Ferrari Salesman's Wrong-Number Pitch Gets Publicly Roasted

Ferrari’s first EV has a math problem, and one of the brand’s own collectors just did the arithmetic out loud. Supercar owner Jeffrey Cheng — @speedy_jeff on Instagram, where he first posted the exchange — pegs the Luce at north of $700,000 once taxes and registration are folded in. For that money, he argued, a buyer could park the best electric cars Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid build in the driveway and still have a small fortune left over. When a potential customer starts running that comparison unprompted, the badge has to do an enormous amount of heavy lifting. For Cheng, it didn’t lift nearly enough.

What makes the whole thing sting for Ferrari is how the conversation started. This wasn’t an anonymous internet critic — it was someone Ferrari went looking for. A sales consultant reached out directly, part of a targeted push aimed at existing owners and EV-curious enthusiasts invited to learn about allocations and ordering. Flatter the loyalists, dangle exclusivity, convert them into buyers. Cheng was, on paper, exactly the right person to email. He was also, as it turned out, exactly the wrong one.

His problem wasn’t simply that the Luce is electric. He went after the design, calling it “un-Italian” and questioning how a room full of Italians — among the best car designers on the planet — signed off on it. He used the word “embarrassing.” Then he circled back to the price, framing $700K-plus as indefensible for a Ferrari EV that hasn’t won the room over.

None of that would matter much if it stayed in the enthusiast forums, where plenty of people have said harsher things about the Luce for weeks. The uncomfortable part for Ferrari is that this came from inside the tent — from precisely the kind of established collector the sales team hoped would line up first.

And yet the picture isn’t uniformly grim. Reports suggest interest in the Luce is already building in Thailand, well ahead of deliveries that aren’t due until late 2027. So Ferrari is living two realities at once: a longtime believer telling the brand to its face that the car is overpriced and off-brand, and a market halfway around the world warming to it sight unseen. Which of those two groups ends up defining the Luce will say a lot about what a Ferrari is allowed to be from here on.

Source: Jeffrey Cheng (@speedy_jeff) via Instagram.

Shawn Henry

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Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

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