Luce: First Electric Ferrari. Designed by LoveFrom

Everything will undoubtedly feel nice/premium as a result of being metal and glass, but you spend more time looking at the entire interior than touching every part of it, so appearance is important.

As Ferrari has been proving over the last few generations, they know how to make engines but Pininfarina knows how to design cars. I'm not even slightly surprised by the Luce.

There will undoubtedly be people that like or love it and there's nothing wrong with that. Design is rather subjective. Fortunately I'm not in the market for a $300,000+ EV made by Ferrari, so I don't have to lose sleep at night over buying this or not :)

This is an enormous departure from Ferrari interiors to the point where it no longer looks anything like a Ferrari beyond the emblems inside.

I first thought that too, but if you take the time to scroll down a bit, you'll see that the instruments are actually three separate screens, and at least the center one has a mechanical needle. Also, the central control panel has lots of physical switches (Musk would hate it) and even a round instrument in the top right corner with mechanical hands, which can be either a clock, a stopwatch or (for whatever reason) a compass. So definitely not an iPad put in a holder.

IMO if they just had materials with any sort of visual interest to them, this would be pretty beautiful.

Instead it feels like sitting inside an iPad which is an aesthetic already cheaply deployed at massive scale to motels, pharmacies, and shitty coffee shops.

This question's answer would require something more lecture length that dives into fundamentals of design with an equal amount of time spent on automotive design. No one has the time or care for something like that, so I'll try to give a high level answer.

Generally speaking, cars are not about simple designs/shapes. They, especially to enthusiasts, are viewed as something closer to art where care is taken to craft shapes and forms for both function and feel. This is amplified dramatically for Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc..

Ive was clearly doing this design work for the Apple EV that never shipped. It followed Apple's historic design aesthetic (driven largely by him) of simplifying things as much as possible--using circles and squircles everywhere, removing as many unnecessary geometry as possible. That's fine for an Apple EV because that's their design aesthetic. That is, demonstrably, not Ferrari's design aesthetic. It's a jarring departure from decades of automotive design and, in my professional opinion, an exercise in hubris.

As we remember that design is largely subjective and that this is all my opinion, I will say that almost everything in the vehicle is overly simplified:

* Steering wheel: an attempt at modern retro, but they added two blobs (to keep the steering wheel simple) to house the dials and buttons instead of incorporating it in a sculpted, thoughtful way. Instead of putting the turn signals in those blobs (or elsewhere), they interrupted the simple steering wheel with a couple circles to act as the turn signals.

* Digital instrument cluster: it's an iPad that connects to the base of the steering wheel. Wasted space in the top corners. Convex glass is a really nice touch however. Gauges are strange to me (gas gauge for an EV, left dial is confusing at first glance, G-force gauge unnecessarily busy), but that can always be changed later so not worth waxing on about.

* The key: a small iPhone 4. It's not terrible, but it's rather uninspired and boring. Ferraris aren't supposed to be boring.

* Dashboard interface: another iPad, but with a Mac Pro handle on it. Might be very nice for moving it, but how often are you going to do that? Does it stick out far enough to act as a wrist-rest as mentioned in their video? The mechanical switches are a nice touch if the display/UI keeps up. The clock/compass/stopwatch in the top right is neat, but almost antithetical to the rest of the design--it's added complexity for the sake of complexity. I still like it though.

* Vents: these make sense to be simplified. I've never loved the number of flaps in most vehicles, but if you have kids you might have issues with toys/food getting lost inside if there's no mesh behind it.

* Seats are nice, but if you removed the Ferrari emblem would you know it's a Ferrari? Is there enough bolstering for spirited driving?

The shapes, iconography, etc. are all carried over from Apple devices. Cars, even in EV form, are not iPads and iPhones. Cars, particularly those like Ferraris, are supposed to be designed, sculpted, given character and flare in order to evoke emotion.

Rivian and Porsche, in my opinion, have designed beautiful EVs (inside and out). They have a design aesthetic that's unique to them and in the case of Porsche stays true to the brand. The Ferrari Luce looks like Ferrari hired Ive to take whatever work he did for Apple and copy paste it over to them. If this was announced as an Ive + Kia/Hyundai/Honda/Lexus/etc. collaboration would it look any more or less out of place? No, because it's been simplified to the point that it doesn't even look designed any more. It almost feels "default" in a way.

This is all just my opinion as someone that's been doing product engineering and industrial design for a long time and happens to love cars--take it with a grain of salt.

CT200h is the nearly perfect hybrid, IMHO, interior included. Thumbs up emoji!

Rivians don't even have a physical vent control (to aim the vents). That alone disqualifies it from anything close to "excellent". And that's before mentioning all the missing physical buttons that should've been there.

Touch screen buttons, especially the ones on the far edge of the center screen, are harder to accurately hit for most people. More physical buttons = better = more premium.

yeah, seems EV is a hard market to enter. Porsche seems that have had a hard time entering it too (see numbers, am no expert)

haha me neither

To be honest, it may help for the modern Ferrari driver. It doesn't help for those who appreciate the Ferraris from the '90s and before.

Acceleration is about the only selling point of a sports EV.

They're so ungodly heavy because of the batteries that they handle like barges. They need giant tyres and so much ESC and software control because these things weigh almost 2000kg or more. You can try and work around it but there's only so much that can be done to make 2000kg take a corner.

Looking at where sports cars will be in 10 years with ICEs being regulated out of existence makes me very sad because it seems like we're about to see the death of the lightweight sports car.

> This is not a car for tech bros with no culture, no traditions, and no past.

Weird, because that's exactly what it looks like.