Love the iMac and iPhone? This one’s for you
We cannot overstate this: in terms of design and technology, and their impact on the wider culture, these are the two most influential figures of the past 50 years.
What you’re looking at here is arguably the most consequential car interior, well, ever. It sits inside the Ferrari Luce – now we know the name – and its unveiling is phase two of the three-step launch process for the Italian legend’s first all-electric car. Why the significance? Because it’s the work of Sir Jony Ive, the man who steered the design trajectory of Apple alongside the late, great Steve Jobs.
Five years later, here we are. We won’t see the Luce’s exterior until May, but in many respects how LoveFrom has redefined the interior, and the user interface, is arguably the bigger story. In short, if you love Apple products – the MacBook Air, iPhone, Apple Watch – this one’s for you. The guys who inadvertently helped usher in the touchscreen era in car design have finally arrived to show everyone how it should be done.
Apple, of course, recently abandoned its long-gestating plans to enter automotive, leading to one of the great ‘what-ifs’ of recent times. Ive had already left the company to co-found a new design collective called LoveFrom, and since 2019 has been free to tackle new areas. A long-time friend of Ferrari executive chairman John Elkann, the prospect of working on a Ferrari was something the car-loving Ive – and his equally visionary business partner, Marc Newson – couldn’t resist. Imagine if they were entrusted with the design of the electric Ferrari… What a meeting of minds that would be.
“We wanted to explore an interface that was physical and engaging,” Ive tells TopGear.com on a personal guided tour during the reveal near LoveFrom’s San Francisco HQ, “and to take the most powerful parts of an analogue display and combine them with a digital display. The first thing we did was try to understand the foundation and architecture of the interface, how things were organised. This isn’t something that’s often apparent.
As ever, the devil is in the detail. With its main binnacle, three-spoke wheel and self-contained central infotainment display, the Luce’s HMI looks deceptively simple at first glance. Behind them is an aluminium sub-strate, punctuated with four gorgeous air vents. Yet, as anyone who’s driven a modern car knows, simplicity in this context is the most difficult thing of all to achieve.
Much of what you see is made of anodised aluminium, and even the elements that aren’t visible have been designed and manufactured with obsessive care. Aluminium is suitable for precision machining, and it’s been hewn here from solid billets using 3- or 5-axis CNC milling tech. The result, says Ferrari, is an ultra-thin, surface hexagonal cell microstructure that’s as resilient as it is lovely to look at. Security screws are an unavoidable part of the process but, as on Apple devices (which use Pentalobe screws), even they justify themselves aesthetically.
So the ergonomics adhere to first principles. Beyond that, this is a story of materials excellence – as well as imagination and creativity. The unveiling is spread across a handful of ‘work stations’, with components disassembled in order to show the meticulousness of their design and construction, including the seats (no cheap runners here). Never mind the tactility of the steering wheel, the Luce’s 12.86in instrument binnacle itself is a thing of sculptural beauty. The edges are rounded off, and invite investigation. There is no plastic on the wheel column surround (in fact, there’s no plastic to be seen anywhere), and the tolerances are millimetrically perfect.
“The binnacle and steering wheel are intimately connected. This is about driving, and everything else augments that experience. This is what’s essential to be able to drive, and the binnacle is about output and the steering wheel is about input. All the controls are physical and mechanical. We stress tested these big organisational principles. We felt they were very important, but we also worked hard to verify the assumptions we were making. Fortunately, the best engineers in the world are at Ferrari.”
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