Ferrari Lamborghini's last stubbornness: It's OK to change the electricity, but there is no way for automatic driving

The silent electric cars slid down the street one by one. Supercars have never been so understated, and like their sharp, exaggerated shapes, sound is fun.

As the last and most expensive bastion of gasoline cars, Ferrari and Lamborghini have also begun to build electric cars. Of course, these super electric sports cars need to inspire the same "fun" as they did in the past, but also reap the same price as in the past.

The general trend: oil to electricity, intelligent

The trend of the entire automobile industry is "oil-to-electricity" and "intelligence".

Tesla has challenged Ferrari and Lamborghini's "speed" advantage. The former, the Model S Plaid, can sprint to 100 km/h in about two seconds, faster than any Ferrari or Lamborghini.

For a supercar maker, it doesn't make sense to just slap together an electric sports car and put a label on it. Super sports cars are the benchmark in the automotive industry. If you want to change electricity, you have to be a world-class leader; moreover, it must be worthy of the price that most people can't afford.

Ferrari has launched the plug-in hybrid Stradale from 2019, but the fully electric model won't be available until 2025. The company made its investment plans public in June, saying it would produce its own motors, inverters and battery packs. "The electric Ferrari is a real Ferrari," said CEO Benedetto Vigna.

Ferrari expects pure electric vehicles to account for 50 per cent of its total sales in 2025 and 40 per cent in 2030. At that time, electric and hybrid cars will account for 80 percent of Ferrari's total sales.

Ferrari will also distill technology from its own racing team, but will still not compete in the Formula E championship.

Lamborghini's headquarters is only half an hour's drive from Ferrari, but it moves slower than Ferrari. It will launch its first plug-in hybrid in 2024 and expects a pure electric vehicle in 2030.

Now that the speed advantage is gone, Ferrari and Lamborghini can only retain the sound and power advantage. Rumor has it that the famous Austrian conductor Karajan once said that Ferrari's 12-cylinder engine achieved "a harmony that a master could not play". The "noisy" of the internal combustion engine and the "strong" power feedback are irreplaceable signs for many people who focus on driving.

For electric vehicles, it is also very simple to achieve complete "silence" if it is not intentionally designed to alert pedestrians. The former CEO of Aston Martin jumped ship to Switch Mobility. "Would a sports car still exist if it couldn't be distinguished by sound?" he said.

It's OK to change electricity, but don't be smart

Electricity changes are inevitable, but supercars aren't going to compromise on "intelligence."

Ferrari won't develop an operating system for electric cars. Legacy automaker Mercedes has long said it's particularly important to build an operating system that runs cars, manages OTA upgrades, and collects drivers' habits. But Vigna said, "I would never develop a Ferrari operating system, you have to focus on what you are good at."

Ferrari is also working on next-generation high-energy-density solid-state batteries. The current battery is not a problem for ordinary electric vehicles, but it is impossible to compete with the internal combustion engine to provide power for electric sports cars. If not reducing the dynamic performance of electric sports cars, the energy efficiency of the battery bears the brunt.

Ferrari also does not intend to engage in autonomous driving. Unlike Tesla and Volkswagen, which pursue L5-level autonomous driving without human intervention, it limits the car’s autonomous driving to L2-level. The grading system of autonomous driving is proposed by the National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which divides autonomous driving into five levels from L0 to L5.

The L2 level belongs to partial automatic driving. The basic operations are completed by the vehicle. The driver is responsible for surrounding monitoring and taking over the vehicle at any time. It mainly includes functions such as ACC automatic cruise, automatic follow-up, automatic parking and so on. Most cars on the market today can reach this level.

"No customer spends money in a car to enjoy the computer, they do it to enjoy the drive," Vigna said. "Achieving human-centric value is fundamental."

Volkswagen Group-owned Lamborghini said last year it would invest 1.5 billion euros to convert its existing models — the Huracan and Aventador sports cars and Urus sports utility vehicle — to a gasoline-electric hybrid system by the end of 2024. A few days ago, CEO Stephan Winkelmann said the figure was 1.8 billion.

Lamborghini intends to mass-produce the pure electric car, recently revealed by design director Mitja Borkert like a "spaceship", probably similar to the previous limited edition supercar Sian FKP 37 - the concept car Terzo milleno from 2017, is equipped with supercapacitors Gas-electric hybrid models.

Electric car owners and electric car enthusiasts like to shed tears of sympathy for fuel vehicles, which is somewhat similar to the mood of the owners of Nansha in Guangzhou mocking the gold mining owners for "sit and talk about Xuanzong".

In fact, Ferrari and Lamborghini make a lot of money. Ferrari is controlled by the Italian Agnelli family, which also owns Juventus Football Club, Cushman & Wakefield, and Fiat Group. It was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2015. Net profit for the first three months of 2022 was $250 million on sales of $1.2 billion.

