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Travel has never been has been the real goal of Ferrari. Sure, you can drive one—though not literally youbecause you probably can’t afford it. For the few who can, it’s a car seen stopped at a traffic light before escaping, or parked in the stands of a luxury hotel, fueling lust and envy. For ordinary people, Ferrari is a symbol: of power, control, precision, and wealth—but also of the desire for those qualities, and the idea that they are virtues in the first place. The Ferrari is a unique bedroom poster car, captured in a glittering image pinned to the wall in a boy’s bedroom like a picture of a woman in a controversial dress: something unattainable.
If a Ferrari is an object of spectacle, an Apple device is an object of work. An Apple product, whether it’s a laptop, music player, smartphone, tablet, speaker or watch, is designed to melt into its context and melt into everyday life. Frictionless, intuitive, and transparent—at its best, an Apple product stops feeling like a thing at all, and instead enables activity. An iPhone or a MacBook shows style, but through minimalism, an aesthetic concerned with disappearing into the background and being obedient to the intended purpose. This design approach transformed the industrial modernist tradition it had inherited—from Dieter Rams, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and others—into an ethos that was pessimistic rather than progressive. Better technology would soften, tame, and deodorize the emotional.
The old world of automotive nostalgia and the new world of glass rectangles collided this week, when Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first electric supercar. The car looks like a Ferrari on the inside but an unmistakable lozenge on the outside, a design that some Ferrari fans hate. Does it mean the end of the playing horse? Nope. Instead, Ferrari’s first EV is a marriage of fun and wistful that no one could have predicted. Through this pairing, Ferrari’s Luce marks the ultimate triumph of the smartphone in the car. There is nothing left to aspire to that is not the epitome of Silicon Valley’s tech industry.
Although cars remain important in America, they have rejected as a model of identityreplaced by online life, where expression can be worldwide. Young people don’t worry about drivingpartly because young people they are not allowed to go anywherebut also because smartphones made doing so less important. Silicon Valley had entered the transportation business, first with ride-sharing and then with self-driving cars. It seemed only right that technology companies could play a big role in the future of transportation.
From 2014 to 2024, Apple tried and failed to make a car. Originally, it was meant to be a real car, with wheels and everything. Details were scarce, but Apple hoped the car could do for cars what the iPhone has done for phones—reinvent the category, and with it, the way people lived. Apple hired people from traditional automakers, from Tesla, from battery companies, from autonomous driving startups. Thousands of people worked on the project, called Titan, at a reported cost of a billion dollars a year or more.
Apple was in over its head. A car, it turns out, is not like a personal electronic device. Apple tried to turn the Titan into an autonomous driving platform. But in the end, after ten years, the company he gave up. Canceled Project Titan. The future of Apple’s cars would be left to CarPlay, a software platform that can make your iPhone run your car stereo and, soonyour climate control and speedometer.
Jony Ive spent nearly three decades at Apple, where he served as chief design officer from 2015 to 2019. He had a hand in almost every major Apple product from the return of Steve Jobs in the late 1990s to 2010 – iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch, and even. Apple Storecompany headquarters. I have been reported he became bored at Apple, and cut ties with the company in 2022. He now runs LoveFrom, an industrial design consultancy.
Ive connects Apple’s legacy with Ferrari’s future. The sports car company hired LoveFrom to design the Luce, inside and out, and gave Ive and Marc Newsom, his LoveFrom partner (and fellow Apple alumnus), the freedom to design an entirely new car. Car and Driver information that this innovation extended to the shape of the car, electric motors, batteries, steering wheel, physical controls and digital displays. The car produces more than 1,000 horses and costs $ 640,000.
Because of its price, the Luce functions more as a symbol than a car, like all Ferraris before it. Yet the car doesn’t look like a Ferrari, or at least nothing like the received idea of a Ferrari. It’s a four-door hatchback, a configuration that, although not new for the company, is very unusual for an Italian flagship. It’s also the first Ferrari to take up five seats, betraying the company’s clear ethos of understatement—a Ferrari should be superfluous rather than useful.
