In case anyone was wondering what the Apple Car would have looked like inside, it would have been roughly this.
As an Apple Car⢠it makes sense, but as a Ferrari it's incredibly soulless and oversimplified. This Ive design aesthetic (Dieter Rams' aesthetic really) is fine on consumer electronics where you want the device to disappear and give way to the display, but on something as emotional as a vehicle (Ferrari especially), this design falls flat.
I do hope some of the design details work their way through the industry (e.g. using glass instead of gloss black plastic, convex glass to add depth to digital gauges), but I hope the rest of it stays as a one-off experiment demonstrating the hubris and one-dimensionality of a top designer.
EVs have a weight issue that fundamentally constrains their overall design. It is really a tough engineering problem to try to shave weight off of everything, because you are starting out with a 700kg battery replacing a 400kg engine + transmission, so you are ~300kg in the hole, and need to remove 300 kg from the rest of the car. That's why they do crazy stuff like use the battery as part of the structural frame, to save on metal there. Every extra kilogram reduces range. Solid things are made hollow. Metal is replaced by plastic. Fabrics are thinner or replaced with lighter-weight engineered materials. Lots of things are removed. Physical buttons gone, flourishes gone, handles gone. Seats are made thinner and with less material. See how they brag about a simpler new steering wheel that is 400g lighter?
All of that and still they come up with a 2300 kg compact two row SUV.
So, if you are going to be redesigning everything anyway to try to get rid of as much weight as possible, why not hire a designer known for sparse, minimalistic, clean design? It makes sense. It may not be what Ferrari buyers want, but you can't really blame Ferrari for giving it a try. We'll see how well it sells.
I think you are wrong on the "weight issue" regarding EV. ICE cars have a weight issue as they consume more gas depending on the weight, which is the case to a much lesser extent in BEV. At high speed, aerodynamics become the main factor reducing range. With urban stop and go traffic, regenerative braking lowers the weight's impact massively. BMW's i3 was constructed with the same mistake: letâs reduce weight to gain range, which didnât pay off. It added to the cost due to expensive composite materials, lesser to the range. Manufacturers learned from BMW's mistake and build the body with conventional metal sheets. Nevertheless reducing weight has its advantages: using less material saves expenses and helps driving dynamics. Range is a minor factor.
i think the discussion here is about performance/pleasure cars, where weight is a real handicap. not range or actual convenience
Ferrari will sell all that they make. If you want to purchase one of the highly desirable low-volume models you can't just walk into a dealership and write a check. You first have to purchase a few of the high-volume models to earn enough "points" on their internal customer priority list. A lot of rich guys will buy a Luce just for that purpose, and then leave it in their garage or maybe drive it to the country club occasionally.
For the type of buyer you describe this vehicle parked in the garage, to speculate, may be capable of doing double duty as an automated battery backup for the estate nearby to store energy during times of excess grid capacity and to discharge during periods of high demand or grid interuptions. I would be interested to know if the vehicle includes this capability, or if it could be easily modified to offer this capability. Probably is preferable to an onsite diesel generator for example even if it is not an exactly comparable situation, just due to lower local emissions.
wow. I never cease to marvel at the companies that make you jump through hoops in order to give them your money. chesterton had a good passage on that in his father brown mysteries (highly recommended to any fan of the genre):
The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy productâan âexclusiveâ commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon.
I wonder what the speed/weight tradeoff is on a Ferrari though. Eg on a Bugatti they can put in a beast of an engine (heavy) because their buyers care only about power output and if it gets 8 miles to a gallon who cares.
On an electric sports car, where does the break lie between extra weight for a powerful battery and too much weight to make the car go vroom?
Side note: I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
Manufacturers like Ferrari, Porsche and Lotus focus on HP per KG. This is why they build ultralight versions of their cars. Porsche's 911 GT series trade glass windows with plexiglass and badges with stickers. Ferrari omits carpets and inner body panels leaving welds bare. Lotus re-invents everything make things lighter and with less material.
Mercedes, Bentley and Bugatti likes to build road missiles. Fast and comfortable, luxurious cars with insane straight line performance and stats, but not made to be thrown from corner to corner in a track. Since these cars are heavier and have somewhat higher center of gravity, they can't pull higher G numbers on skid pads and tracks. They also have somewhat slower lap numbers (Maybe Mercedes' SLR McLaren is an exception to this, but it's half McLaren, so...).
If you want to go to the edge of it, see McLaren and Pagani. They take the track-optimized, lightweight car design to extremes. Esp. McLaren.
Edit: I mixed up CLK-GTR with SLR. My bad, brain haze. Sorry.
> Side note: I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
Sure, except the very poor will be eco criminals (due to being unable to maintain their equipment to relevent emission standards/pay the associated offset fees) and will be selectively hounded and exploited by law enforcement.
Look at horses, they used to be a commodity used for transport, now they're pets of the rich, being taken care of and used for recreation.
I guess the poor get donkeys...
> I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
That's certainly the way it's worked out with horses after petrol cars took over.
Weight doesnât make all that much difference to EV range: aerodynamics are a much more important factor.
