The First Electric Ferrari Will Launch in 2025
The announcement of Ferrari’s reversal on building EVs came directly from the top.
There have been a few big shake-ups at Ferrari over the past year or so. Firstly, the storied automaker has had to rearrange its staffing to accommodate the Formula One budget cap, shifting race team staff to factory roles. Secondly, it's started doing stuff like making a car that's eligible for federal tax incentives as a plug-in hybrid, even if it is a bit of a marginal case.
Petrolheads can slip further into despair that F1's hybrid era has finally taken hold of Maranello's road development as the brand has confirmed it really will build an all-electric car. It won't come for a few years and we have basically no details about it, but CEO John Elkann specifically confirmed that an electric car will be introduced to Ferrari's range in 2025.
Ferrari's first PHEV car was the SF90 Stradale, which as well as a small plug-in system has a reassuringly large amount of turbocharged V8. However, even if Ferrari's been feigning reluctance about it, the brand's F1 arm has been making hybrid cars since 2009. That's when the series introduced KERS, a regenerative braking system that high-performance power unit engineers would really like you not to compare to a Prius but isn't, conceptually, a thousand miles off.
Speaking at Ferrari's Annual General Meeting, CEO John Elkann said that although the brand isn't in a tearing hurry to get its range electrified, that's now a direction it's actively pursuing.
"As we enter 2021, we continue to roll out our ambitious and exciting product plan and we will unveil a further three new models in the coming months," Elkann said at the AGM. "We are continuing to execute our electrification strategy in a highly disciplined way. And our interpretation and application of these technologies both in motorsport and in road cars is a huge opportunity to bring the uniqueness and passion of Ferrari to new generations," Elkann continued.
He set up the EV announcement by referencing the Stradale, mentioning the plug-in as a "wonderful technical achievement and driving experience."
"We are also very excited about our first all-electric Ferrari that we plan to unveil in 2025 and you can be sure this will be everything you dream the engineers and designers at Maranello can imagine for such a landmark in our history. So, we see this exciting decade of accelerating change as opening even more ways to push to new levels the boundaries of excellence and passion in everything we do."
This might all seem like a pretty slow timeline to be inching towards electrification on but remember in 2013, then-chairman Luca di Montezemolo was adamant that Ferrari would never make an electric car.
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