offered the Lingotto factory on its opening in 1923 as the height of Italian avant-garde industrial modernism. Because the perception of national economic success required a large and competitive auto industry, car workers knew they could inflict such political pain that they had to be feared.

But this psycho-material history began in a geopolitical world where China was stuck in its century of humiliation. China’s emergence as a manufacturing superpower leaves nothing of that old world untouched. Without its rapid economic development over the past 30 years, driving carbon emissions and accelerating oil demand after conventional oil production stagnated from 2005, the energy transition would have seemed less of an imperative.

By committing to end the energy-basis for western Europe’s early historical experience of industrial modernity without a viable strategy for realizing a different future, European governments only accelerated the long forces of de-industrialization. Now, China has claimed the most potent symbol of the energy transition for its own project of modernity. As the meaning of this change begins to be comprehended, democratic politics in Europe will necessarily enter a new era of tumult.

And it’s getting worse, apparently. The “death risk from London’s toxic air” – steady on, now – “sees ‘utterly horrifying’ rise for second year running”, shrieked the Evening Standard a week or two ago. According to the paper, the “rate of fatalities linked to breathing in killer particles went up from 6.4 per cent to 6.5 per cent in 2017”, having gone up from 5.6% to 6.4% in the previous year.

Which sounded very strange to me. Because, firstly, that figure seemed very high. If one person in every 15 died from air pollution, I think we’d know about it. Second, I thought that the air was, in general, getting cleaner.

Luckily for me, a new paper is out in the journal Environmental Research Letters which helps make sense of it all. I popped along to a briefing on it on this week.

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The paper looked at the health impacts of air pollution with a snapshot every 10 years, starting in 1970 and ending in 2010. It found that for the main pollutants – sulphur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) – things are a lot better.

Emissions have consistently dropped for SO₂ and PM2.5, while emissions of NO₂ rose slightly until 1990 and have dropped to well below 1970 levels since. Only about 55% of UK air pollution is directly linked to UK emissions (the rest is mainly from nearby countries), but still, the same pattern is visible. This pattern is not true for ozone, which got worse until 2000 and has declined a bit since, but that’s a smaller contributor.

And it has had an effect on public health. Using the same metric that the Evening Standard’s story used, the “percentage of fatalities linked to” PM2.5 in 1970 was about 12; in 2010 it was more like five. Similar drops are seen in deaths linked to NO₂ and SO₂.

The paper links this, convincingly in my mind, to air pollution control policies, in the UK, at European level, and internationally, such as the 1997 National Air Quality Strategy and the European vehicle manufacturing standards that were issued in the 1990s. Stephan Reis, one of the authors, pointed out that, in the 1970s, German manufacturers used to build cleaner cars to export to California, where the regulations were stricter, and sell more polluting ones in the domestic market.

Still, though, 5% of all deaths caused by particulate pollution alone sounds pretty bad, right? And that’s only one contributor, albeit the biggest. When you add in NO₂ (about 3%) and ozone (about 2%) it gets even worse – 10% of all deaths caused by air pollution!

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Except, of course, you can’t add them up like that. That’s not how it works. What they’re reporting is the ‘attributable fraction of mortality’, or AF. The AF is a statistical measure that describes “the proportional reduction in population disease or mortality that would occur if exposure to a risk factor were reduced to an alternative ideal exposure scenario”.

Insofar as I understand, it’s essentially relative risk, but in reverse – it’s saying, if you took this factor away, cleaned the air perfectly, how much would the annual mortality rate go down by? Which is an interesting question, but it’s not the same as “this causes 5% of all deaths”.

The risks overlap. So, if you added all the possible contributing factors of death together (smoking, ageing, obesity, diabetes, stress, car crashes, murder, meteorite strikes, Godzilla, whatever) it might add up to many thousands. It’s a very widely used and accepted metric, but I really don’t like it, because I think that when you give percentages, they should add up to 100. Otherwise people will hear “air pollution kills 6% of people”, which I’d say it definitely doesn’t. It contributes to 6% of deaths, but that’s not the same thing.

According to Sotiris Vardoulakis, one of the authors of the Environmental Research Letters paper, the effect of air pollution is roughly equivalent to, on average, a six-month reduction in the national average lifespan. Last year, a professor of respiratory medicine told BBC More or Less that in London, that figure is about nine months. Which is quite a big deal! And, of course, it won’t be evenly spread: some will see smaller effects, while some, especially those with preexisting lung conditions, are likely to suffer much worse.

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But, for context, the AF caused by smoking in 2005 was 19% (27% among men). That’s not among the 25% of Britons who were smokers – that’s for the whole population. Obesity and alcohol are both significantly larger contributors as well. Vardoulakis pointed out that air pollution is the largest environmental factor, and it’s certainly not negligible, but “London’s toxic air” is getting a bit carried away. I’m concerned that over-fretting about it will stop people from doing things which definitely are good for you, like cycling, because they’re worried about particulates or nitrogen dioxide.

And there’s another point. This is a good news story! Legislation to reduce air pollution appears to have worked. People have had to bear some part of the burden of that regulation, either through increased costs or through bans on products, but it appears that we are all significantly healthier because of it. If we then all kick off and complain that our air is toxic and we’re all dying of the black lung – which we’re not; this is not the Great Smog of 1952 – then people might, understandably, feel that we’ve been wasting a lot of time and effort regulating all this stuff.

Air pollution is bad. That’s fine, we can all agree about that. And we all want a future world of electric cars powered by offshore wind, and London air that smells like primrose and freshly cut grass rather than piss and diesel. And maybe we’ll get it one day. But in the meantime, let’s have a little perspective: things are getting better, we’re all living longer, and it’s not going to kill you if you go outside and go for a run.