How Jony Ive's team designed the first electric Ferrari

The new Ferrari Luce is the first vehicle from the Prancing Horse brand to have its design led by a studio outside Maranello, and the way it came together is just as unusual as the car itself.

Ferrari handed the exterior and cabin to LoveFrom, the creative collective founded by former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson. It’s a significant break for a brand whose design has long been the domain of its in-house studio, run by Flavio Manzoni.

The Italian automaker says the process started by bringing LoveFrom on board and walking the team through the project and its philosophy. Then things went quiet.

The designers headed away for around six months with no contact at all, before returning not with a slideshow or a wall of renderings, but with two books laying out their vision. Ferrari says those early ideas weren’t far off what’s been revealed today.

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The brief that came back was about simplification, and you can see it in the finished product. The Luce is built around what Ferrari calls the “glass house”, a large glazed cabin with the bodywork and a pair of floating aerodynamic wings wrapped around it. The result is a clean, almost shrink-wrapped shape with very few interruptions.

One of the more unusual structural details is what the team has nicknamed the “flying bridge”.

“In traditional terms it would be the C-pillar, but it sits somewhere between a C-pillar and a targa,” said Jeremy Bataillou from LoveFrom, who was responsible for the vehicle’s interior design. “It is a carbon-fibre component, so it is a structural element, and it ties the inside and outside of the car together.”

LoveFrom’s fingerprints are all over the details too. Ferrari says the dashboard is machined from a single solid piece of aluminium, and the three-spoke steering wheel uses an exposed aluminium structure.

Glass is used throughout the cabin as a material rather than just for screens, with the gear shifter machined from glass with an LED inside, and even the console and steering wheel buttons made from glass.

Perhaps the most telling detail is how little was carried over.

“There are almost zero components reused from a previous car. Everything was designed from the ground up,” Mr Bataillou said. “There are hundreds of little products in here that we were able to design, which was an incredible opportunity.”

There are some genuinely clever touches that came out of treating the car as a blank sheet. Ferrari says the instrument binnacle is attached directly to the steering column, so it moves with the wheel and keeps the driver’s view consistent no matter their seating position.

The central screen is treated as its own component rather than being buried in the dashboard, and can be tilted towards either the driver or the passenger.

It all points to a car that was allowed to start from scratch, rather than being shaped around an existing Ferrari. Whether buyers warm to such a clean, design-led approach remains to be seen, but the Luce is clearly a deliberate departure for the brand.

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