In case anyone was wondering what the Apple Car would have looked like inside, it would have been roughly this.
As an Apple Car™ it makes sense, but as a Ferrari it's incredibly soulless and oversimplified. This Ive design aesthetic (Dieter Rams' aesthetic really) is fine on consumer electronics where you want the device to disappear and give way to the display, but on something as emotional as a vehicle (Ferrari especially), this design falls flat.
I do hope some of the design details work their way through the industry (e.g. using glass instead of gloss black plastic, convex glass to add depth to digital gauges), but I hope the rest of it stays as a one-off experiment demonstrating the hubris and one-dimensionality of a top designer.
Ferrari interiors have always been spartan and aimed at functionality.
This feels like a modern Ferrari F40 dashboard and I like it a lot.
It certainly looks like an Apple device. Ive's aesthetic is Apple's aesthetic, so if you hire Ive, that is what you are going to get.
I can see a car company who doesn't care about design stumbling into this outcome, but Ferrari doesn't seem like that kind of company. So the choice must have been intentional.
> but on something as emotional as a vehicle (Ferrari especially), this design falls flat.
Strongly disagree. To each their own...
Well, that’s the problem with product design — looking at it simply doesn’t suffice. It needs to be experienced in person.
Well, that’s not (yet) possible, but this video does a good job in the meantime:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wv1btxCjVE&pp=ygUQTG92ZWZyb20...
Everything will undoubtedly feel nice/premium as a result of being metal and glass, but you spend more time looking at the entire interior than touching every part of it, so appearance is important.
I think the Aston Marting with the Apple Carplay Ultra[0] is a pretty good example of what an Apple Car would have looked like.
[0]: https://www.astonmartin.com/en-us/our-world/brand-stories/as...
So bland. An iPad put in a holder. I was not exactly hoping for, because I didn't really, but I dreamt of a much more radical design direction.
I first thought that too, but if you take the time to scroll down a bit, you'll see that the instruments are actually three separate screens, and at least the center one has a mechanical needle. Also, the central control panel has lots of physical switches (Musk would hate it) and even a round instrument in the top right corner with mechanical hands, which can be either a clock, a stopwatch or (for whatever reason) a compass. So definitely not an iPad put in a holder.
No not literally, but that is what it looks like.
It would have been much better imho to for instance have lots of tiny screens embedded in the dashboard/console alongside their respective buttons. Each "app" gets their own toggle and physical dials. That would have been expensive and cool and could have been made not-tacky. (Like some cars are, expensive and cool but also without any class whatsoever, they look like a teenage gaming room.)
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What is oversimplified specifically (given this is an electric car)
IMO if they just had materials with any sort of visual interest to them, this would be pretty beautiful.
Instead it feels like sitting inside an iPad which is an aesthetic already cheaply deployed at massive scale to motels, pharmacies, and shitty coffee shops.
This question's answer would require something more lecture length that dives into fundamentals of design with an equal amount of time spent on automotive design. No one has the time or care for something like that, so I'll try to give a high level answer.
Generally speaking, cars are not about simple designs/shapes. They, especially to enthusiasts, are viewed as something closer to art where care is taken to craft shapes and forms for both function and feel. This is amplified dramatically for Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc..
Ive was clearly doing this design work for the Apple EV that never shipped. It followed Apple's historic design aesthetic (driven largely by him) of simplifying things as much as possible--using circles and squircles everywhere, removing as many unnecessary geometry as possible. That's fine for an Apple EV because that's their design aesthetic. That is, demonstrably, not Ferrari's design aesthetic. It's a jarring departure from decades of automotive design and, in my professional opinion, an exercise in hubris.
As we remember that design is largely subjective and that this is all my opinion, I will say that almost everything in the vehicle is overly simplified:
* Steering wheel: an attempt at modern retro, but they added two blobs (to keep the steering wheel simple) to house the dials and buttons instead of incorporating it in a sculpted, thoughtful way. Instead of putting the turn signals in those blobs (or elsewhere), they interrupted the simple steering wheel with a couple circles to act as the turn signals.
* Digital instrument cluster: it's an iPad that connects to the base of the steering wheel. Wasted space in the top corners. Convex glass is a really nice touch however. Gauges are strange to me (gas gauge for an EV, left dial is confusing at first glance, G-force gauge unnecessarily busy), but that can always be changed later so not worth waxing on about.
* The key: a small iPhone 4. It's not terrible, but it's rather uninspired and boring. Ferraris aren't supposed to be boring.
* Dashboard interface: another iPad, but with a Mac Pro handle on it. Might be very nice for moving it, but how often are you going to do that? Does it stick out far enough to act as a wrist-rest as mentioned in their video? The mechanical switches are a nice touch if the display/UI keeps up. The clock/compass/stopwatch in the top right is neat, but almost antithetical to the rest of the design--it's added complexity for the sake of complexity. I still like it though.
* Vents: these make sense to be simplified. I've never loved the number of flaps in most vehicles, but if you have kids you might have issues with toys/food getting lost inside if there's no mesh behind it.
* Seats are nice, but if you removed the Ferrari emblem would you know it's a Ferrari? Is there enough bolstering for spirited driving?
The shapes, iconography, etc. are all carried over from Apple devices. Cars, even in EV form, are not iPads and iPhones. Cars, particularly those like Ferraris, are supposed to be designed, sculpted, given character and flare in order to evoke emotion.
Rivian and Porsche, in my opinion, have designed beautiful EVs (inside and out). They have a design aesthetic that's unique to them and in the case of Porsche stays true to the brand. The Ferrari Luce looks like Ferrari hired Ive to take whatever work he did for Apple and copy paste it over to them. If this was announced as an Ive + Kia/Hyundai/Honda/Lexus/etc. collaboration would it look any more or less out of place? No, because it's been simplified to the point that it doesn't even look designed any more. It almost feels "default" in a way.
This is all just my opinion as someone that's been doing product engineering and industrial design for a long time and happens to love cars--take it with a grain of salt.
+1 to everything you say here, but unfortunately I doubt this will sway anyone who doesn't have similar feelings upon just looking at the thing with their own two eyes.
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