The Designer of the iPhone Created a Surprisingly Analog Electric Ferrari
When you hear that the designer of the iPhone, Jony Ive, is involved in designing Ferrari’s first all-electric car, what do you imagine? Sweeping touchscreens lining a sci-fi-looking cockpit, perhaps. This is the guy who helped make touchscreens the norm, initiating an industry-wide purge on buttons (RIP BlackBerry). But with Ferrari, he’s doing the opposite.
The Luce might be the Ferrari of the future but its interior is surprisingly analog. It’s the result of a five-year collaboration between Ferrari and LoveFrom, a creative agency founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson, whom Ive hired at Apple to help create the Apple Watch and who has a history in automotive design, including spearheading the ahead-of-its-time Ford 021c concept car in 1999.
The two bonafide design legends decided that just because the Ferrari’s engine is all-electric, it doesn’t mean the interface has to follow suit.
While the Ferrari Luce’s interface includes digital displays, such as the modest control panel, the main focus is on mechanical buttons, dials, and switches. Below the control panel are nine different knobs that primarily control the air conditioning, while a feat of watchmaking is integrated into the top-right corner that, through independent motors, switches between being a clock, chronograph, compass, and launch control. In most modern cars, these kinds of features are fully digitized.
The Luce’s steering wheel, made in a razor-thin specially developed aluminium alloy, has a similar variety of physical controls with two analog control modules inspired by Ferrari’s Formula 1 cars.
These tactile traditional design elements are intended to feel, according to a press release from Ferrari, “simple,” “familiar,” and “easy to navigate.” Basically, Ive and Newson, two pioneers of futuristic design, decided to go back to the classics.
But this is only the philosophy behind the inside of the car. The car’s exterior won’t be revealed until May, offering the full picture of what Ive, Newson, and Ferrari have been collaborating on for half a decade.
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