The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader
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Look at those tactile buttons and knobs. For cruise control and wipers. And the flip switches for Infotainment / climate.
The "LUNCH" mode button that you have to pull and then shows a glowing ring. Feels 90s science fiction. I wonder if I can 3D print a replica, not sure for what yet, but I want it. It's literally inspiring for me.
The outside though :(
It can be sponsored by Uber Eats and whenever you press it, it automatically orders a burger to your current GPS co-ordinates.
The control panel is the odd one out at the moment, but perhaps in the next version they'll "upgrade" it to a lop-sided rhomircle instead. Maybe even find a way to make the seatbelt foul the accelerator pedal when in use, in homage to the Magic Mouse.
I like tactile knobs and switches. I can see my self enjoying using them, similar to a fidget toy. Or an earbuds case that you can close with a satisfying SNAP.
Look at the infotainment, you have the handle bar thing that you can feel and thus rest your hand vertically. But instead of just a row of flip switches, in the middle you have the depressed button and a wheel. All of this helps using it without taking your eyes of the road.
I don't have a way with words, but there is also something about the instruments cluster. Looks cool I guess. Reminds me of 80s / 90s Mercedes maybe? Shows everything without being too much.
The interior looks like the car version of those "Xbox 720", "Gameboy Omega" meme renders from the late 2000s. It's just plain ugly.
Compare that to some of the beautiful devices Braun and Sony created in the past. Buttons don't prevent something from looking beautifully crafted. But ugly design does.
Thinking of it, you know who could design a beautiful Ferrari interior? Teenage Engineering. Look up the OB4 radio in red.
I looked up "Xbox 720" and can't see the resemblens to the Luces inside.
The type of buttons, how you use them, how they feel, is for me part of the design. And I like what I see :)
You're not the only one. Users have been screaming for tactile buttons for about a decade or more now. Mercedes recently switched to tactile buttons and more expected to follow.
But regarding this car, did you check where it says "CONTROL PANEL" in your link? It is still a flat screen ...
Anyway, none of this looks revolutionary to me. Whether you think it is aesthetically pleasing or not (I do not).
Yes, it has 9 or so physical buttons. Those are the ones I talked about in the post you are replaying to. As long as you can most needed tasks by buttons I'm fine also having a touchscreen.
Just judging my the images it seems the climate On/Off is touchscreen only. Even though you can control temperature by buttons. Could be that you can enable / disable it via other means. (Double click climate or whatever)
> none of this looks revolutionary to me.
Yeah same. But then again I have no idea what was revolutionary in car dashboards. Maybe GPS navigation?
The exterior of basically all cars from Hyundai up to (now) Ferarri is currently stuck at some kind of aerodynamic / fuel efficiency local maximum that dictates that they all look like the same boring bar of soap. Nobody seems willing to budge on this and climb down the hill even a bit.
As problematic (quality-wise) as the Cybertruck is, at least they went full-send on the design. It might look ugly but at least they tried to not make it look like every other truck on the market.
Are we looking at the same images? The steering wheel (https://ferrari-cdn.thron.com/delivery/public/image/ferrari/...) has a bunch of switches, yeah, but the Infotainment/climate (https://ferrari-cdn.thron.com/delivery/public/image/ferrari/...) seems to be all touchscreen buttons on the huge iPad-like device in the middle? Like most modern cars, it looks incredibly difficult to use and outright dangerous.
Seems to still depend on some state that they show on the display, makes it seems like you still need to hit "invisible" buttons in the iPad UI to start setting the temperature with the hardware "lever", kind of defeating the purpose. But maybe again it's just the website/images/videos being unclear.
Hopefully you can activate it by changing the temperature. Or maybe double pressing the "climate" physical button.
Ferrari sells dreams. That's not a car anybody will dream about.
This is just gross incompetence all around.
Above all, Ive had an ethical responsibility to protect his clients from harming themselves by refusing the commission.
Speaking of Porsche, they did once design a Star Wars ship and ended up with something super generic that looked like a free sci-fi model on sketchfab. Same as this car.
While all the other recent Ferrari's are basically a blur, I bet 95% of people could order then roughly by year.
It looks like a generic Hyundai. If not for the badge I'd have assumed it was some Chinese mid tier EV.
