A Car By the People Who Would Have Designed the Apple Car
Tim Stevens
Remember the Apple Car? You know, the project that was all anyone wanted to talk about before AI took the world – and Apple – by storm? Honestly, given the current state of the car market, Apple was probably wise to kill it off, with manufacturers rushing to pivot from their all-in-on-electric strategies amidst a shift in politics, incentives, and perhaps taste. Oh yes, and tariffs.
Anyway, we can still dream about what could have been. And that dream sure seems more tangible now with the Ferrari "Luce". Their first all-electric vehicle, which I wrote about back in 2024 before it had a name. Why? Because they had contracted LoveFrom to work on the design. Yes, the company led by Jony Ive (the part that didn't go over to OpenAI with the io acquisition).
If you're familiar with the designs that Apple produced under Ive's tenure, particularly in the era beginning with the iPhone 4, you'll feel right at home here. The overall aesthetic is one dominated by squircles and circles, all with absolute, minute perfection and symmetry.
At first blush, it's a bit clinical, but dig deeper, start poking and prodding, and you'll see there's a real sense of charm here. Fun little details and genuinely satisfying tactility begin to reveal themselves. The key, for example, has a yellow panel with an E Ink background. Push the key into the magnetized receiver in the center console, and the yellow on the key dims, moving across to glow through the top of the glass shifter. It’s meant to symbolize a sort of transference of life.
Tim Stevens does a nice job conveying the touches here, but you should really watch the video shared by Mike Matas, the designer you may know from projects back in the day such as Facebook Paper and various work within the Apple ecosystem – including at Apple, and yes, more recently at LoveFrom.
The entire project looks like a beautiful um, hybrid of digital and tactile elements. That's notable as one of the knocks against Ive towards the end of his Apple tenure is that form was winning out over function, with buttons cast away in favor of whittling down the device to just the essence – which mainly meant, of course, the screen. But despite Tesla's best – IMO, sort of tacky – attempts, that doesn't really fly in vehicles. So it's great to hear LoveFrom is inspired by both worlds:
The shifter isn't the only thing that's glass. There are 40-odd pieces of Corning Gorilla Glass scattered throughout the cockpit, everything from the shifter surround to the slightly convex lenses in the gauge cluster. What isn't glass is aluminum, much of it anodized in your choice of three colors: gray, dark gray and rose gold.
What does that sound like?...
The center display is a 10.12-inch OLED perforated with plenty of holes to allow some pleasingly chunky toggle switches through, plus a glass volume knob. The little clock in the upper-right can turn into a stopwatch or a compass, with its needles swinging about depending on the mode. The whole central control panel pivots and swivels. Just grab the big handle below and drag it where you want it.
I bet that swivel feels just great...
Ive was on hand to unveil the interior, clearly a little nervous about showing all this for the first time. After five years of working confidentially on this topic, Ive said he was "enormously excited" and "completely terrified" to provide our first real glimpse at the Luce.
Marc Newson, who founded LoveFrom with Ive, said: "Jony and I share a really, really deep interest in automotive things and vehicles. Actually, I'd go so far as to say that that is probably a hobby of both of ours."
And it was almost much more than a hobby, as Newson was of course at Apple as well! While obviously the interior of a Ferrari – no word on pricing yet – would have undoubtedly been different than what an Apple Car may have looked like (it certainly wouldn't have been cheap, probably not in the Ferrari range – or maybe the "Pro" model may have been), there's probably a lot of ideas that transferred over...
One more thing: remember who is on the board of Ferrari? One Eddy Cue...
