The Official Ferrari Blog (Sept 11) and Magazine issue 10
When I was eight I had a poster of a red Ferrari F40 on my wall. Brutal, fast, expensive – it was the most desirable thing in the world and I wanted one. It was my dream, my desire, my reason to be successful. The pinnacle of my ambition. Fast forward 32 years and I find myself outside the Ferrari factory. It should be a dream come true, but over the years my dreams have changed. It’s not that I don’t want a Ferrari any more. I do. I absolutely do. That raw desire hasn’t gone anywhere. However, over the past three decades there has been a fundamental change; not just for me, for everyone.
We have all realised that the planet is something we need to worry about and that we’re using up too much of the world’s resources. My eight-year-old self grew up to be a sustainability specialist. I help businesses all over the world to be more sustainable and inspire people to make more sustainable decisions, and it was actually in this capacity that I found myself at the Ferrari factory. I’d been asked to conduct a review of the Company from a sustainability perspective, a task that also gave me the chance to try to get to the bottom of the ultimate conundrum. Could I square my desire to do my bit for the planet with my desire to own a Ferrari? On the face of it, it might seem that the answer would have to be a resounding ‘no’. After all, we’re talking about cars that emit anything up to 470g/km CO2. The Ferrari brand conjures up many things: performance, speed, excellence – but the environment is definitely not one of them. All of which left me standing at the Maranello entrance with a heavy heart, expecting to find that I would have to send that childhood dream packing. The good news is that I discovered a number of factors that made me feel much better than I’d expected. Yes, the emissions of the cars are high. But we have to remember that the actual emissions are only one part of the impact of the car. There’s no point looking at them in isolation. The whole life cycle of the car has to be taken into account; its production, getting it to the owner, driving and servicing and then finally getting rid of it at the end of use. I discovered much to feel positive about throughout this whole cycle and I found out that Ferrari has been taking significant, positive steps to address the big emissions question, too. What’s more,
I felt really good about the way Ferrari was going about sustainability
It just felt that it was… well, it felt very Ferrari...click here to read the full article.
