Jony Ive-Designed Ferrari Luce Tests CEO Benedetto Vigna’s EV Bet

Ferrari launched its first all-electric vehicle, the Ferrari Luce, to a cacophony of criticism this week, leaving the storied brand stumbling. Following Monday’s launch, the stock dropped 8 percent and didn’t rebound until Thursday, when CEO Benedetto Vigna defended the Luce, saying that customer interest was “strong.” 

What made the response so unusually broad outside of automotive circles is a specific quality of the Luce’s design failure, according to automotive design experts. Ferrari has always sold desire across class lines, and people who could never own one still had a relationship with the brand, through posters, racing and the simple fact that a Ferrari looks like nothing else on the road. Yet the Luce flattened the aesthetic while keeping the $600,000-plus price tag, enraging not only its own fans but the broader public as well. 

The backlash even reached Ferrari’s own past. Luca di Montezemolo, the company’s longest-serving chairman in the post-Enzo era, reportedly told an Italian news agency that the Luce risks “destroying a legend,” and said he hoped Ferrari would remove the prancing horse badge from the car. Di Montezemolo ran the company from 1991 to 2014, and his public rebuke of a current Ferrari product is unprecedented.

Paul Snyder, a veteran automotive designer with decades of experience at major volume manufacturers like Ford and Honda, and currently the Paul & Helen Farago Chair of Transportation Design at the College for Creative Studies in Michigan, called the Luce “Shocking, because it just doesn’t look like a Ferrari at all,” comparing its proportions to a student’s first exterior clay model and arguing that it misses Ferrari’s two most fundamental visual reads: silhouette and surface. “There’s just no originality,” Snyder told Observer.

Derek Jenkins, SVP of Design and Brand at Lucid Motors, whose Lucid Air has been compared to the new Ferrari Luce,  made a similar distinction between the car’s exterior and interior. “The face of the car isn’t identifiable. This is where the response is coming from. It’s a mismatch with the brand,” Jenkins told Observer. He was more favorable toward the cabin, calling the steering wheel “both nostalgic and modern” and praising the switchgear and air vents as “thinking about the brand in a future context.”

Jony Ive’s design magic isn’t translating to sports cars

Ferrari contracted with Jony Ive and Marc Newson’s design firm LoveFrom for the Luce. The interior, unveiled last year, received mixed reviews for its analog and digital blend. The exterior design, however, has become the butt of internet memes. Ive is best known for designing the first Apple iPhone and working on the never-launched Apple Car, while Newson is known for his design of a concept car for Ford called the 021C. 

But just because Ive and Newson have designed beautiful and iconic devices and furniture doesn’t mean they can design a car. Industrial design and automotive design are two very distinct skill sets, as Snyder points out.

Snyder said that Ive’s work on the Luce would have scored “two out of five” on exterior evaluation criteria such as originality, proportion and appeal at the college, equating the exterior design to a middle-of-the-road sophomore project. “It doesn’t have any of the emotional factors or sculptural factors or the dynamism and verve that Ferrari should have,” he said.

“It really does look completely derivative of all the A.I. slop you hear about car design,” he continued, adding that if the aerodynamic wing over the front windscreen had been removed, the dramatic glass line Ferrari created at considerable engineering expense might have been something genuinely new. Snyder also noted that if the interior design language had been applied to a city car, or a smaller vehicle like a Cinquecento, it might have resonated more positively with audiences, but in a Ferrari, it makes no sense.  

CEO Benedetto Vigna’s risky pivot

The interior restraint reflects a deliberate approach that reportedly came from the top of Ferrari. In an interview with Autocar India published in April, CEO Vigna called it “bizarre” that people assume an EV must have many screens, saying Ferrari’s approach with the Luce is to bring together tradition and innovation. The company opted for tactile buttons, dials, and switches rather than following the industry trend toward touchscreen-dominated interiors.

Automotive analyst Stephanie Brinley at S&P Global Mobility argued that the market reaction is likely short-term. Ferrari operates at low enough volume that even a polarizing car can find sufficient buyers to be commercially viable. “It’s not the first Ferrari that people have scratched their heads about,” she said. “You can fix design with money and time.” The real risk, she said, is if the car sells poorly and Ferrari does not pivot. 

Vigna told a roundtable in Modena on Thursday that customer interest has been robust from new ultra-wealthy buyers, a group the brand has been trying to recruit for some time, with particular focus on China’s growing wealthy class, even though luxury automakers are struggling in the country because of the economic environment there and local competition. Whether Ferrari’s China audience will take to the polarizing design remains to be seen. 

Whether the market agrees with Ferrari’s design bet or with the rest of the world’s visceral response will be answered by Ferrari orders, not on the internet. Vigna noted that order numbers will be disclosed in July when the company releases its second-quarter earnings.