I’ve been thinking about the new Ferrari Luce, and I think they’re about to make a really expensive mistake.

This is going to take a detour through watches. Stay with me.

The Swiss already lived this

For most of the twentieth century, a Swiss watch sold one thing: precision. A chronometer-certified mechanical movement was the prize at the end of generations of craft, and the luxury watch industry spent staggering sums closing the gap between thirty seconds of drift per day and three.

Then quartz showed up.

A quartz crystal, when you apply a voltage to it, vibrates 32,768 times per second. That number isn’t arbitrary. It’s two to the fifteenth, which means fifteen binary frequency dividers get you to one clean pulse per second. The whole thing runs off a battery the size of a shirt button, costs almost nothing to make, and keeps better time than any mechanical movement ever built. A quartz watch drifts 10 to 30 seconds per month. A great mechanical watch drifts that much in a day.

When Seiko shipped the Astron on Christmas Day 1969, the competitive moat of Swiss watchmaking evaporated. The thing they’d been selling for a century, accuracy as proxy for craft, had just been commoditized to nearly free.

The Swiss made the obvious mistake first

The instinct in Geneva was to compete. If quartz was the new game, the Swiss would play it, and they’d play it better than the Japanese.

In 1977, Rolex shipped the Oysterquartz. Chronometer-certified, in-house movement, arguably the most over-engineered quartz watch ever made. Omega did the same thing. So did Longines, Tissot, and basically everyone else.

It didn’t work. Like, at all. The numbers from the period are genuinely brutal:

  • Swiss global market share fell from over 50% in the 1960s to 24% by 1978
  • Mechanical watch exports collapsed from 40 million units in 1973 to three million ten years later
  • The number of Swiss watch companies dropped from 1,600 to under 600
  • Six out of ten workers in the sector lost their jobs

Some of these weren’t marginal brands. Universal Genève, in the 1960s, was a peer of Omega and Longines. They went all-in on quartz, shipped the world’s thinnest quartz movement trying to out-engineer the Japanese, and by 1989 they’d hollowed out so completely that they got sold to a Hong Kong investment group and effectively vanished for three decades.

The Oysterquartz itself? It was a flop. The customer they needed never showed up. People willing to pay Rolex prices for accuracy could buy a Casio for fifty bucks that kept time just as well. People willing to pay Rolex prices for a Rolex didn’t want a quartz watch at all.

This is what an industry looks like when it meanders. The Swiss spent fifteen years trying to win the new game and lost half of themselves figuring out it was the wrong game.

What the survivors figured out

The brands that came through eventually realized something obvious in retrospect: the customer for a $10,000 mechanical watch was not buying timekeeping. A Submariner customer knew a Casio kept better time. He paid anyway. What he was buying was a story. A set of associations. A small signal about taste and history that he could wear on his wrist. The Casio couldn’t deliver that signal at any price, because the signal had nothing to do with the technology.

Once the industry accepted this, everything reorganized. The mechanical movement became a feature, not a bug. The fact that the watch was less accurate, required winding, cost a fortune to service, and was anachronistic in every functional sense became the entire point.

Rolex now makes only mechanical watches. In 2024 they cleared roughly $12 billion in revenue, more than the next five luxury brands (Cartier, Omega, AP, Patek, Richard Mille) combined. They got there by losing the technology fight in 1969 and then deciding not to keep fighting it.

Same crisis, with horsepower

Here’s where this gets interesting. The same thing is happening to the supercar right now.

For a century, a Ferrari sold one thing: acceleration. So did Lamborghini, Porsche, McLaren, Bugatti. The whole supercar pyramid was organized by horsepower and zero-to-sixty times, and the Bugatti Veyron sat at the very top. When it launched in 2005, it was a thousand-horsepower moonshot that cost $1.7 million and represented the absolute frontier of what an internal combustion drivetrain could do.

Then Tesla shipped the Model S Plaid. Zero to sixty in 1.99 seconds. Faster than the Veyron. Faster than every Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, and Koenigsegg in production. Off the lot for roughly a twentieth of the Veyron’s price.

The Plaid is the new quartz watch. Raw acceleration, the thing supercar brands had been selling for a century, has been commoditized by a four-door family sedan any dentist can buy.

Ferrari is making the Oysterquartz mistake

Ferrari just unveiled the Luce. Their first all-electric series car, designed with LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s design collective. 1050 horsepower from a four-motor in-house drivetrain. Aluminum and glass interior. Marketed as “disruptive.”

I read the press release and I knew exactly which watch I was looking at.

The Luce is the Oysterquartz. It’s overengineered. It’s in-house. It’s got the celebrity collaborator. It’s making the absolute most determined argument possible that Ferrari can play the new game, and play it better than anyone else. And it’s making the exact same mistake Rolex made in 1977, which is assuming the game is still about the spec sheet.

The Ferrari customer is not buying acceleration. They haven’t been for a long time. A Plaid will beat every Ferrari to sixty. The Ferrari customer knows this. They pay anyway, because what they’re actually buying is the badge. Enzo. Le Mans. The widow’s curse of drivers who died in his cars and made the legend bigger every time. The sound of a V12 because no one needs a V12 anymore. The whole operatic Italian grief-and-glory inheritance, completely orthogonal to the question of how fast you can get to the next stoplight.

The Luce gives all of that up. The visual language is Apple, not Maranello. The interior is glass and aluminum, not leather and machined metal. The horse on the hood is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because the rest of the car has stopped speaking Italian.

What they should do instead

Rolex didn’t win by becoming Seiko. They won by becoming more Rolex. The crown, the Oyster case, the mechanical movement, the fluted bezel, the green dial, the impossible-to-find Daytona. The product became more anachronistic over time, not less.

The supercar industry has the same path available. The customer who can spend $500,000 on a car has already decided practicality isn’t the question. They’ll pay for a combustion engine that doesn’t make engineering sense the same way they pay for a mechanical movement that doesn’t make timekeeping sense. Because the impracticality is the point. The V12 is the fluted bezel. The manual gearbox is the winding crown. The fact that the car is loud and inefficient and requires a special mechanic is exactly what marks the owner as the kind of person who owns one.

This is the part I keep coming back to, and I think it generalizes. When the metric you’ve been winning on gets commoditized, the answer is almost never “compete harder on the new version of the same metric.” That’s how you build the Oysterquartz. The answer is to figure out what you were actually selling, which is usually not the thing on the spec sheet.

Rolex took fifteen years and two-thirds of the Swiss workforce to figure that out. Ferrari has the whole case study sitting right there in front of them.

I guess we’ll see if they read it.

PS: If any of this is interesting, I’d recommend the Acquired podcast episodes on both companies. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal go deep on the business, history, and culture of each, and a lot of the thinking here is downstream of theirs.