Transcription
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Now, if you want to fit a V12 behind the front axle line, and four seats, and a boot in your Ferrari, you need an extreme measure. Watch this. So, the back of this car, the Lusso, has that sort of bread van shape, which is distinctive. Here's the rear wheel. I'm going to walk forward, and you're thinking that looks normal. But now you're thinking, when does the front wheel arrive? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? It's about there. Now look how long the wheelbase is. Look at the real estate between the front and the rear wheel. It's enormous. So, I walked back from the front of the car to where effectively the driver sits. Watch this. All of that is ahead of you as the driver. It is genuinely one of the most unusual cars ever made.
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So, from the outside, it sort of looks like an FF for someone's tried to lightly restyle. And inside, inside it's quite a bit different. The two side TFT screens and the centre console remained. The rest of it is entirely new, including this enormous flat-screen centre console bit here. Now, for many years, Ferrari was a long way behind the curve. It always seemed to release the sort of generation of infotainment behind any of its rivals. But this thing looks bang up to date. And it does a split-screen thing either side. I don't quite know how it works. I've spent a bit of time playing with it, and there is a sort of instruction that comes with it. I'm getting there. After a year, you actually learn how the controls work. And the quality inside here is miles better than the FF, I have to say. It's not squeaky, it's not rattling, and you don't have to put all the bits that fall off in your glove box like they put in my FF.
Dynamics. This is really because, as someone who did, I don't know, 7,000 miles on my FF, I loved it. But there were some very obvious problems. First of all, it was too loud. When you started it up, it would wake people in the village from about a mile around. That's too much. We want sound, we don't want to be anti-social. That's the new way of doing things. The ride comfort, even with the dampers selected, the suspension was too busy. And the biggest problem of the FF, for a car that was a GT, was the kind of tire suspension noise at the back of the car. If you sat in the back, you just got deafened. There was plenty of room, but you got rattled around by the suspension and the noise of the exhaust and the kind of resonance that came from the suspension, the tires.
So, what have they gone and done? Well, when you start it, it's quieter, but it still sounds wonderful. The ride comfort, with the bumpy road button on, is superb. I'm coming out of an everyday S63 AMG Mercedes, which I think rides as well as any fast car, but this isn't a long way off. It's really impressive. I'm at perhaps the most impressive thing about the Lusso. So, the way it filters noise that you don't want out of the cabin and lets you have all that V12 goodness. That most Ferraris are designed around the driver. The driver matters. No one else. All the controls and everything had configured towards the driver environment. The passenger is forgotten about. But the Lusso is obviously a four-seater. So, Ferrari has kind of had to pay attention to the person that sits there in the front passenger seat and the back seat as well.
So, we're losing radical. I'm now going to test this vehicle from since. In the spirit of good consumer journalism, I'm going to attempt to show you the new infotainment screen. But before I do that, I'm going to start the engine. Because wouldn't do that. Something waiting cool happens. Watch this. A flap opens and air comes out. Now, notwithstanding the fact that Jaguar managed that 10 years ago, Ferrari with a flap that opens. Amazing.
So, here's your infotainment screen. Look how big it is. And it's sort of flush to the edges. It's got the sort of matte luxury feel to it. But it displays some basic information like the temperature and the time. So, you've got your usual things. You've got the media you're playing, your nav, your phone, the way that you can change your seats and air conditioning and all that sort of stuff. And then the car settings. That's like a normal car. But this has a split-screen function. Now, look at that. You see media and navigation at the same time. You can also have Apple CarPlay. Where's my cable? What's this? So, I plug in the phone. They get offered Apple CarPlay. Now, that in a Golf R, I think, is free. In this car, it's about two and a half grand, which seems a bit steep. But it works quite well. We've got a redesigned set of climate control buttons. We've got another rotary button here, which sort of helps you navigate. Randy, we don't want to do the touchscreen. And on why you do that, a volume knob here, which has got a crack in the middle of it. And if you look at it, it sort of moves the way a 300,000-pound car's buttons shouldn't move. It's a bit of an ergonomic hash-up. But it looks beautiful, and the materials are very special indeed. That's what you would need to understand when you see the price of this car. You'll say, well, an RS6 is a third of the money. An RS6 feels a third of the money inside. This is beautiful. The hides are waxy and soft, and they're a beautiful colour, and everything does like, does fit together rather well, in a way that Ferraris don't always do. And these vents and titanium edges, they're things of beauty. There's not too much carbon in this car, which I rather like. Usual controls. Then you've got two paddles here, up and down. They're fixed. They're not behind the wheel and moving with the way. All this has been redesigned slightly. That's the most important button in the car. You press that to get your soft dampers. The Manetti-Gnome. Straightforward. One thing you do need to know is that when you go to ESC off and slide it around, which I'm not going to do in this video, the rear-wheel steering cuts off. It doesn't work because that would not help in a skid situation. The fuel tank is still not quite big enough at under 90 litres. And everything else, well, it's the same as it was before. Up there, what I find slightly confusing is there are one, two, three, four, five, six rotary dials that sort of twirl around, and I'm not quite sure where each of them does. Some, hey, I think that's my pit limit, my cruise control. There's one other thing worth noting. The JBL hi-fi in my FF was pants, really, really rubbish. The JBL in this is really, really good.
