It started with a partnership that looked too good to pass up. Ferrari needed an electric vehicle. Apple had Sir Jony Ive and his firm, LoveFrom. Two titans of design colliding? Sure, why not. Ferrari and Apple share a specific obsession with how things look, not just how they work. Both brands have stumbled—remember the Magic Mouse 2 or the Ferrari California?—but they remain symbols of peak performance wrapped in beauty.
On paper, this collaboration felt like a cheat code.
“Recruiting perhaps the greatest tech product designer… appears… to be somewhat of an industry shortcut.”
The car is called the Luce. Light, in Italian. Irony isn’t subtle here. The name suggests illumination, yet the Luce mostly sheds light on a fatal flaw in merging automotive and tech design principles.
Inside vs. Out
Step into the cabin. It works. LoveFrom applied tech-industry logic to treat every interior element as a standalone product. Tactile controls return to the driver’s reach. It’s a sharp rebutal to modern cars that just stick iPads into dashboards. Retro touches like circular dials mix with aluminum accents. It feels expensive. It feels right.
Step outside. Something goes wrong.
The Apple influence hijacks the silhouette. Squircle proportions? Classic Ive. The only Ferrari left is in the F355-styled rear lights. Strip the badges off this thing, and would you know it was from Maranello? Probably not. Ferrari has evolved visually since the Daytona or the 360, sure, but their cars have always been instantly recognizable. The Luce looks like a spaceship that crashed into a showroom.
It feels like LoveFrom ignored traditional car design entirely. They treated the exterior like a smartphone chassis. A shell. A vessel to protect the user interface inside.
Who are you designing for?
Maybe that logic holds water if you think cars are just mobile living rooms. It doesn’t.
Ferrari doesn’t sell transportation. You already have a Honda. You already have three other cars that get you from point A to point B. You buy a Ferrari for the heart. You buy it because the lines hit you differently than anything else.
Think about bedroom walls. Not interior dashboards. Exteriors. The exterior design of Ferraris has inspired generations of enthusiasts, including me. The closest most people will ever get to driving one is standing on the sidewalk staring at it. If the outside looks like an overpriced tablet case, you lose the dream.
You buy an iPhone to doomscroll and make calls. You buy a Ferrari because your other options don’t make your heart race.
The market decides
The Luce treats the car like a luxury appliance. It reduces an object of pure passion to a gadget. That’s fine for a laptop. It is deadly for a supercar brand.
Investors noticed. Ferrari’s stock tanked after the reveal. They know. We know. Trying to turn a Ferrari into a posh piece of consumer electronics misses the entire point of what makes the brand valuable.
So we are left with a beautiful interior sitting in a confusing box. It’s clean. It’s futuristic. It’s safe.
Does it feel like a Ferrari?