In the first quarter of 2022, Lamborghini contributed a pre-tax profit of 180 million euros to Volkswagen on sales of 592 million euros.

Last year, Ferrari sold 11,000 cars and Lamborghini 8,300. Such a rate of return, in the small profit but quick turnover auto industry, is quite a dazzling achievement.

big competition, small competition

Ferrari and Lamborghini represent Italian prestige and industrial prowess.

Although the Italian auto industry has been declining and Fiat's market share in Europe is only 4%, the super sports car still relies on the pursuit of the upper class to prop up a world. A supercar can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the most exclusive models have multi-million dollar price tags, and buyers often have to wait a year.

Life in Italy is not so easy. The coalition of populists and the centre-left establishment is crumbling, and the bickering over billions in EU bailout funds is never-ending. This year, Italy's imports of natural gas have fallen sharply due to the war, which could shut down entire manufacturing industries -- and supercar makers are no exception.

At the beginning of the year, the U.S. government announced an electric vehicle subsidy program, and plans to build charging stations with federal funds were also on the agenda. At the end of June, the environment ministers of the 27 EU countries passed a motion in Luxembourg to phase out the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles from 2035. Italy, along with four other member states, is seeking exemptions for some automakers.

Some automakers include Ferrari and Lamborghini. The two have already made many concessions in terms of carbon emissions. However , the deadline of 2035 "the end of the internal combustion engine" cannot be avoided.

The main purpose of promoting electric vehicles in various countries is to reduce carbon emissions - reducing tailpipe emissions, which are the main source of carbon dioxide and smog. Of course, the energy and raw materials of battery manufacturing are not 100% green, but according to statistics, they are better than fuel vehicles.

At the same time, fierce regional competition is also unfolding in this industry. Japan's Toyota was originally a pioneer in hybrid vehicles, but its development was very slow. The bZ4X, which went on sale this year, had a solar charging panel on top, but it was not very attractive. Porsche's electric Taycan, on the other hand, outsold the 911 last year. Mercedes-Benz sold nearly 10 electric cars and vans last year, a 90 percent increase from the previous year.

Tesla in the United States, along with the emerging Lucid, Rivian, and China's new car-making forces, are devouring the territory of Japanese and German cars. SAIC, which owns the British MG brand, is taking advantage of technology transfer to enter the European market.

In the industrial chain, the competition of batteries is also becoming increasingly fierce. BYD supplies batteries to Tesla, directly sending the company's market value to the 1 trillion yuan mark. And this news did not shake the rising trend of the stock price of "Ning Wang" (Ningde era), reflecting the market's sufficient enthusiasm for the new energy vehicle industry chain.

In contrast, Germany's opposition to the "2035 ban" is understandable: taking lithium batteries as an example, the European battery industry is completely backward in terms of talent, technology accumulation, raw material supply and even the structure of the industrial chain.

Ferrari broke with tradition last year and named Vigna as chief executive, not without reason. Vigna had never worked in the automotive industry and was previously an executive at semiconductor maker STMicroelectronics. His appointment marked the great significance of the chip to Ferrari. Vigna is very familiar with people from Apple and Tesla, and can bring deep technology genes to Ferrari.

In fact, the use of batteries also provides some benefits for sports car design. Electric vehicles do not require long driveshafts, bulky transmissions, electric motors are much smaller than internal combustion engines, and these components can be rearranged to optimize weight distribution. Each wheel can have its own electric motor programmed to run at slightly different speeds to maximize cornering maneuverability.

The last fortress?

Our "Aventador makes you feel like a driver, a hero," said Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr, and recreating that feeling in an electric car "is our main mission".

Every sports car designer thinks so. In the UK, Aston Martin will launch its first pure electric car in 2025, and McLaren will launch its first pure electric model in 2028.

Historically, an industry trend is indeed inevitable. However, the trend has its own rigidity, which often leads to the homogeneity of production and design. In the field of mobile phones, since Apple became the king, it has been difficult to find a mobile phone that is not like the iPhone on the market - the same "beauty" stifles the creativity of many creators, and also stifles the feelings of consumers.

Chances are you'll drive a "this generation" Volvo, with head and tail lights from the Quake and Viking Axe concepts, a small 4-inch display, a waterfall-style control panel, moderately responsive physical buttons, and powerful Power, like the Nokia mobile phones of that era, is full of Bauhaus and minimalist simplicity, the practical attitude of "making the best use of everything", especially the sense of security of "what you touch is what you get", and "everything". Let me control" sense of order.

This is much better than the large LCD screen, through-type taillights, and some sunroof sunshades carved out of a mold today.

Perhaps, the last aesthetic hope of automobile diversification can only be pinned on super sports cars.