Ferrari’s new Jony Ive-designed electric vehicle is wrapped in glass and aluminum

Despite Ferrari in dramatic fashion reduction its EV projects end of 2025, it is no exaggeration to say that the revelation of the first complete vehicle from the Italian manufacturer electric car going to be THE automotive event of 2026.

While the outside is still under coverFerrari has revealed the interior of its next electric vehicle designed by LoveOfthe creative company of former Apple chief designer Jony Ive. It might not look like the Project Titan car that Apple worked on for a decade. killed in 2024but it appears to have similar DNA.

“We are entering a new era at Ferrari,” company CEO Benedetto Vigna said at the inauguration, which took place last week at the Transamerica pyramid building in San Francisco. Vigna also revealed that Ferrari had changed the name of the electric vehicle. It is now officially called Ferrari Luce, the Italian word for “light”, pronounced loo-chay.

“This is a project that will illuminate our future, our path forward,” Vigna said.

The car previously carried the Elettrica moniker, and the change is apparently an effort to downplay electrified elements in favor of focusing on more Ferrari-like features. “There are many other things that are at the heart of Ferrari Luce,” Vigna said. “Elettrica wouldn’t have been a good name for our car.”

Auto parts

This inner revelation is the second in a three-part revelation process of the Luce. Ferrari details shared about its EV powertrain in October. Ferrari says a full disclosure of the exterior will take place in May, but this latest presentation was the first glimpse of what Ive and his team at LoveFrom have created for those sitting inside the Luce.

At the event, Ive immediately compared the experience designing the Luce with the 27 years he spent at Apple before. departure in 2019.

“Cars are very complicated,” Ive said. “But I hope the care put into every little element will be evident and clear.”

Using office space on an upper floor of the Transamerica Pyramid, Ferrari and LoveFrom showed off several of the internal components that will be in the Luce. The team is certainly not ready to show us everything. We didn’t see a stereo, glove box, or even floor mats. We saw a front seat (which we weren’t allowed to sit in) but no back seat. A Ferrari representative assured us that the Luce would indeed have cup holders. After all, cup holders are very important.

We were able to see and touch the key elements of the cockpit: the steering wheel, the binnacle behind it with speed and odometer dials, a screen mounted on the center dash, and a center console with a glass shifter.

Oddly enough, none of these pieces were arranged inside an actual vehicle interior, but rather were disembodied, separated, and spread out across a large room so people could walk around. A seat here. A dismantled ventilation system near the back wall. It was the luxury automobile equivalent of a Marcel Duchamp exhibition, but instead of a galvanized iron urinal or snow shovel (which, by the way, went for 3 million dollars last year), there was a steering wheel.

“Part of my grumpy belligerence now is that I’m done working with assholes,” Ive said in his introduction. The line made the audience around him laugh. “I’m so happy that we can just put creative excellence at the center of what we do.”

I may have been self-deprecating about his salty nature, but when he started explaining the details of all the machined aluminum buttons he had ordered and approved over the course of five years, he was frankly torn. As we walked through the exhibit, I happily answered WIRED’s questions about how things worked with Ferrari.

“It’s an important brand,” Ive said. “I like that they weren’t lazy, like other companies I know who are content with their success by printing money.”

Not far from the apple tree

If you are connected Ive’s stylethe Luce aesthetic will seem familiar to you. Everything is presented in glass and brushed aluminum. Rounded corners are applied with ruthless efficiency. The occasional small glass button on the edge of the screens evokes the Apple Watchthe crown. The central control panel looks a lot like an iPad. Even the jaw-dropping video Ferrari used to reveal the interior was edited like the booming product videos shown at iPhone launches or WWDC.

Ive says the emphasis on physical buttons, each serving a unique purpose, is to allow the driver to keep their eyes on the road and off the screen. “When you look at this, you don’t wonder, ‘How many layers deep am I going to have to go to find something that warms my butt?'” he said.

“You don’t touch anything other than aluminum, glass or leather,” several Ferrari employees said repeatedly during the event. (The only pieces of plastic they had were a few gears in the control panel.)

The result is a truly tactile experience. Everything feels clicky or twisty in a satisfying way. The aluminum buttons, unsurprisingly, feel incredible. The glass buttons were just as smooth. We were particularly impressed with the air vents, which feature aluminum shields that flip over when you open and close them. We played with this over and over again until the Ferrari people came and told us it was time to leave the room.

Familiar friends

Ferrari’s glass partner is Corning, the company whose Gorilla Glass was used on every iPhone model. Corning says there are more than 40 glass parts in the Luce, including buttons, screens and even the center console housing and shift knob.

