Comment by Traster
4 months ago
I clearly don't understand Design. My expectation is that an amazing prolific designer would deliver different designs in different contexts. At Apple maybe it's this minimalist industrial design. But what I'm seeing here - and forgive me if I'm just an idiot about design, is exactly what you'd get it you asked ChatGPT "Ferrari but Johnny Ive apple design interior".
It's all the same design language and materials you'd seen on Apple product. It's almost like someone went "let's make the infotainment a giant Apple watch".
I would expect you call up a good designer and they design something special that works in the language of your product, something uniquely new, but also uniquely Ferrari. But what seems to be happening here is if you phone up Johnny Ive you'll get a slapdash re-run of 2010s iPhone design.
Compare the iconic Testarossa [0] with the latest F80 [1], do you see anything common that screams “Ferrari design language”? I don’t. If anything, Luce looks more like a modern take of the classic Ferrari model.
You criticized it despite not knowing how the exterior looks like, or what Ferrari’s requirements are, e.g “fresh take in the new era”, “distinct look for EV”, “avoid upsetting existing buyers who want to protect their car’s value”, “attract younger affluent buyers who grew up with Apple products”, and so on.
Another thing to consider, this will be a SUV for the mainstream, not the enthusiasts, although it still requires preorder and long waiting time.
Design is very subjective. I personally don’t love this. I like Land Rovers’s much more. Still the criticism here reads a lot like “Jony Ive is no longer cool, so anything he touches sucks”.
[0] - https://f1rstmotors.com/blogs/the-ferrari-testarossa-the-cla...
[1] - https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g65351444/2026-ferrari-f...
You have eloquently described my first impression upon looking at the pictures. It feels way too Apple-y or should we say Jony Ive-y. Perhaps a design’s style is truly unique to an artist, much like painters who inevitably develop recognisable styles, and therefore we should not be surprised by this outcome. For me, it dilutes the Ferrari's historical and unique Italian design.
I don't think you are not understanding design, big-name designers do have a design language but in this case it just feels like Ive re-applied whatever his design language for Apple in the early 2000s into a Ferrari car.
Very little care on aligning the design to the brand design, except for the seat and a few selector switches (which somehow Ferrari seems to have accepted? Strange from such a picky client), no care about keeping refined design elements like stalks for the turn signals and wipers and instead applying this buttons-everywhere-for-every-function approach that is considered a regression in EVs input design.
The screens are just different shapes of iPhones/iPads instead of something uniquely Ferrari-Ive, feels like a Ferrari-Apple car collab.
Really don't understand it, Dieter Rams did a lot with the same design language because he worked for Braun for a long ass time, Ive is completely untethered from Apple so re-applying the same design language he created for the brand unto another brand is just unimaginative.
This looks exactly like “we had the one trick pony, Jony, design an iPad car interface”
Unsolving the problem of human vehicle interaction.
This is Jony Ive taking his design aesthetic (minimalism, primary shapes, metal&glass) and applying it to the interior of a car vs. Jony Ive designing an interior of a Ferrari that looks like a Ferrari.
Or lack of design aesthetic. It has no opinions except for safe ones.
This design does not feel apple to me at all. Most noticeably, the central console has physical switches all over, something neither apple nor carmakers are keen of in recent years. I would also expect an apple product to have a fully digital dashboard, but it looks like everything is old school analog display on that Ferrari, even the clock.
I wonder how many people could have actually known that this is designed by Jonny Ive if they haven't been told before.