petrolhedonist

Because if you can’t say anything nice… Two Italian legends are going electric with opposite ideas about what a car should look like. So we asked one of them to mark the other’s homework.

Ferrari and Lamborghini have spent 60 years disagreeing about almost everything, so it’s fitting they can’t even agree on how to go electric.

Ferrari handed the design of its first EV, the Luce, to LoveFrom – the San Francisco studio run by Jony Ive, the man who drew the iPhone. Lamborghini draws every line in-house at Sant’Agata, and treats it as scripture that a Lamborghini must, above all else, look like a Lamborghini.

So with design director Mitja Borkert on a call for the new Revuelto SV, I asked the obvious question. What did he think of the Ferrari Luce – and how much of Ferrari does it reflect?

He wouldn’t touch it.

“We should have a judgment agreement within the design world that we are not talking about maybe the other manufacturer,” Borkert said, “because in the end of the day, I cannot judge the circumstance behind the other project. I can only talk about what I contributed to.”

Fair enough, and very classy. But this was from a man who had just spent the previous hour explaining that a car has to look like its maker – that the silhouette alone should tell you the badge from a hundred metres. Ask him to hold a rival to that same test, and suddenly he’s a diplomat who never comments on other people’s work.

The refusal is the real message. You don’t go quiet about a design you admire.

Ferrari’s first electric car might have sold out, but it looks the way it does because a phone-and-software studio in California shaped it. Lamborghini would sooner shut the factory. Borkert’s whole philosophy is that brand DNA lives inside the building, in the same hands that drew the Countach and the Miura, and that you cannot contract it out. The Lanzador, Lamborghini’s own electric concept, was drawn at home.

I told him as much – that I’d be far more comfortable seeing the Lanzador on the road than some of the other things now arriving. “Let’s speak about what I do,” he deflected again.

He’s allowed to be coy. I’m not.

Ferrari’s bet is a real one: that the electric future needs fresh eyes, even eyes from outside the car world. It might be right. But Ferrari named its EV Luce, for light, and the warmest thing its oldest rival’s designer could manage was to change the subject. When the man across the fence won’t defend your new car and won’t attack it either, he’s already told you where he stands. He just wants us to join the dots ourselves.