Well, that's it from the driver's perspective. I'm now going to hand over to my short, dark, very good-looking colleague to discuss what goes on in the front passenger compartment.
So, here we are, riding shotgun now in the Lusso. And straight ahead of me, it's the optional passenger readout or passenger display. Three thousand, three hundred and sixty pounds. I can say that with a straight face. Just look at this. It used to be basic. Now, how could it's not so basic? You get exactly the same graphics as you had on the main screen. So, you can have a duplicate of all of the information the driver's seeing about the car and what you're doing on that left-hand screen there. Here, but you can also have all the media as well. And you can change the song, which you will find drives. You can put your mad because, bless, my 12-year-old was in the front with me this morning and was changing the radio station every five minutes, which drove me completely nuts. But look how cool this is. So, you can then have all of your performance data as well. So, that's your speed and your RPMs. I mean, I know it's a total gimmick. These cars are about theatre and making people feel special and making you smile at all the sort of delights. And that's what I love about this thing. So, if you're sitting here as a passenger, you've actually got more fun to be had here than the passenger has in any other car on sale.
Having played with my directional air vents with their new open and shut mechanism at the top, they're just quite nice. And pressed my solenoid-activated glovebox opening device, I shall move to the back where another, well, not unattractive, small brown man is ready to show you what it's like. That's it in the back. Right, I can't talk about the back. Back tomorrow. Free, eleven thousand, five hundred and twenty pounds. Eleven and a half grand for a glass roof. Okay. Right, once you've got that out of the way, the back of this car is a revelation. Legroom, more than the S-Class Coupe. What a great position. The rake of the seat back is just right. And because they're individual seats, they've got these little side cushions that just pinch the lumbar of your back, which make it really supportive and comfortable. Feels like a bucket seat in the back of a car. Armrest on my left. Look at that. Couple of USBs for charging, dual cupholders, and an air vent to point cold air at your face. Genuine four-seater with a boot. Oh, look, a split-fold rear seat. It never falls flat. Already flat because of that there. That's the fuel tank under there. But to genuinely practical car. And it's area. It's light because of the eleven and a half thousand pound roof option. I can't keep a straight face too much longer. It's utterly bonkers, this car, but I love it.
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I've got a much more refined, more comfortable car. But of course, being Ferrari, it's faster. It now has 690 horsepower. This is a four-seat family Ferrari. 700, left. Of course, the Lusso is really just a facelift of the FF and an excuse for Ferrari to roll out confusing new naming strategy. But it is actually quite a big step over the old FF. The 6.2-litre V12 now has 694 horsepower and 514 foot-pounds. It revs to 8,250. Again, very unfamiliar. Compression ratio is now 13.5 to one. There are lighter internals on a new piston design and the new generation of engine electronics. In short, it's a monster. Zero to sixty-two in 3.4 seconds. Zero to 124 in 10.5. And 208 miles an hour flat out. The chassis retains the crazy four-wheel separate gearbox for the front axle to allow that front-mid-engine layout. But now it has four-wheel steering and a completely new brain controlling the whole lot. Ferrari always makes big aerodynamic claims about downforce that I don't normally believe. But I will say that the Lusso has possibly the biggest diffuser that I've ever seen in a road car, which is handy because the boot is actually quite small. Ah, who cares about 15 and old money? That's foot-pounds. So, the thing is an absolute rocket sled.
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Over 200 miles an hour flat out. Those are insane numbers. But it's so much more comfortable. It is also more agile, as it now has a four-wheel-drive system. As if this powertrain wasn't already complicated enough. To remind you, the engine is effectively front-mid-mounted. Okay, so the motor's just so ahead of it. There's a supplementary gearbox that drives the front wheels, and then there's obviously a transaxle gearbox situation out back. So, you've got power being directed all over the place. They've now integrated a rear-wheel steering system with that central ECU. So, at any one time, the computer has to decide how much steering lock to apply at the rear wheel, how much torque to put to each one of the individual tires. I mean, it's crazy. It's so clever. And now it feels seamless. The FF was a car that developed over its life. I had an early one, and at times it really did feel like it was a rear-wheel-drive car that when you get into trouble in computer, we go, is the problem with front axle. Throw power to front. By the time it did that, you'd already crashed. This one doesn't feel like that at all. It still feels fundamentally rear-driven, which is lovely. But you can feel the torque vector. You can feel it starting to find its line, find a more efficient way of getting you power to the ground.
The seating position is good. The steering wheel now has these extra Model T bits on the back for the indicators, which is a good idea. I always found the windscreen wiper a bit of a pain. You had to sort of pull it to get one swish and push it to make it go on. Now, with it done, they put a rotary thing to roll on your non-intermittent wiper. And if you want a quick, a quick switch, pull it back once. These are weird observations, and I'm sort of providing a consumer test of a car that no one ever really uses, aren't I? But I used mine. It feels expensive, and so it should, because this one, with the few toys, is 280,000 pounds. I'm going to pause there for a minute, allow Neil to sort of fade in some moody music and the odd shot of it while you think about the fact that it costs 200.
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