F80 Reportedly Having Issues Selling

The usual broken record...

 

THIS.
Thank you.

Marcel Massini

 

Luca Di Montezemolo is also a man of taste but unlike Flavio Manzoni he knew exactly what a Ferrari should be or should not be. While Manzoni was under the "tutelage" of Montezemolo there was a coherence in all his designs. After Montezemolo's departure, Manzoni became an orphan and I agree, lost the paternal reference of “what a Ferrari should be”. Since then, as Rosario Scelsi so well wrote, Flavio Manzoni “has impulses of great genius, he is not always able to match them perfectly”. “If with Pininfarina there was no doubt about the fact that the next "red" immediately buried his heart for his style, with Manzoni there is great anxiety every time and nothing can be taken for granted”

 

Between the 458 introduction and Ferrari becoming public, the following cars have been released:
FF
F12
California 30
LaFerrari
California T
488

 

This is what they should have done. Produce just 2 regular models:
1. the entry level car, a NA V8 with "only" 6-700 HP, but as light as possible (say 1200 kg tops) to offset the lack of power compared to its competitors.
2. a GT car, with a NA V12 developing around 8-900 HP, but again, also very light, 1400 kg tops.
And then the HALO car, limited to 100 examples only, NA V10 pumping out +900HP, 3 tons of downforce, 1000 kg, central driving position - 5 million a piece.

 

to good to be true and to low profit for greedy guys

 

Great post!

 

Did you forget the F40’s FIAT indicator stalks, plus numerous other examples over history - far more than now? I don’t recall touching anything that I saw from another manufacturer when driving our SF90. If there is such, it’s very well disguised and of appropriate quality.

 

Why on earth would they voluntarily choose to do that? Their revenues would be massively reduced, their production scale worsened, and the brand would be smaller and less well-equipped to deal with the industry changes that they knew and still know have come and are coming. They haven’t been a GMA ‘plus’ type company for over 50 years. Why would it make any sense at all for them to go back to that, struggling to make ends meet, not enough profit to keep their head above water? Could they even do it? No, they couldn’t. So what’s the point in asking. People who want to buy that type of car need to look elsewhere - that particular boat with a Ferrari badge on it has long sailed. And LDM increased its speed.

 

Why is it greedy to want to make profit? I run a family business, no public shareholders anywhere. And I want our business to make profit. As much as possible. We only get to do that by satisfying our customers and as many of them as we can find. If we make more money, we gave more satisfaction. I certainly wouldn’t expect to have to apologise for that and neither should Ferrari. It’s just naive to think a serious company would ever decide to make less profit because of a romantic notion that that’s a better idea.

 

Let’s dissect this for a little while. Ferrari started as a racing team, moving on to making cars using the learnings from racing to try and build a sportier car. This was over 70 years ago. Today, Ferrari is the only racing team that has continuously competed in F1 since its inception. It recently (and under the management of RACE) swallowed the cost and returned to WEC and won the 100th running of Le Mans having returned for the first time for 50 years. They followed it up with a second win last year. Hopefully they can do the hat-trick in 2025.

They also run the world’s most prominent customer racing programme with all the various challenge series, plus the Corse Clienti and other programmes. They do it better than anyone else for the Gentleman and lady racers among their now vast customer base. Their cars still take racing technology and incorporate it into their design and engineering, to lesser and greater degrees. While they have ventured into clothing such as team apparel and even worse, fashion items, their revenue is still mostly driven by racing and car-buying customers. Still, over 70 years later. For such a large and successful brand, their success at staying true to their roots, despite their size, seems incredible to me.

Apple, on the other hand, started by making graphics-driven personal computers, mainly used by artistic professionals. Today, that is only a small fraction of their iPhone-, ipad-, iTunes- and Apple TV-led empire. They have moved well and truly away from their roots. In fact, the ‘stuff’ they make gets farmed out to China and has been for many years. Ferrari on the other hand are retaining their manufacturing in Maranello, and do so more proudly and prominently than any of their competitors. And it must be said, at great expense.

