While most details about Ferrari’s Elettrica EV, including its appearance and price, remain a mystery ahead of a planned launch in the spring of 2026, the company said it will go from 0 to 62 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds; have a battery with a capacity of 122 kWh to ensure recharging in as little as eight minutes; and boast a range of 323 miles on one charge. In other words, the company is promising the kind of excellence aficionados expect from Ferrari, beloved since 1947 when it started making cars renowned for their beauty, slick engineering and mind-boggling speed, both on streets and racetracks.

Ferrari has not said how many Elettrica EVs it will produce, but one thing is clear: It is not likely to make many. Ferrari’s reputation for innovative design and technology prowess works hand-in-hand with a strategy of maintaining very tight supply to elevate the mystique the company enjoys. Based in the Northern Italian city of Maranello, Ferrari sells about 14,000 cars per year (compared to 6.2 million at GM or 6.4 million at Stellantis).

That intense scarcity arouses a FOMO among very wealthy car lovers that allows Ferrari to charge prices like $250,000 for one of its entry-level cars, and $3 million for a hypercar like its F80. And customers must endure long waiting lists, like those coveting a Birkin bag by Hermès.

Vigna makes no apologies for keeping production extremely limited to focus on innovation, customer service and cachet. “If the client is happy, the investor is happy. The other way around is not always true,” the CEO said. Indeed, Ferrari is expected to take in nearly $8 billion this year, a fraction of Ford or GM’s revenue—but its market capitalization of $70 billion is larger than that of either of those rivals.

A competitive sector

Lamborghini, Bentley, and Porsche are already in the EV market, and Ferrari feels the need to have a horse in the race to defend its place as a pioneer in the luxury car market, however it evolves, CEO Benedetto Vigna told Fortune.

“We are a leader,” said Vigna, a former Silicon Valley executive who took the reins of Ferrari four years ago. “A leader has the responsibility to push forward the limit of what is possible. If we don’t do it, then we do not deserve to be called a leader.”

Vigna says the plunge into EVs does not mean its internal combustion engine cars will be any less the company’s focus. EVs are “in addition to” and not “in replacement of” them, the 56-year-old said.

At the same time, the market for EVs has cooled: Many carmakers have partially walked back their plans, with demand for EVs sagging recently. Ferrari is not immune either: At its investor day (which it called its Capital Markets Day) on October 9, Ferrari said that it expected 20% of its car production in 2030 to be fully electric models, down from an earlier forecast of 40%. That, plus a lower-than-expected profit margin forecast, sent Ferrari shares plunging 15%. Lamborghini delayed last year its first EV by one year to 2029 citing market conditions, while Porsche announced a similar delay last month.

Bernstein analyst Stephen Reitman said Ferrari’s results were disappointing. “The market had expected a confident story of further margin development and was instead served a thin gruel as far as 2030 guidance was concerned,” he wrote in a research note cited by Bloomberg.

More innovation, per favore

Vigna studied physics at the University of Pisa and then spent 30 years making his way up from engineer to executive at the French chipmaker STMicroelectronics. That helped him land the Ferrari job, since much of the innovation in top-of-the-line car-making has to do with computational power.

As someone who was always intrigued by luxury and beauty, Vigna bristles when someone suggests that Ferrari is simply a carmaker. To him, it’s a luxury brand that happens to make cars. “I was never using technology for the sake of technology, but always for how the technology affects the emotions generated in human beings,” he said.

Still, coming from the tech world was a culture shock, he told Fortune. When he arrived at Ferrari in 2021, Vigna found the company’s metabolism slow, ironic given its reputation for extremely fast cars. He says it was hampered by a culture of silos and a c-suite too far removed from the rank and file.

Early in his tenure, Vigna conducted a listening tour, meeting with 300 of the company’s 5,500 employees in roles up and down the org chart, to understand Ferrari’s challenges and strengths. The CEO found it was important to also stir emotions in the Ferrari workforce to fully harness their ideas and not have them die on the vine.

The result of his changes, Vigna claims, is a rate of innovation five times what it was before he became CEO. He points to 201 patents last year, compared with 26 in 2019.

When he first arrived, Vigna was surprised to learn that many Ferrari employees had never even been inside one of the company’s cars. (Vigna, a fan of the brand since his childhood in Italy when he had a Ferrari backpack with its famous prancing horse logo, first drove a Ferrari himself only a few years ago, when a friend in Silicon Valley lent him his car.)

So he invited employees to a track at headquarters to go for a spin with a test driver. Now, he is going one step further and allowing all Ferrari employees to drive the cars, about 50 people per weekend. Vigna says the slots, put up on Ferrari’s intranet, are filled in seconds, so snagging one is a coup.

 “It is pretty emotional for them,” the CEO says.