Jony Ive, the Essex-born designer behind Apple’s most iconic products, has come up against a backlash around his work for Ferrari’s first all-electric vehicle, the $640,000 Luce. One analyst described it as “a mix between a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla 3… We are lost in translation with Ferrari’s new strategy” while shares fell in Milan and the US yesterday.
The idea was to distinguish the car from other Ferrari models. Benedetto Vigna, the Ferrari chief executive, said: “We are convinced that a company demonstrates its leadership when it has the courage to dare and to take on the challenge of new technologies. Ferrari Luce was born precisely from this challenge, offering our unprecedented vision of electrification.”
The Luce panders to petrolheads and F1 fans with speaker that play loud engine noises, inside and out. Perhaps it’s Ferrari’s lack of commitment to electric that’s been the problem: the carmaker cut its ambitions in half recently by reducing its aim for e-vehicles from 40% to 20% of its fleet.
It’s not Ive’s first experience of criticism, though. At Apple, among his standard-setting work for the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the Apple Watch, he also produced a couple of howlers. His $5bn design for the company’s Apple Park headquarters was so minimalist that it failed to prevent birds (and humans) from crashing into it. And his laser-etched titanium credit card, billed as “Apple’s thinnest and lightest status symbol ever,” also attracted ridicule.
