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Transportation has never been a Ferrari’s real purpose. Sure, you can drive one—although not literally you, because you probably can’t afford one. For the few who can, it is an automobile to be seen idling at a stoplight before prancing away, or parked at a luxury-hotel valet stand, inspiring desire and jealousy. For normal people, a Ferrari is a symbol: of power, control, precision, and wealth—but also of the longing for those virtues, and of the idea that they are virtues in the first place. The Ferrari is the quintessential bedroom-poster car, captured in a glossy photo pinned on a wall in a teenage boy’s bedroom like a photo of a scantily clad woman: an unachievable object of desire.
If a Ferrari is an object of spectacle, an Apple device is an object of function. The Apple product, whether it’s a laptop, music player, smartphone, tablet, speaker, or watch, is designed to dissolve into its context and melt into ordinary life. Frictionless, intuitive, and transparent—in its ideal form, an Apple product ceases to feel like an object at all, and instead facilitates an activity. An iPhone or MacBook expresses style, but through minimalism, an aesthetic concerned with vanishing into the background and becoming obedient to intended purpose. This approach to design transformed the traditions of industrial modernism that it had inherited—from Dieter Rams, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and others—into an ethos that was demure instead of forward. The best technology would become softened, domesticated, and emotionally deodorized.
[Ian Bogost: Apple is boring now]
The old world of automotive desire and the new one of glass rectangles collided this week, when Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first electric supercar. The vehicle looks like a Ferrari on the inside but an anonymous lozenge on the outside, a design that some Ferrari fans hate. Does it mean the end of the house of the prancing horse? No. Rather, Ferrari’s first EV is a delightful if wistful marriage that nobody could have predicted. Through this pairing, the Ferrari Luce signals the final victory of the smartphone over the automobile. Nothing aspirational remains that isn’t an expression of the Silicon Valley technology industry.
Although cars remain important in America, they have declined as an expression of identity, replaced partly by online life, where self-expression can go global. Young people don’t care about driving, in part because teenagers aren’t allowed to go anywhere, but also because smartphones made doing so less necessary. Silicon Valley had gone into the transportation business, first with ride-sharing and then with autonomous vehicles. It seemed reasonable that tech companies might play a large role in the future of transit.
From 2014 to 2024, Apple tried and failed to make a car. At first, it was meant to be an actual car, with wheels and everything. Details were scant, but Apple hoped the vehicle could do for the automobile what the iPhone had done for phones—reinvent the category, and with it, the way people lived. Apple hired people from traditional car makers, from Tesla, from battery companies, from autonomous-driving start-ups. Thousands of people worked on the project, code-named Titan, at a reported cost of a billion dollars a year or more.
Apple was in over its head. A car, it turned out, is not like a personal electronic device. Apple tried to pivot Titan to a platform for autonomous driving. But in the end, after a decade, the company gave up. It canceled Project Titan. An Apple automotive future would be left to CarPlay, the software platform that can make your iPhone operate your car stereo and, soon, your climate control and speedometer.
Jony Ive spent nearly three decades at Apple, where he served as chief design officer from 2015 to 2019. He had a hand in nearly every major Apple product from Steve Jobs’s return in the late 1990s through the 2010s—the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch, and even Apple Park, the company’s headquarters. Ive reportedly became bored at Apple, and he cut ties with the company in 2022. Now he runs LoveFrom, an industrial-design consultancy.
Ive connects Apple’s legacy with Ferrari’s future. The sports-car company hired LoveFrom to design the Luce, inside and out, giving Ive and Marc Newsom, his LoveFrom partner (and fellow Apple alumnus), freedom to design a wholly new automobile. Car and Driver reported that this newness extended to the car’s form factor, electric motors, batteries, steering wheel, physical controls, and digital displays. The car produces more than 1,000 horsepower and costs $640,000.
Due to its price, the Luce operates mostly as a symbol rather than an automobile, as did all Ferraris before it. Yet the car looks nothing like a Ferrari, or at least nothing like the received idea of a Ferrari. It is a four-door hatchback, a configuration that, though not new for the company, is highly unusual for an Italian supercar. It is also the first Ferrari that seats five, betraying the company’s apparent principle of inutility—a Ferrari is supposed to be excessive instead of useful.
