The Jony Ive interior is here

Since Apple finally put its mysterious and long-suffering Project Titan out to pasture, we’ve wondered what a Jony Ive-designed Apple Car might have looked like. Today, we might have a clue. This, though, is no Apple Car. It’s the Ferrari Luce (“light” in Italian), the actual name for the EV formerly known as Elettrica, and I’m fresh from getting a walkthrough of the thing from Sir Ive himself. At a glance things look like you might have expected, but there are a few surprises here.

While Ferrari has sold hybrids in some form or another since 2013’s LaFerrari, Luce (née Elettrica) will be the company’s first all-electric machine. We got our first look underneath back in October, when we saw the chassis, battery pack and other details that pointed to this being a larger, more family-friendly machine than your average Ferrari. Last week, I got a look at the next major component, the interior, which comes courtesy of LoveFrom.

LoveFrom is the house that Jony Ive founded after leaving Apple in 2019. The obsessive design firm, which currently numbers about 60 employees, was acquired by OpenAI for $6.5 billion last year. LoveFrom has thus far taken on a medley of projects, like the $60,000 Linn Sondek LP12 turntable, but the Luce could be among the company’s biggest projects so far — at least in terms of literal dimensions.

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.

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.

Yes, all that sure does sound like I’m writing about a new iPhone and not the latest Ferrari. But where Apple has been pruning every physical control it possibly can from its devices lately, LoveFrom will insert some great tactility in the Luce. The shifter moves through its detents satisfyingly, the air vents open and close with a clear snick and the paddles behind the steering wheel pop with a great feel.

My favorite feature is the windshield wiper control, a little dial in the upper-right of the steering wheel face. It features a tiny lens that magnifies the current setting. It’s actually magnifying one of four custom OLED panels, 200 ppi units from Samsung, cut and shaped to deliver LoveFrom’s ornate style.

The gauge cluster behind the steering wheel, or binnacle as it’s more formally called here, is two OLED displays stacked on top of each other, with a physical needle sandwiched between serving as a pseudo-tachometer for this car without an engine. The gauges change and morph as you move from one mode to the next.

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.

The attention to detail on everything is astonishing. Even the rails that hold the seats to the floor are gently shaped and anodized to match the rest of the interior.

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.”

Both Ive and Newson own many vintage machines, and Ive said that modern cars “are missing some things that we love about our old Ferraris.” Things like tactility. “It was very clear to us that we needed to figure out as many ways as possible to viscerally and physically connect to the interface,” Ive said.

So, while the Luce does have that pivoting touchscreen, it’s far from the vehicle’s primary interface. Ive said he hopes that physical connection and all the clever touches create a uniquely charming vehicle.

Ive told me that the LoveFrom team has genuinely enjoyed working with Ferrari. “It’s been really lovely,” he said, and he praised Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna’s dedication to this project and where it might lead down the road. “Benedetto is an amazing engineer,” he said, “he’s really interested in what can be learned more broadly.”

The biggest challenge might have been working within the automotive industry. Here, design, form and function are key, but safety is of the utmost importance. “It’s very hard,” Ive told me. “I’ve never worked in an area that’s so regulated. Some of it’s great, because you understand why, and people’s safety is certainly important, but some of it drives you nuts.”

It’s far and away the most exciting and fresh interior I’ve seen outside of the ultra-rare machines like the $4 million Bugatti Tourbillon. But it’s so clinically precise and refined that it lacks the rough and raw feel that typifies many classic Ferraris. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing will be debated endlessly, and I look forward to reading your comments, but I do figure it’ll go a long way to delivering the kind of new clientele that Ferrari must be targeting with the Luce.

Ultimately, whether anyone will want one is hugely dependent on how good the rest of the car looks and how much it will cost. Those are questions we still can’t answer, at least not until May, when CEO Vigna says we can expect the Luce’s full reveal.

For Ive, though, it seemed like that won’t be the end of the road for this automotive journey. “At the end of a project, there are two products. There’s what you’ve made, and there’s what you’ve learned. I’ve always been fascinated by what you’ve learned,” he told me. “And honestly, we’ve learned so much.”