Ive calls glass an “authentic material.” Compared to a more standard plastic option, glass certainly feels more valuable as a knob or shifter. But will it shatter in an instant if you get into a wreck? Let’s hope not, because Corning says its technicians have performed countless crash tests to ensure this version of Gorilla Glass is safe enough.

The steering wheel features the three-spoke design that Ferrari is famous for. It is almost a circle but its bottom is crushed which gives the wheel a shape reminiscent of a dumpling (or a flat tire). The steering wheel, of course, has a leather grip all around, but clickable aluminum buttons right next to your fingers let you cue or change music tracks and volume.

Behind the steering wheel is the passenger compartment, the console where the odometer, speedometer and other indicators are placed. Taken alone, the screen looks like a large iPhone in landscape mode with three Apple Watches positioned in the center. Convex lenses with parallax effect enlarge the circular OLED screens supplied by Samsung, with which Ferrari partnered for the display technology. Additional icons appear in the upper right corner to indicate things like road conditions.

Although the cabin is dominated by screens, very select bits are entirely analog. Namely the speedometer and odometer needles, which are made of aluminum and polycarbonate. When the car is turned off, the gauge screens darken and the hands appear to float in a black void. When the screens light up, they also illuminate the hands, making them glow.

Take control

To the right of the wheel is a control panel screen, a rectangular screen with smooth curved edges and almost no frame. In other words, shaped like an iPad. However, the screen is mounted on a ball joint and can therefore be moved in a way reminiscent of another relic of Ive’s tenure at Cupertino, the iMac G4.

This screen is again a Samsung OLED, this time a touchscreen. The panel tells you a lot of information specific to electric vehicles, such as battery life and which wheels use the most power.

The idea of ​​the panel being movable is so that the person operating the shotgun, instead of the driver, can control the elements on the screen. I pointed out that when the screen is in the neutral position, the driver can rest their palm on the aluminum grip for easier access to the tactile switches and buttons without having to look directly at the panel.

In the upper right corner of this panel is a cutout for a clock. The background of this clock is digital, so it can be modified to become a stopwatch or a compass. The analog hands then move according to the setting you choose.

Fabulous keychain

Yes, the Luce’s keychain looks like a miniature iPhone. It has a glass back, with a Ferrari logo surrounded by yellow E ink. This digital ink comes into play when you turn on the car.

To demonstrate, I installed the key fob into a slot in the center console, where it magnetically engaged. When I pushed it down, the yellow E Ink on the key fob faded and the glass shifter button next to it lit up with a yellow glow. The Ferrari logo flashes and the dashboard dials catch the eye. It was as if this distinctive yellow pigment was a serum injected into the body of the car, waking it from its slumber.

“You feel like it really brings the rest of the system to life,” Ive said.

Corning claims that the shift knob has 13,000 holes, each half the width of a human hair, laser-projected throughout the glass so that light can properly diffuse through it for this very purpose.

Return of the Titan

After the main event, our scrum of journalists walked a few blocks from the Transamerica building to the headquarters of LoveFrom. LoveFrom co-founder Marc Newson and some Ferrari representatives were in attendance, but most of the questions over the next half hour were directed at Ive. He growled classic Ive-isms in his smooth baritone, such as “If you can’t use something, it’s ugly” and “I like learning more than I like being right.” »

However, this focus on Ive – as well as the multiple echoes of Apple products past and present in the Luce – has led to a nagging realization that this first electric vehicle from Ferrari may be the closest we’ll ever see to what the Cupertino company could have produced had its Project Titan already been released into the wild.

Ferrari knew exactly what it was buying when it brought in Ive and his team, and he delivered. The goal of LoveFrom’s efforts with the automaker is to leave users with the tactile, visceral feeling of interacting with something real. Yet it also seems strangely incongruous coming from the man who helped build an empire on the backs of beautiful slabs of glass that everyone now spends all day parading doom over. (The man is also, of course, designing OpenAI’s next project. physical material project which will provide an interface for its chatbot.)

To his credit, Ive seemed to recognize this incongruity and even signaled a sort of desire for atonement for the societal impact of the (very good) designs of his past.

“We are increasingly isolated in our digital worlds,” Ive said. “There is a growing desire not to be isolated, disconnected, whether from each other or from the real physical world. »

“Every bone in my body tells me about some of the things that we learned, some of the things that I think we discovered, I hope will have a much broader relevance and value implication for a broader set of products,” Ive said.

Maybe one day the connection with reality will be more easily accessible to everyone and not just those lucky enough to sit aboard a Ferrari EV.