But mostly, the Luce is smooth and rounded, resembling an aerodynamic suppository more than a big-haunched cavallino rampante, the rearing horse that serves as Ferrari’s logo. That design produces performance—a “drag coefficient lower than any prior roadgoing Ferrari,” according to Car and Driver—which helps the car accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in about two seconds. But lost in the process is the typical Ferrari style: low, taut, and animalistic, like a machine stretched over the musculature of a ferocious creature.
For this reason, the Luce has produced a backlash. Some “Ferraristi,” The New York Times reported, “are finding it difficult to embrace the Luce’s bubblelike exterior.” The former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo said, according to The Wall Street Journal, “At least, I hope they take the horse off that car.”
One mocking social-media post depicts the car on its back, with a charger inserted into its underside. The joke refers to the Apple Magic Mouse, whose now-infamous design requires plugging it in upside down while it charges, preventing it from being used. The message: A Jony Ive–designed Ferrari brings an unwelcome Apple-design sensibility to an incompatible product and brand. The Ferrari Luce looks like exactly the sort of car that Apple would have made. Now that the smartphone-car is actually here after more than a decade of anticipation, people aren’t sure they actually want it.
In part, that’s because the whole supercar market has been on the wane for at least a decade. In 2015, when Tesla began delivering the Model X, automobiles had already ceased to be an object of desire. A Tesla could keep pace with a Ferrari or Lamborghini back then, but it did so in a humdrum way, stripped of the carnal passion that had imbued its Italian precursors. No teenager would ever hang a picture of a Tesla on their bedroom wall. Nor, for that matter, the Ferrari Luce.
Some critics accuse dinosaur-burning supercar purists of “petro-masculinity,” a misplaced and retrograde attachment to gasoline combustion and climate-damaging excess. Lamborghini dropped plans for its all-electric supercar, the Lanzador, after concluding that demand for it was “close to zero.” Pagani scrapped an electric version of its multimillion-dollar Huayra on the grounds that EVs “lack the emotion” of internal-combustion cars. Gordon Murray Automotive, led by the designer of the McLaren F1, sold its EV division to focus on V12 gasoline automobiles. Aston Martin, Porsche, and Lotus have also scaled back their electric ambitions.
But as Tesla’s and Ferrari’s examples attest, not to mention the Formula E electric-racing circuit, EVs can be just as—or even more—powerful than gas-burning vehicles. The problem with EVs was never their performance on the road.
Ferrari appears to have realized that electric vehicles are the future, and that pursuing that future demands the reinvention of the supercar itself, as well as the supercar company that makes them. Actually taking that risk by designing the Luce as a production model that will be released rather than scrapped or relegated to concept-car purgatory is worthy of praise.
But that kind of risk taking has consequences—Ferrari’s stock was down as much as 8 percent after the Luce reveal. Even so, a Ferrari was always an out-of-reach toy for the ultrawealthy, and owning such a car let the driver forge new and hazardous paths, much like taking risks in business. Seen in this way, the Luce embraces the symbolic spirit of the supercar better than the V12 Pagani or the Gordon Murray T.50.
[Andrew Moseman: A new kind of hybrid car is about to hit America’s streets]
Ferrari may have realized that its old way of chasing wealth and symbolizing power has ended. Apple, Ive, and their kindred beat it years ago. Lamborghini and Aston Martin might see dying on their own terms as more noble than caving to incompatible values. But Ferrari has steered a more sensible course, which also makes its track appear unexciting and even unprincipled. The company has embraced an important virtue, which is that electric vehicles are the future, even for supercars, and embracing that aspiration at the top of the market will help adoption trickle down to the bottom.
Silicon Valley still sees risk in business as a virtue, but its successful industrialists seem to value utility, simplicity, and intelligence over ornament or conspicuous luxury. That ethos is consonant with the design sensibility that pervades the sector. The minimalist principles that Ive brought to Apple became doctrine in the tech industry. Technology was deemed good if it was smooth, quiet, seamless, and emotionally reassuring. Like the Bauhaus and International Style that influenced it, monochromatic, high-tech minimalism is anonymous and somewhat generic, and its capacity to operate anywhere contributes to its ability to scale globally. Ostentation and idiosyncrasy—of the kind that a traditional Ferrari represents—never had much place at Ive’s Apple. Instead, technology was meant to disappear, to conceal complexity, to deliver emotional calm, and above all to present itself as inevitable.
This most famous of Italian-sports-car makers may have realized a more practical truth as well: The tech sector’s ultrawealthy are one of the only markets left for a Ferrari anyway.
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