Handling and âsports car feelâ are affected by weight, though, and this is the real reason that Ferrari would want to cut weight to a minimum on their EV.
The inside of the Apple Car looked nothing like this - primarily because "driving" is the main activity the design of this Ferrari is intended to serve, and "driving" was not an activity that the Apple car intended to support.
You're driving it wrong.
It certainly looks like an Apple device. Ive's aesthetic is Apple's aesthetic, so if you hire Ive, that is what you are going to get.
I can see a car company who doesn't care about design stumbling into this outcome, but Ferrari doesn't seem like that kind of company. So the choice must have been intentional.
As Ferrari has been proving over the last few generations, they know how to make engines but Pininfarina knows how to design cars. I'm not even slightly surprised by the Luce.
I wonder if that explains why mahinda's designs are significantly better (if still not great).
Marc Newson is a âWatch Guyâ and this also clearly comes across.
Well, thatâs the problem with product design â looking at it simply doesnât suffice. It needs to be experienced in person.
Well, thatâs not (yet) possible, but this video does a good job in the meantime:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wv1btxCjVE&pp=ygUQTG92ZWZyb20...
Everything will undoubtedly feel nice/premium as a result of being metal and glass, but you spend more time looking at the entire interior than touching every part of it, so appearance is important.
Car interiors are static so your brain very quickly ignores it while driving or after owning the car for a while.
The interface / ergonomics on the other hand end up way more important than anything else when it comes to personal enjoyment of the interior.
I thought I was going to look at a car when I clicked that link. I scrolled the last 80% of the way out of morbid curiosity. This secondary quest was not disappointing: no car photos. So weird. Perhaps this is a complaint about the title.
But since it's all about the interface, I must say, the idea of a sports car with a touch screen is still rather terrifying.
All the necessary controls are fortunately physical in the Ferrari.
This is way better than what VW and other manufacturers have been doing in the last 5 years. At least VW is going back to physical controls as customers weren't satisfied with the capacitive buttons and hidden menus for essential functions.
BYD has physical controls, which I really like.
I'm not sure there are any essential functions in a menu on a VW. Indicator, light and wiper controls are on physical stalks (kind of wild that "has an indicator stalk" is no longer common ground in cars), while ADAS, audio, climate controls and seat heating have dedicated touch buttons or sliders. The button experience of these touch buttons is mediocre, not as bad as bad physical buttons (since the touch buttons still gives very clear feedback whether they are activated), but certainly not as good as decent physical buttons. The sliders work fairly well, though for volume adjustment specifically it keeps feeling awkward, a rotary knob would be clearly better.
From this point of view the announced change in e.g. steering wheel buttons seems mostly cosmetic rather than fundamental. I hope they still keep the slider functionality on the wheel, it's quite intuitive and quicker imho. The bigger change would be that they're adding a central switch bar back, which seems to have the functions on it that are currently dedicated buttons in the main display. This seems like a clearer UX win to me.
They say elsewhere that itâs part of a series of reveals.
The ev powertrain last October, this, and the exterior in May.
Note that the exact date in May has not yet been announced, but there is a hint: in all the videos and screenshots of displays the date and time is shown as "Mon 25 10:10".
Now when Ive was still at Apple, the first screenshots of iPhone showed a time of 9:42 because that was the time they expected when the device was first shown. And that time was placed in all the official PR images well in advance.
Extracting from that, a Monday the 25th could be the time we'll first see the full car. Going through all 25ths of each month this year, May is indeed the only month where it falls on a Monday, so it's probably the 25th of May.
Same, even on the web I was not able to find a car photo.
This is the kind of design I'd expect from Ive: it is designed to look nice. Ease-of-use is another story.
There's a lack of consistency on the wheel controls that make this look more like a UX showcase rather than a usable interface.
Case in point:
- A bunch of rotary knob that perform the same function: to select. But, they all look different and use different ways to represent the selection.
- Some have a lighted indicator, some have a notch, and some are completely ambiguous.
- The 2, 1, *, 0 switch has a hole in it to indicate the currently selected option.
- The plastic surrounding this is is mere millimeters of thickness and I would expect it to break off within a decade.
I think it's fine for wheel controls to look different though. You're adjusting them when engaged with a task that requires constant concentration, so being able to easily identify the control you want and then use it makes sense.
I'd rather have this than all of them look the same. If you're driving in rain and need to swap to wet tyre mode, but have to spend time figuring out which generic knob does the thing, it's dangerous.
Exactly.
My car has every button and knob share the same design language but all subtly - or not so subtly - different so that the moment a control is touched there is zero ambiguity as to a) how to operate it and b) which one it is.
Appearance also comes into play as one doesn't necessarily have to _look straight at_ something to distinguish which is which or what the position is, merely it being somewhere in peripheral vision may very well give just enough clue so that you don't really have to take your eyes off of the road.
Porsche is the only car company that has nailed interior EV design - IMO.
Their interiors look high-end, functional and not just a minimalist big computer screen.
https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g46528574/2024-porsche-m...
