FERRARI LUCE: JONY IVE'S FIRST CAR DITCHES TOUCHSCREENS

# Ferrari Just Handed Jony Ive the Keys to the Future Ferrari's first electric car now has a name, Luce, meaning "light" in Italian, and an interior that looks like the iPhone designer's revenge against touchscreens in cars. ## The Anti-Tesla Manifesto The interior makes a deliberate statement against the large-touchscreen trend dominating EVs, with Ferrari saying it "defied the convention that electric cars must be dominated by large touchscreens," instead prioritizing mechanical buttons, dials, toggles, and switches. "To use touch in a car is something I would never dream of doing, because it requires that you look at what you're doing," Ive told journalists at the San Francisco reveal. This from the man who literally invented the iPhone touchscreen. Where Tesla stripped the Model 3's dashboard down to a single central screen, and competitors like Rivian, Lucid, and Mercedes-Benz have followed suit with ever-larger digital surfaces, Ive and Newson have gone in the opposite direction. ## Newson's Alien Eyes and Biomorphic Seats Marc Newson approaches design as an experimental exercise in structure and advanced technology, combined with a tactile exploration of materials, with his reach incorporating watches, footwear, luggage, and aircraft interiors. He previously created aluminum surfboards for pro surfer Garrett McNamara, and produced the iconic Lockheed Lounge in 1988. The Luce's seats showcase Newson's signature biomorphic design language. The air vents deliver what the original poster called "an alien eye vibe," perfectly capturing Newson's otherworldly aesthetic that has made him one of the most influential designers of his era. ## Tech That Actually Makes Sense LoveFrom and Ferrari enlisted Samsung here, whose slim-line overlapping OLED houses individual pixels that can be turned on or off independently, creating perfect black and infinite contrast ratio. Samsung OLED screens give it super-rich contrast and the flexibility for Ive and Newson to pull off the biggest party trick: punching three holes in the 12.86-inch top screen to show the individual dials underneath. The needle is a physical item, made of anodized aluminum, back-lit by 15 LEDs. Even the starting ritual gets the theater treatment with an aluminum speedometer needle attached to a ring gear that can spin 360 degrees as part of the "startup ceremony". ## The Bigger Picture The company has said the electric supercar will cost over €500,000 ($535,000), with the full exterior reveal scheduled for late May. Ferrari and its parent company Exor announced a multi-year creative partnership with LoveFrom in 2021, and this interior represents the first major output from that collaboration. Ive spent years working on Apple's scrapped car project before it was abandoned. While we'll almost certainly never see those Apple Car designs, the Ferrari Luce likely echoes elements we could have expected to see in an Apple car. The Luce isn't just Ferrari's first EV. It's proof that the future of car interiors doesn't have to look like an iPad glued to a dashboard.