DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJune 24, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

Ferrari's marketing chief is gone after its EV design backlash.

On 23 June 2026, Ferrari announced that Enrico Galliera — its chief marketing and commercial officer for the past several years, and a Ferrari man for more than sixteen — would step down, with former BMW Italy boss Massimiliano Di Silvestre taking the role from 1 July. Ferrari framed it as a personal decision, and Reuters reported that company and executive had in fact agreed to part ways at the start of the year, with Galliera staying on through the launch. But the timing is impossible to read neutrally: the change lands weeks after the most scrutinised product reveal in the company's modern history, a launch that wiped roughly eight percent off Ferrari's market value in a single trading day. The car was the Luce, Ferrari's first full electric vehicle. The thing the market reacted to was not the battery, the range, or the price. It was the shape.

A design decision, priced by the market in a day

The Luce was developed with LoveFrom, the studio founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, and it broke from the Ferrari aesthetic on purpose: a minimalist, four-door, five-seat silhouette that the press and the public greeted with memes comparing it to a computer mouse and an unreleased Apple car. The interior — including a swivelling, iPad-like central display — had already been shown months earlier. By reveal day the only genuinely new information was the exterior, and the exterior is what the conversation seized on. Former chairman Luca di Montezemolo, who ran the company for decades, called it a disgrace to Ferrari's history and said he hoped they would "take off the prancing horse from that car."

Strip away the celebrity and the schadenfreude and what remains is a clean, almost clinical case study: a styling decision, made in a design studio, that the stock market repriced by about eight percent within hours of being seen, and that — at minimum — coincided with a change at the top of the commercial organisation. The surface was the story. The surface was also the liability.

The most expensive object in the building is a judgement call

Here is the uncomfortable truth the Luce makes legible. The single highest-stakes decision in a car programme is not the powertrain, the platform, or the price. Those can be benchmarked, simulated, and argued on spreadsheets. The exterior form cannot. Whether a shape reads as brave or as embarrassing is a human, emotional, brand-perception verdict — and it is structurally unprovable before the public sees it. You cannot A/B test a Ferrari silhouette against a billion people in a boardroom. So the most consequential, least reversible, most valuable decision in the entire programme is routinely signed off on the thinnest evidence of any decision in the building: a few renders, a clay model under studio light, and the conviction of the people in the room.

That is exactly the gap. By the time the Luce was on a stand, every other variable had been de-risked to death. The one variable that actually moved the share price had been de-risked the least.

What a parallel design team would have changed

This is the precise problem Design Intelligence exists to address. Not to tell Ferrari what its car should look like — taste is the client's, and should stay there — but to put the contested call in front of the people who own it, as photoreal evidence, in every state that matters, months before the reveal commits the company to it. The polarising silhouette rendered against the disciplined fallback. The minimalist face shown the way a sceptical enthusiast will photograph it, dissect it, and meme it — not only the way a launch photographer flatters it. The brand-dilution question made visible as a side-by-side a CEO and a board can actually judge, while the surface is still data in CAS and the tooling is unordered.

A parallel design team does not remove the risk of a bold choice. Ferrari may well have looked at the honest evidence and shipped the Luce anyway — boldness is a legitimate strategy, and the analysts who told investors not to overreact may be right that the long game justifies it. The point is narrower and harder to dismiss: the decision that repriced the company by eight percent should have been made by leadership looking at the actual surfaces under real light, in the real states the public would judge them in, while the call was still cheap to change. The render is not the product. The decision is the product. And on the Luce, the decision was made in the one room that could not see how the rest of the world would react to it.

The takeaway

A styling choice cost Ferrari billions in market value in an afternoon and, by every reasonable reading of the timing, contributed to a change at the top of its commercial organisation. None of that was a manufacturing failure, an engineering failure, or a pricing failure. It was a design judgement made on thin evidence, late, with everything riding on being right. That is not a Ferrari problem. It is the default condition of the concept phase across the entire industry — the highest-stakes decision made with the least proof. The studios that win the next decade will be the ones that bring evidence to that decision before the money is spent, not after the stock has already moved.