Lexus CT200h is one of the best interiors ever designed. The design language was tactile: every single button or control had a different action or feel.
https://cdn-fastly.thetruthaboutcars.com/media/2022/07/20/94...
Thereâs a roughly 7 inch above the vents that flips up whenever the car is off, but using the screen is optional. The screen is up near the road, and itâs very safe to use. Thereâs a small joystick to move the cursor.
Screen up:
https://preview.redd.it/after-about-a-year-of-ownership-post...
CT also has a stateless âspringy gear selectorâ which works the same way as a manual gear selector, but after selecting the gear it springs back, so itâs stateless. It also has tactile blocking for gears you canât enter yet. It felt extremely satisfying.
CT got a 10/10 from me, like a small aircraft cockpit. Enough knobs and computers to be exciting, but not OTT. Made a hybrid micro hatchback feel exciting.
BMWs interior pre-iPad-glued-to-the-dash is of the same quality. The automatic gear shifter is stateless, by it has an extremely satisfying clunk, buttons and dials for everything. Note that a stateless gear shifter isn't ideal if you ever need to move your car on a dead battery. In a BMW you need to go under the car and screw in a bolt that pushes the parking pall into neutral.
> iPad-glued-to-the-dash
Whoever started this trend has a lot to answer for. It looks tacky as hell and is a technically-inferior solution to just having a dock that would let a customer bring their own tablet. It's truly the worst of both worlds and a seemingly pervasive problem across multiple manufacturers in the automotive design space.
CT200h is the nearly perfect hybrid, IMHO, interior included. Thumbs up emoji!
This looks gorgeous.
Looks a little bland to me.
Personally Iâm very happy with the interior of my 2012 Cayenne.
What do you mean interior EV design? Why does it have to differ from an EV to a gas powered car? You might have some different gauges, a control or two that is different, but other than that, why does an EV have to look a certain way?
> Why does it have to differ from an EV to a gas powered car?
Because they have different design constraints.
It didnât take long for car manufacturers to figure out that a horseless carriage doesnât have to look like a carriage. Early ones such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Velo certainly did. You can even see it somewhat in the Ford model T.
Similarly, an electric car doesnât need an exhaust, and if the engines are in the wheels it doesnât need a transmission tunnel.
That changes the design constraints, so chances are the optimal design looks different.
Well it's exactly that. It shouldn't look different, but the other carmakers decided EVs must have annoying interiors.
It still looks like a big computer screen, I'm afraid. Although, making it seamless with the dash is a step up, you're right. That tiny paddle gear shift looks horrendous, though.
I would really like to have analog features back, buttons and all that, in an EV.
It literally is just a big minimalist computer screen. I drive a taycan and it would be significantly better if they were to remove the massive touchpad and replace it with a cluster of physical controls.
I think Ferraris have gotten especially ugly in the last few generations. I generally like Jony Ive designs. But this is a mismatch. A whole new kind of not-right-is-ugly for Ferrari.
Elements of it are precious and well designed. But it doesn't feel like a car interior.
Oh. I have the exact opposite feeling. I'm not into cars but I love this.
This is precisely why it's the right design for an Apple car and probably the wrong design for a Ferrari.
I knew someone who allegedly worked on the Special Project after a successful career at more familiar premium automotive brands. He was expressing exasperation with the process and said "I don't get why they're letting people who don't like cars design one. You wouldn't send your kids to a school full of teachers that hate children!"
I love cars and absolutely love this interior. It's retro-modern and has clear inspiration from Ferraris of the 80's and 90's. Ferrari's interior in the past few models (296, Roma) was absolutely atrocious, and this is a big step up.
My fear is that itâs the most attractive part of the car design :-)
The good news is that this won't matter much because it's probably out of consideration for pretty much all of the HN crowd. Ferrari is one of those things which the ultra rich and a small sliver of the population can afford to buy brand new, and those not even lurking here. For everyone else it's something they can try out on a track if they are curious.
That being said, I wonder what can be cloned from this by others. The ICE are huge and refined and people can steal that engineering into other cars. With battery and motors, I feel like everyone is now on a level playing field and starts from zero. I wonder what will set apart a Ferrari from others.
Seems like the steering wheel comes in three colours: silver, rose gold, and space gray...
This is the closest we've ever got to the Apple Car.
That is the point that cracked me up the most.
No actual car is visible in this car promotion website.
I had the same thought, but the article starts with "first look at the interior". So maybe the exterior does not exist yet?
It's exists. Car and Driver and other sites have photos.
Obviously it's weird to not showcase the exterior of a Ferrari, that being pretty much the entire point of Ferrari. The cynic in me can't help but think this may be due to the fact that it looks like a lowered Hyundai with a body kit[1].
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a70279106/ferrari-luce-ev-...
Do we know thatâs an accurate image? The site says itâs an illustration and admits the exterior reveal comes later
I hope itâs not accurate. If so, interior looks more interesting than the exterior
Oh, wow. Yeah nobody is going to convince me that that is a Ferrari.
Wow, first we got SUVs that were like morbidly obese Saloons, now we have this which is like a comically squashed SUV. Horrible.
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