Pictures of the world’s first electric Ferrari, the Luce, have now been out long enough for both initial reactions and a few counterpoint follow-ups. Most of the commentary I’ve seen in automotive circles is along the lines of: “Enzo is rolling in his grave!” He’s not, though. If Ferrari‘s founder were alive today and saw a Luce on the street, he probably wouldn’t even look twice at it. That is the actual tragedy of this pointless car. But really, it’s just a reflection of the state of our whole industry.
The Luce’s design is friendly, clean, tidy, inoffensive, and unremarkable. As a modern daily driver, it looks fine. But when your brand revolves around grand-entrance aesthetics and your new $600,000 supercar invites comparison to a Nissan Leaf, something’s not right. A few commentators are describing Luce’s look as “a big risk” or some kind of dramatic statement, but really, it’s the opposite. It’s a four-door daily driver—it’s the most mass-appealing product Ferrari could have possibly created. Sure, it’ll have enough horsepower to enter orbit and a price that ensures only oligarchs will be first owners. But every function is going to be electronically actuated, every display is simulated on a screen … just like every Honda and Hyundai.
View Price on AmazonWell, OK, not just like—Ferrari did a nice job making its screens sit in cool housings. So herein lies the problem—as every car becomes a computer, everything that makes cars really feel special is inherently impossible to carry over. There was some intrigue around the Luce after the cockpit was revealed, and I won’t deny I was drawn in myself. “The iPhone guy made a Ferrari;” I even did a TikTok about it. Jony Ive, who had a hand in designing a bunch of Apple products, and Marc Newson, who also did some Apple stuff and, even more relevantly, the Ford 021C concept, are being credited with a lot of the Luce’s presentation.
So we can’t really be surprised that the Luce looks more like a piece of consumer electronics than a car. To the credit of everyone involved, the Luce does clearly make an effort to move away from the “monolithic black mirror” giant screen-centered cockpit by using a bunch of little screens instead. But even when the guys who designed the iPhone actively try to save tactile, mechanical knobs, the overarching reality of the modern EV package is still so fundamentally ensleekified that the car ends up feeling like an appliance anyway.
Here’s where we get to my headline—this Ferrari isn’t ugly. In fact, it’s a perfect contemporary vision of what a futuristic Ferrari should look like. It’s just that today’s sleek future-techy aesthetic is an austere, corporate copypasta sanitized to the point of lifelessness. The intro of Weeds comes to mind. What exactly is today’s sleek future-techy aesthetic? Look at modern washing machines, lawn mowers, homes. Pretty much everything either looks like Call of Duty, EVE from Wall-E, or some combination of the two. (The Luce falls firmly in the motherly robot category.)
It’s not just about the aesthetic, or even the fact that it’s an EV, or a practical people-mover. It’s the combination of those things. And the realization that it’s not really an original idea—it’s a modern interpretation of something that already existed. And that can kind of be said for every car people get interested in lately, right? “New Bronco!” “New Defender!” There’s nothing new, just old ideas turned into what feels like an app-icon version. What the Luce accentuates is how so many aspects of the consumer experience have gone this way.
Source: thedrive.com
