THE FERRARI LUCE EV'S GLASSY, GLOSSY INTERIOR IS SOMETHING TO SEE
- Ferrari's new all-electric machine will be called not Elettrica but Luce, and it'll have four seats with slim leather-covered buckets and a glass and aluminum exterior.
- Ferrari partnered with the design firm Love From, which is known for work on Apple touchscreen products, but the Luce uses tactile switches and glass buttons.
- The third and final reveal, showing the complete car, including the exterior, is expected in May.
Talk about a slow burn. Ferrari has been taking its time rolling out the release of its first all-electric model. We know from previous releases that the first electric prancing horse will be a four-door four-seater making more than 1000 horsepower and will hit 60 mph in less than 2.5 seconds thanks to four electric motors. We also know that it will have a battery pack rated at 122 kWh (gross) and be capable of 330 miles of range by European rating methods.
At a recent event in San Francisco, we got a few more clues as to what we can expect to see on Ferrari showrooms when the Italian EV comes to the dealers at some as yet unannounced date. First is that it has a name that is not Elettrica, which is what Ferrari has been calling the car during development. No, the new Ferrari is the Luce (Italian for "light"). That's referring to luminescence, not weight, because at just under 5100 pounds, the Luce will outweigh even the Purosangue SUV as Ferrari's beefiest offering.
An electric family Ferrari is already an outlier in Ferrari's stable, and an additional novelty of Luce is that it was designed in partnership with an outside creative firm. For the past five years, Ferrari chairman John Elkann, CEO Benedetto Vigna, and chief designer Flavio Manzoni have been working with Love From, a creative agency founded by former Apple designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson.
Ive and Newson are famous for their work on the early iPhone and Apple Watch, so it's no surprise that the interior components in the Luce have some familiar materials, including soft-edged screens, primary-color displays, and muted brushed aluminum finishes in cool grey, matte silver, and light champagne gold. What was surprising though was that touchscreens took a back seat to tactile controls. Fans of toggles will be delighted by the rows of machined metal switches that await their questing fingertips. Even where the design is screen-heavy, as in the gauge cluster and center infotainment screen, a clever use of layered OLED display and innovative cutouts allows for the use of real needles, clocks, and convex lenses to add visual interest and clarity of use.
"When everything is flat, you stop absorbing the information," Ive told us at a roundtable where he made the somewhat startling assertion that despite his work on iPhone, it would have never occurred to him to use touchscreen tech in an automobile. "We used touch on the phone to solve a problem [of not enough real estate to hold all the needed buttons for the desired applications]. In a car, that's just the wrong technology."
That's not to say there is no touchscreen in the new Luce, only that it is not the main way for the driver to interact with the machine. Instead there is a simple, leather-wrapped three-spoke steering wheel, appealingly slim in a world of chunky tillers. Anodized aluminum switches sit against black glass pods with cruise control, drive mode, and dash lighting on one side, power modes, suspension, and wipers on the other. Volume and seek controls are on the back, flanked by paddles which control torque delivery for what Ferrari says is a gear-change-like sense of engagement.
The steering-wheel hub is attached to the gauge binnacle, which moves to match the driver's preferred seating position. This is a sleek aluminum-framed glass display, with OLED graphics seemingly floating at different levels. There's no magic trick to this, the screen is in fact made up of several layers, a technique only possible with the very thin OLED technology. By cutting out holes in the upper layers, Ferrari and technical partner here, Samsung, were able to create displays where, for example, the speedometer graphic is below the level of a physical needle, which is itself behind additional drive info and beneath a curved inset lens. The end result is both more interesting and easier to parse when driving quickly.
The same approach is used on the overhead console, where an airplane-inspired set of toggles and pull-outs controls lights and launch control. In the center console, the cut-out tech highlights a clock which can become a chromometer or a compass, all with real needles in their glowing centers.
More glass flows from the center console, whose suede-covered lids open butterfly-style, and close with a delicious magnetic click. Oddly, despite having USB connections, a standard iPhone won't fit in the console, but Ferrari says there will be a charging pad ahead of the shifter in the final design.
Speaking of the shifter, that's glass too, a smooth shot-glass-sized knob that slides easily through a set of gates machined in the glass surround. If all this talk of glass in a car is making you nervous, rest assured that it's all from the laboratories of Corning, where it was designed to be even more shatter and scratch-resistant than the patented Gorilla Glass on your phone screen. Making use of the material's transparency, the Ferrari driver will set his or her glass fob in the console, where it will go from yellow to black, while the shift knob lights up yellow when the car turns on. It's theater, and there's no guarantee it's as thrilling as firing up a V-12, but at least Ferrari knows it's important to give some gravitas to its starting procedure.
It's hard to say what the car might be from just some dash parts and a slim leather seat, but it's interesting to see Ferrari branching out in both technology and design.
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