PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMES have been circulating on social media all week of the new Ferrari Luce.

Designed in part by Jony Ive, the designer who gave the world the iPhone, it is Ferrari’s first fully electric car, its first five-seater, and priced at an eye-watering €550,000.

It is also, if the reaction from investors and the public is anything to go by, potentially one of the most damaging things Ferrari has ever done to itself.

Ferrari shares fell sharply after the Luce’s unveiling. Former Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo, the man who oversaw some of the brand’s greatest years, was scathing in the Italian media and even suggested the prancing horse should be removed from the car.

Italy’s transport minister weighed in too. Social media, predictably, caught fire.

Ferrari has defended the design as deliberately divisive, while CEO Benedetto Vigna has argued that people are often wary of what is new. He may be right.

Ferrari may recover. The Luce may, in time, be reassessed. But this week, for a few extraordinary days, a single car threatened to destabilise one of the most valuable and storied automotive brands on earth.

It is not the first time this has happened. Not even close.

The Ford Edsel: $250 million on a car nobody wanted

In 1957, Ford in the US decided to fill a perceived gap in its model range between the standard Ford and the more premium Mercury. What followed was one of the most famous and expensive disasters in corporate history.

A 1957 advertisement for the Ford Edsel. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The Edsel arrived in 1958 with enormous fanfare and extraordinary hype. Ford had spent $250 million (€214.7 million) developing and marketing it, which is around $3 billion (€2.58 billion) in today’s money.

The car itself was not exactly what you would call subtle. The front grille, a vertical oval sitting in the centre of the horizontal grille, was widely described as the automotive equivalent of a toilet seat.

It did not help that the cars were riddled with quality issues straight off the production line – doors that jammed, bonnets that would not open, push-buttons that did not push.

Then there was the timing. The Edsel landed at the precise moment a recession hit the American market, just as buyers were turning away from large, expensive cars toward smaller, more economical ones. The Edsel was the........

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