Ferrari’s CEO Thanks Tesla for the New Roadster: “You Can Still Innovate and Dare”

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Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna has praised Tesla’s new Roadster, giving last week’s unveil a 10 out of 10 for technology and a 10 out of 10 for presentation, and thanking the company for showing that an old industry still has room to take risks.

That’s according to Reuters, which interviewed Vigna on Tuesday at an automotive conference organized by the Italian magazine Quattroruote. Vigna joined by videoconference from India, where Ferrari was hosting a client event. “It certainly shows that also in the automotive world there’s still a lot to be done. We have to keep dreaming,” Vigna said. “As a European, thank you for showing us how that, even in an old world, you can still innovate and dare.”

Vigna connected the Roadster to Ferrari’s own first electric car. He told Reuters that risk-taking is necessary and that outside input was vital for the Ferrari Luce, which was developed with former Apple design chief Jony Ive and the team at his LoveFrom studio. “If we had worked on our own, we wouldn’t have done what we did. In other words, we tackled a whole series of questions and came up with some answers prompted by people who were observing us from the outside,” he said.

Tesla showed the new Roadster on October 15 at SpaceX’s rocket test site near McGregor, Texas, with stunts that included the car getting airborne. As we covered in our Roadster reveal story, Tesla laid out Performance, Thrust and Rocket configurations, with the single-seat Rocket using perimeter-mounted cold-gas thrusters that Tesla says let it fly. Tesla’s targets for the Rocket are 0 to 60 mph in under 0.59 seconds and a top speed above 230 mph, and the company posted a 0.81-second run that night. The show’s producer later explained how a falling banana worked as a stopwatch during one of the runs. Reuters reported that Elon Musk said production would start in 2028. Tesla hasn’t announced pricing, but reservations require a $50,000 deposit.

Ferrari’s own electric car has had a tougher reception from investors. Ferrari revealed the Luce in May, and its shares fell in Milan after the reveal, according to Reuters. The car’s official Ferrari specs include four electric motors, one at each wheel, 1,050 cv of output, 0 to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds, a top speed of 310 km/h (about 193 mph) and 530 km (about 329 miles) of range from a 122 kWh battery pack. It’s also the first Ferrari with room for five, as we noted when Ferrari unveiled the Luce in May.

The Roadster also carries a lot of history for Tesla. The original Roadster arrived in 2008 as the company’s first car and helped show that an electric car could be fast and desirable. Tesla first showed the next-generation Roadster in November 2017, and the people who reserved one back then have waited through years of delayed demos and production timelines before last week’s event.

Do you think Ferrari’s CEO is right that the Roadster shows there’s still room to innovate in the car business?