But mostly, Luce is smooth and rounded, it resembles an aerodynamic accessory more than a big-haunched one. a running horsethe rearing horse used as Ferrari’s logo. The design offers performance—a “lower drag coefficient than any previous Ferrari,” according to Car and Driver—which helps the car accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in about two seconds. But the classic Ferrari style was lost in the process: low, loose, and animalistic, like a machine stretched over the muscles of a fierce creature.
For this reason, Luce has offered resistance. Some “Ferraristi,” The New York Times information“they find it hard to hug outside of Luce like a bubble.” Former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo said, according to The The Wall Street Journal“At least, I hope they will release the horse that car.”
One sarcastic post on social media it shows the car behind him, and the charger inserted into his bottom. The joke refers to the Apple Magic Mouse, whose popular design now requires you to plug it upside down while charging, to prevent it from being used. Message: The Ferrari designed by Jony Ive brings an unwelcome sense of Apple design to a mismatched product and brand. The Ferrari Luce looks like the kind of car Apple would make. Now that the smartphone is here after more than a decade of anticipation, people aren’t sure they want it.
In part, that’s because the entire supercar market has been stagnant for at least a decade. In 2015, when Tesla started producing the Model X, the cars were ready it ceased to be an object of desire. Tesla may have kept up with Ferrari or Lamborghini in the past, but it did so in an unsophisticated way, stripped of the physical lust that had filled its Italian predecessors. No teenager would hang a picture of Tesla on their bedroom wall. Nor, for that matter, does Ferrari’s Luce.
Some critics accuse dinosaur supercar cleaners”petro-masculinity,” a flawed and modified attachment to gasoline combustion and climate-damaging excess. Lamborghini scrapped plans for its electric supercar, the Lanzador, after to conclude that his needs were “close to zero.” Pagani dropped the electric version of its multi-million dollar Huayra on the grounds that EVs don’t have the “feel” of internal combustion vehicles. Gordon Murray Automotive, led by McLaren F1 designer, to be sold its EV division focuses on V12 gasoline vehicles. Aston Martin, Porsche, and Lotus also have them cut back their desires for electricity.
But as the examples of Tesla and Ferrari prove, without forgetting System E electric racing circuit, EVs can be just as—or even more—powerful than gas-burning cars. The problem with EVs was never their performance on the road.
Ferrari seems to have realized that electric cars are the future, and that following the future demands a redesign of the supercar itself, as well as the supercar company that makes them. Taking that risk by designing the Luce as a production model that will be produced rather than discarded or relegated to concept-car purgatory is to be commended.
But that kind of risk-taking has consequences—Ferrari’s the stock was down about 8 percent after Luce revealed. However, a Ferrari was always a toy out of the reach of the wealthiest, and owning such a car allowed the driver to develop new and dangerous ways, such as taking business risks. Seen this way, the Luce embraces the iconic spirit of a bigger car than a V12 Pagani or a Gordon Murray T.50.
Ferrari may have realized that its old way of chasing wealth and signaling power is over. Apple, Ive, and their relatives hit years ago. Lamborghini and Aston Martin may see dying on their own terms as more honorable than relying on inconsistent values. But Ferrari has steered a more sensible course, which also makes his track seem uninspired and even unprincipled. The company has accepted an important characteristic, which is that electric cars are the future, even for large cars, and embracing that expectation on the market will help it be passed down to the bottom.
Silicon Valley still sees risk in business as a virtue, but its successful industrialists seem to value utility, simplicity and intelligence over apparent adornment or luxury. That ethos is in line with the focus on design that pervades the industry. The little principles that Ive brought to Apple became doctrine in the technology industry. Technology was considered good if it was smooth, quiet, seamless, and emotionally stimulating. Like Bauhaus and International Style which influenced, monochromatic, advanced minimalism is unknown and general, and its ability to work anywhere contributes to its ability to expand internationally. Ostentation and idiosyncrasy—of the kind that the classic Ferrari represents—didn’t have much of a place at Ive’s Apple. Instead, technology was meant to disappear, to hide complexity, to provide emotional stability, and above all to present itself as inescapable.
This most famous of Italian sports car manufacturers may have realized a more practical truth as well: The high-end in the technology sector is one of the only markets left for Ferrari after all.