It is sort of bland-nonoffensive like motel 6 artwork.
For people who buy a Ferrari the price is not part of the equation at all.
Also Ferrari’s whole game is demand and supply manipulation - there are always more people who want a Ferrari than can actually buy one. These will all sell out whatever happens.
Or it look like a modern successor to the Pontiac Aztek.
I can only imagine what the Italian designers have to say about it…
For previous models, it was the excessive "sportiness" that sometimes made them look like a car from a mecha anime.
Luce's is more of an underwhelmed look, especially with the outstanding interior design it was privileged to have that was (rightfully) overhype over the last few months.
A car with that kind of an interior deserved a much bolder design.
That's a paradigm shift for Ferrari which has always been associated with exclusive performance and beauty - and the removal of that USP is why it is seeing such pushback.
At that point, does it even matter
Same reason why people buy Porche SUVs instead of 700hp Grand Cherokees (it's a fucking shame they never tossed that engine in the Journey though) or Corvettes instead of Chargers.
I don’t know if there is a psychological term for that phenomena in design but I think it’s related with mere-exposure effect [1]. A design that stands out and is uncommon, will evolve a deeper relationship over time with the observer than a well-polished predictable design.
It's not all that ugly, it just doesn't really hit any Ferrari design language, or even do something interesting enough to justify the extreme cost.
Marc Newson is also on the team, and there striking similarities to (t)his 27 year old concept car[1]: https://marc-newson.com/ford-021c-concept-car/
Regarding the UI: This is miles ahead of any other digital cockpit made by Ferrari. Also pretty good overall.
[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48271629#48278841
From manufacturing luxury vehicles they are now manufacturing gadgets.
If someone is interested in buying a tablet on wheels, he can shop Tesla or Xiaomi, they don't need a Ferrari.
From some point on, people buy stories, experiences, luxury. Gadgets don't provide the same experience.
I get that they think about going away from the combustion engine, but as a manufacturer of insanely expensive, loud and overpowerd sports car this doesn't make sense.
It's like if I as a software dev would be worried about the future market and suddenly advertise myself as a psychologist in search for clients.
Ferrari shares fall after launch of first EV as Jony Ive design proves divisive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282034
Ferrari Luce
Ferarri took the bold action to not be tied with it's past.
One of their director explicitly said they used an external design company to intentionally to avoid a minor refinement of its ICE cars.
They knew how this car will be perceived, if only because surely there must have been fierce internal resistance.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13-ZdXDJTIfhe1vkAuzssvRx9bOQ...
Bezos is right, things are either contracting or expanding...the saving and conserving energy to extend the runaway will only lead those who do to perverted and depressed outcomes.
Such as this monstruosity
The perfect mix of tactile controls and mechanical needles with the screens feels revolutionary.
I expect others will follow replicating some of the ideas.
EDIT: "paddles on the steering wheel control regenerative braking and torque delivery."
Jony Ive is a brilliant example of the role selection plays in evolutionary processes. It is the sorting method that punishes bad ideas with death and allows good ideas to survive. After Jobs passed away the selection mechanism that only let Ive's good ideas pop through disappeared. It is popular to accuse Jobs of credit hoarding, but in that relationship he was the talent. Ive just someone who could generate ideas for him to choose from.
More than a mutation agent, less than a good designer.
What makes Ive bad for Ferrari is that he operates under the delusion that he is a great designer. This makes him arrogant. Arrogance paired with mediocrity isn't the best of combinations. And Ive sans Jobs is mediocre on a good day. But his myth is persistent.
Ferrari has a long history. Ive completely ignored it and designed a mediocre bar of soap.
If he did so out of an abundance of arrogance, or simply because he actually doesn't understand Ferrari is unclear. But it is an undeniable fact that the car neither looks like a Ferrari, nor is it a particularly elegant car. If you saw it without knowing what it was you could be forgiven for thinking this was a more modestly priced asian mass market car.
For admirers of a brand that aspires to make iconic cars this is, of course, a disappointment.