When you really look at Apple and Ferrari, it seems clear that they have completely different strategies - both in the past and for the future. In fact, RACE could make more money by adopting some of the Apple strategy and farming out their manufacturing. But they don’t do that and they won’t. Why do they choose to keep a more expensive strategy? Could it be because they do after all understand a bit about long-term brand value. That would be a shock, wouldn’t it?

 

Let's check...

Mid engine V12...Check
Crazy and beautiful styling that leverages their historic DNA...Check
$1M+ MSRP ...Check
Non-Standard Production...Check
Invite Only To Buy...Check

Yep, it passes the halo car test. The fact that the 296 is faster doesn't mean anything, as when the Enzo came out the F430 Scuderia was quicker around Fiorano and the 488 Pista was faster than the LaFerrari. The only potential knock is not using the full F1 tech with the engine... but then again when the the Enzo came out Ferrari was using V10's in F1 and when the LaFerrari came out they where using V8's in their F1 cars so...¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Those cretieria have nothing to do with the halo car. The halo cars have always been the most advanced and quick Ferraris when they came out. The SP3 is slower than the 11 year old LaFerrari upon which it is based. It not even close to being a halo car. It is an Icona, which tells you all you need to know about it. The Enzo and the LaFerrari were using time correct F1 engine ethos, i.e. high revving N/A engines. It's not about the cylinder count, but the basic philosophy.

QED Checked and disproved.


@Lukeylikey: You sir are a hero for trying to discuss reasonably with someone who asks for 3 tonnes of downforce on a road car, when there are no tyres that can take that much force and there is no use for that much d/f either... Alas, it is a losing battle against insanity.

 

1. Agree that Ferrari is not Apple. Actually it is a mistake to take a high luxury brand on a journey that leads to it becoming like Apple.
2. Not sure if the quality problem is down to materials or attention to detail, but I agree that quality has slipped as production numbers have gone up. Just ask any dealer doing pre-delivery inspections about what they see on a regular basis (can tell you some stories about my cars too). Ferrari need to address this fast
3. Agree on new V12. Lamborghini decided to stay the course, so Ferrari could if it wanted to. Having a turbo V8 flagship (SF90) is a mistake. I am not even sure the brand needs 4 different cars, all in coupe and spider form.

 

Regarding your point 3, I think the equation probably went something like, “we need to grow, do we sell more of the same number of models?” The answer being that if they did, each individual model becomes much less rare and discounting during slack times much more likely, thereby undermining the business model completely. The more expensive route - to develop multiple models - helps with a lot of things (except cost). It allows a widening of the customer base to achieve added volume, it ensures each model is produced in lower quantities to maintain some degree of rarity on a model-by-model basis and it provides a pathway for newer or younger customers to progress into the higher products. So it seems natural for the Ferrari board, making a super-premium product, to choose the expensive route.

The alternative is to not grow. But with increasing wealth and access to cheap money post 2008, plus the expectation of expensive-to-develop powertrains being needed, also plus the fact that everything works so much better in a company when you’re trying to grow, a strategy to not grow wouldn’t really have been appropriate.

The flagship being a hybrid V8 may turn out to be a mistake but it’s easy to see how they got there. As Leiters said, it made little sense to hybrid-ise the V12 (the Drag Times Revuelto was weighed at 4,335lb which might be why Ferrari were nervous of it) and so the V8 was used. The resulting 1,000hp car, with a very expensive-to-build powertrain, itself dictated flagship status for a company whose core is about race technology in road cars, making them faster. Could they have reasonably declared the 12C to be the flagship? Probably not. Could they introduce a front-engined V12 hybrid as a further model to ‘upstage’ the SF90? Who knows but I don’t think it looks likely. Would it be any good? It would certainly be heavy and probably even heavier than the Revuelto.

Ferrari are still making their V12 for two models (more than Lamborghini) and while they seem happy to let people believe the 12C will be the last V12 (that ‘last of’ thing again) will it be? Emissions does make it hard but will e-fuels save the day, or some other twist? Perhaps. Ferrari haven’t psychologically moved away from the V12, but when it came time to do a super-mid car, a hybrid powertrain was a the solution they chose to get the power. I haven’t driven a Revuelto but we’ve now had three SF90’s (just had XX delivered) and every time I get behind the wheel, I really enjoy the car. It would be better with buttons but there’s not much else. I don’t think it would handle better with a V12.

