First Ferrari Luce EV Sells For $40,000,000 Because Money Is Fake And The Economy Is A Scam - Jalopnik
tags:
Ferrari
Even if you assume the Ferrari Luce drives better than any EV ever sold, and its cabin only uses the highest-quality materials, it's still hard to see how Ferrari's first EV is worth the $640,000 it takes to get a base model. Then again, the wealthy don't think the same way that you or I do. So when Ferrari announced plans to auction off the first Luce build at Monterey Car Week, it was hard to guess just how much it would sell for. Maybe a few million? Oh no. Over the weekend, the first Ferrari Luce sold for a cool $40 million.
Not $4 million. Ten times that. An entire $40 million for a single car. A car that's never won any races, been owned by anyone famous, or done anything cool. Before taxes, that's like 800 years of earnings for someone who makes $50,000 a year. Ok, sure, it's a unique build, but it's still a white car with white wheels and a white interior. Or, as the press release describes it:
This one-of-a-kind vehicle has been thoughtfully crafted with a central concept of light, especially rendered through white and its innate ability to transform the perception of surfaces. It features a unique Madreperla Semi-Gloss body, using a dedicated Ferrari Tailor Made pigment to produce evolving, iridescent reflections evocative of its mother-of-pearl namesake. The interior extends this theme with exclusively developed Le Mans metallic leather in Perla and for the first time on a Ferrari, secondary interior elements finished in Grigio Corvara. The enduring luminosity is reflected further in the configuration, including dedicated wheels, bespoke brake calipers and the Ferrari Luce logo on dashboards set against an optical white background, another exclusive solution created for this car.
That sounds very fancy and all, but it sure doesn't sound like a car that's worth $40 million.
It's all for charity
Ferrari
The good news is, Ferrari won't keep that $40 million. It goes to the Ferrari Foundation, which plans to donate 100% of the proceeds to charity. That's important, right? Of course it is. Then again, these are rich people we're talking about, so your definition of "charity" might be a little different than Ferrari's. Some of the money will reportedly go to "supporting ongoing educational initiatives in the United States," while the Ferrari Foundation says it will donate the rest to M-Tech Alfredo Ferrari, the Italian automaker's new tech training center.
You know, because there's no cause more important than ensuring Ferrari trains plenty of future employees. Could you imagine the global disaster that would result if Ferrari ever ended up short on trained Ferrari techs? The billionaires who don't even drive their cars in the first place could end up ever-so-slightly inconvenienced, and we can't have that. It just wouldn't be right. The wealthy deserve a well-trained underclass of workers to serve them, and society would collapse if they didn't.
As for the auction winner, that's reportedly Florida optometrist and inventor Herbert Wertheim, a billionaire who previously spent $26,000,000 on a Ferrari Daytona SP3 that was also auctioned off for charity. Like a lot of the people who have "spend tens of millions to educate future Ferrari techs" money, Wertheim's name isn't particularly well-known, but he did make the news for non-car reasons last year when his now-ex-wife sued him claiming he forged her signature and misappropriated $250 million in Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation assets. Wertheim is also a Mar-a-Lago member and longtime Trump supporter who briefly launched a congressional campaign earlier this year at the age of 87.