14 DAY TRIAL // Ferrari is a name that needs no further presentation. It's the symbol of sports cars, the car maker than imposed red as official color of any respectable supercar, and it's a dream ride for any car enthusiast in the world.
Owning a Ferrari is more than a description of your bank account, it's a statement of class, of wanting a riding pleasure that not many competitors can offer, and ultimately, it's a synonym for "class" anyway you look at it.
Models like F40 or F50 are the embodiment of the latest technologies in car races, packed in a street-legal rocket. But a new Ferrari prototype is doing something no one might have expected.
The concept is called Ferrari FFX Millechili, which basically means "1,000 kiligrams". It's not a drivable model, but it still represents efficiency in performance.
There's only one problem: it's hybrid. Yes, it's true, this is the first hybrid model ever produced by the Italian manufacturer. It uses an electric drive train not just to boost power but also to increase efficiency.
Who would have thought that Ferrari too would be engulfed by the "going green" trend of the latest years? Probably, since it's only a prototype, it will never enter production. It's just a statement, something like: "See? We can do green, now let's get back to building supercars."
The electric drive train is just one of the shocking revelations about this model. The manufacturers said that the FFX is actually made of lightweight materials including carbon fiber, plastic and cardboard.
Cardboard? Come on, Ferrari, get real here. Unless you can convince people that it's some sort of bulletproof, anti-radiation, space age cardboard, the word itself doesn't inspire much confidence.
I hope they weren't inspired by the East German Trabant of the communist era, which was also made of cardboard (Europeans know what I'm talking about). It's true the little commie spawned a true collector's frenzy after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but surely Ferrari could have done better.
At least by calling the cardboard something fancy, like "corrugated fiberboard". It's almost the same thing, but it definitely sounds better.
I'm sure they had a very good reason for introducing this new material, though I don't know if the company is really considering its use in vehicles, or if it was just developed to make the prototype easier to build.
Unfortunately (is it?) there's not much chance of seeing the FFX on the road, as it happens to most prototypes, but it could be the platform for a new model, sometime in the near future.