 

Impossible with CO2 emission regulations.

 

I just want to say that the comparison to Apple is a bit weird to me. Comments that Apple is no longer doing what they used to do because they don't own their own factories is indicative of them changing their model isn't accurate. Apple is the only computer company that manufactures their own hardware and OS software. Microsoft tried to do this decades later but without much success. Apple has kept to their roots, they make the hardware for their OS software, creating the best integration experience for their users. This is how they have always done it. That's what made Apple different than other computer manufacturers. Today, they are making their own chips too, which to the best of my knowledge, no one else is doing. The company is simply brilliant and Ferrari profit is but a mere rounding error on the PL of Apple.

 

It's very easy to know if this news is true: someone of you (super owners / collectors) call Ferrari "hello, could I have an F80? I'll send you the configuration"...

 

Absolutely ! not to mention that the SF90 and 296 hybrids are consumable cars that have no future in the collection. We will always restore a 246, but never a 296.i m curious to see how they will manage this, given the disaster of its cars in number and value on the second-hand market...

 

Without LCDM, Ferrari would no longer exist, and I think by 2030 we ll see the impact of bad product plans in an internal environment inside disconnected from the culture and history of the brand...
With the exception of the 12 C, these are soulless digital and repetitive cars that many will tire of.
At some point, when there is only power as a selling point, buying a new car of 1100 hp instead of 1000, without its engine sound and which collapses at the speed of light in resale value will present all the limits of this strategy...

 

Our last hope is that things will change in Europe until 2035..
I still don’t believe EU will survive this economical disaster in automotive industry ..

 

Check out Sir Jonathan "Jony" Ive, former CDO of Apple, and Ferrari.

Marcel Massini

 

I think the point is that it’s the iPad, iPhone, iTunes and other software and streaming services that form most of their income stream. The iPhone alone is around 50% of Apple revenues. The iPad and iPhone are built in China. Nothing wrong with any of that, it’s just not the same strategy as Ferrari. To me, Apple are a great company but not everyone agrees.

I agree that the comparison with Apple is ‘weird’.

 

Very interesting man, Jony Ive. And probably a genius. He seems very humble and ‘curious’. An excerpt from an interview he gave caught my eye;-


When you gather a large group of people, they generally want to be able to relate to one another and to be sociable. But any process that is unpredictable does not sit comfortably or naturally in a large group setting. So people come to value activities that are predictable.

This doesn’t mean that you would willfully want to undermine those activities that are predictable. But that is the nature of creating. And one of the things I realized is that when you’re trying to create in the context of a large group of people with a whole range of different expertise, people tend to want to gravitate to those attributes or characteristics of a product that you can measure easily. If you’re trying to relate to a group of very different people and you want to appear sociable and engaged and connected, it’s much easier to talk about something that you can measure with a number. That’s why we choose to talk about schedule or cost or speed or weight. Given our very different backgrounds, that’s a comfortable and easy conversation. I completely get it.

But there’s an insidious problem with that. There is a dangerous assumption that we’re having these conversations because they’re the only important ones. But the really important conversations and preoccupations and concerns are very hard. Because you can’t assign a system of numbers to make the relative judgments that need to be made.

I used to think that this kind of conversation was a personal attack, or an affront to the practice of creating, but I’ve come to learn, over the years, that it’s just a natural, very predictable consequence of having larger numbers of people gather together to talk about developing something.



Seems like he understands fchat well! Here’s the full article, where he talks directly about Elkann, who he respects. It’s interesting. Happy for people to conclude he has no idea what he’s talking about, just don’t count me among them. I may not like with everything he produces but that’s the way design and creativity works, isn’t it?

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-creative-process-is-fabulously-unpredictable-a-great-idea-cannot-be-predicted

 

Do you honestly believe that? I can’t believe there is any doubt about it. One day, they will be restored, just like all the others.