Ferrari Roma Eschews Silly Antics for Pure Driving Pleasure and Practicality
The Ferrari Roma ushers in a new era for the automaker without losing sight of what makes the brand special.
In the world of exotic cars, most automakers have historically sold vehicles based on their wild looks, screaming powerplants, and audacious features, caring little about silly things like ergonomics or practicality. If you want those things, you buy a GT, of course. But the Ferrari Roma is truly different – an exotic car that’s both beautiful and practical, a car that’s sold with adaptive cruise control and not a driver-adjustable rear spoiler. And, as Hagerty’s Jason Cammisa points out, the Roma is also a sign that the future of Ferrari might look a lot different than its past.
“Ferrari has, in my opinion, made a couple of missteps with its brand in the last few years,” Cammisa says. “The Roma is both a product of those mistakes and a sign that things might be changing.” And as he points out, the GT car concept is essentially dead, as no modern road car is incapable of transporting its owner from point A to point B without breaking down, and some crank out incredible numbers nonetheless. Thus, the Ferrari Roma is indeed the best of all worlds. Heck, it even comes with seven years of free maintenance, standard.
But what about those miscues? Well, according to Cammisa, Ferrari had somewhat lost its way prior to rolling out the Roma. “Its cars, in most ways, are objectively better than ever,” he says. “But they have, I’m sorry to say, lost all semblance of elegance. Slats, grilles, spoilers, and 600 special editions with more dollars added to their price than substance under their skin.”
Unlike the California upon which it descended from, the Roma is “a return to the gentleman’s GT,” Cammisa says. “The type of car that Enzo might want to drive or that elegant people might want to buy. Ferrari is at least once again paying attention to the models of its glorious past, the ones that made the company so famous.”
While Cammisa isn’t a huge fan of the million screens inside the Roma, nor its “numb electric power steering” or “turbos that give it too much power,” he loves pretty much everything else about it. “It’s a modern Ferrari,” he concludes. “Which means that the steering is outrageously precise, the turbos don’t muffle the sound, and the suspension tuning makes it feel massless. It’s beautiful and elegant – it’s a real Ferrari.” One, it just so happens, that’s incredibly practical and far less audacious compared to what we’ve seen in the past.
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