I did like the instrument cluster though. It dials back the somewhat childish and gaudy displays that sports car manufacturers have offered for the past couple of decades and replaces it with something that is more tastefully retro. A lot of older Italian cars had beautiful dashboards that give off strong race car vibes. (for instance the Bertone-designed Alfa Romeo GTV from the late 60s and early 70s - those had gorgeous instrument clusters)
Just because he had a successful collaboration two decades ago doesn’t mean we have to pretend everything he touches is gold.
I get the history with Ferrari cars and their aesthetic and all.
But it looks like what one would expect from the man who designed iPhone.
Some chucklehead car review guy on YouTube is going to get their hands on one of these, put a Door Dash car topper on the roof and drive around town to see if anyone notices the $640k delivery vehicle. Few people will, and that's what's wrong: the entire point of Ferrari, for better or worse, going on 85+ years, is to get looks.
If all the people that have ever purchased a Ferrari for its interior design vanished today, there are so few it wouldn't make a headline. The Testarossa interior was so tragically bad it probably shouldn't have been permitted by the DOT et al. Yet there it was, plastered on posters and magazine covers; a thing of dreams around the world.
So only yet another case of complete disconnect between a brand and its loyalists. Not the first, and given the myopia plaguing such folk today, not the last.
Here's what an electric EV supercar could look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlRIdLz6Juk
How about this: techbros got their hands everywhere nowadays, so even an iconic car brand is forced to use their brainfarts? Forced by market pressure, forced by export conditions, you name it, but I cannot fathom why otherwise getting a tech guy design a car. I actually like the design, but I must agree it doesn't look Ferrari at all. Did they fire Manzoni or what?
This is a brand that permanently banned Paris Hilton for painting her Ferrari pink, Kim Kardashian for modifying her 458, and Justin Bieber for wrapping his in neon blue.
Where does that fall on the line between your product, your rules and I bought the thing, I own it, I paint it blue? My gut reaction was that this should totally not be legal, neither telling people how to paint their car, nor telling them what [not] to do with it, or to which places they can take it, seriously? And also banning people from buying one to enforce this.
In the case of Ferrari, their products are essentially also rolling advertisements, so modifying them goes against what they are trying to sell.
Of course you can have a friend to buy it for you, but again, it's Ferraris choice who they want to conduct business with as long as they follow the laws to the letter. Their car is their brand and they want to protect it.
You missed out on the more egregious (IMO) points about having to buy certain "entry" Ferraris to be allowed to buy the rarer ones too.
Morally... I dunno. Telling a customer they're not worth the headache is something I'm generally on the side of, so long as the goods being sold are entirely optional. Once again, Ferrari's in the clear. A Lamborghini may not be exactly the same, but they're wildly different goods they are not.
And as lazy a counter it is: If you disagree, you're more than welcome to start your own luxury car brand. That's even how Lamborghini got their start - to knock Ferrari down a peg
but ferrari is arrogant too: "This is a brand that permanently banned Paris Hilton for painting her Ferrari pink, Kim Kardashian for modifying her 458, and Justin Bieber for wrapping his in neon blue."
WAT? how dare someone tell me what i do with my car.
but back to the argument: people don't like change. but change is inevitable. sure, some change is objectively bad, but we are talking about style here. get over it. if you don't like it, don't buy it.
the article argues that the problem is not the switch to electric, but how the car makes you feel. i'd argue that electric feeling different is unavoidable.
the article fails to show an example that does this better. the tesla example is unfair because tesla didn't have an existing brand image to follow. they could start from scratch.
if the luce looks like a car designed by apple, that's obviously no surprise. it will certainly appeal to apple fans.
so to me the lesson is this: don't change your brand, or it will hurt, if you want to innovate, create a new brand. but the consequence is also that if brands can not change they will eventually have to die and be replaced. that is not new, we have known this for some time now.
but i want to ask: is it possible to break out of that cycle? only if we teach people to be more open to change. and if we teach them to stop complaining about things that don't concern them. go complain about the cybertruck, that thing is objectively ugly. or about SUVs, they have no place in the city. but complaining that the luce does not fit the ferrari brand should be left to those that actually buy from ferrari.
I recognize Ferrari is one of our most iconic and exported brands.
Also I could not give any less fucks about the new Ferrari, the fact that it's ugly, the fact that it's probably going to tank or be a hit. They and their products are so detached from the lives of 99.9999999% of the population.
Also, what do you expect from a guy that used to design computer mice.