I can't tell if it is just me, but a digital analogue clock is weird. I'm all for analogue time keeping with hands circling a face, but when it is put on a flat screen, it feels cheap.
There aren't enough buttons, there is too much to read, and all of this while I'm driving.
I remember my friends dad had a Corvette or something in the mid-late 90s, and it had this red projected HUD on the windshield. All of your information was right at eye level, and you never had to look away from the road to see your RPM or speed, and probably more, but that was 30ish years ago, and I barely remember yesterday.
GM has kept the HUD thing going for a few decades now. They offer it on a good number of vehicles in their GMC lineup. I have it on my vehicle now and it's absolutely amazing. I find I rarely look inside the vehicle at the 14" infotainment screen. It shows speed, cruise control status and alerts, navigation, and a popup of song title if I manually change songs with the steering controls. I find I'm lost and heavily distracted when I get in my wife's vehicle without a HUD.
Also, my vehicle is a truck, one of the last places where manufacturers still let you have buttons and knobs to control climate.
Everything about this design has a dichotomous personality. The smoothness of the materials and rounded edges can’t make up for the disparate and forced combobulation to get…this…
British sports cars in the sixties for safety reasons had to remove toggle switches. The problem was that during crashes people were losing eyes or suffering puncture wounds. This was the story handed down to me by my uncle.
This is second hand account but here are my uncle's credentials...
I feel like nobody has figured out yet how these screens and components in a modern car should fit together that don't look like little iPhones and iPads just mounted in a car.
There are some nice buttons here, and individual components (as photographed) look good on their own.
BUT altogether it still seems like disparate components who share design language, just slapped into a vehicle.
Agreed. This projects looks like they couldn’t find a meaningful way to innovate and had to reach for impact-less uniqueness - physical clock on a digital screen, Oled gauges for no reason.
screens are for output, buttons (and toggles, knobs & sliders, they all have their strenghts) are for input. Voice is also good for input but should never be the only (or primary) way of interacting with important functionality.
automakers are slowly figuring this out but, unfortunately, the move to electric may retard this realization because "high-tech"
Voice is only good for languages which have broad support, and for native or almost-native sounding speakers. Anyone with an accent or speaking a language with broken support due to few speakers or just models not heavily trained on hates voice commands.
I don't have a heavy accent but as a non-native speaker still do have an accent in English, and I hate the failure modes of voice commands when it misinterprets something since it is much harder to correct. I actively avoid voice commands just due to this 1-5% of failures that are extremely annoying.
I clearly don't understand Design. My expectation is that an amazing prolific designer would deliver different designs in different contexts. At Apple maybe it's this minimalist industrial design. But what I'm seeing here - and forgive me if I'm just an idiot about design, is exactly what you'd get it you asked ChatGPT "Ferrari but Johnny Ive apple design interior".
It's all the same design language and materials you'd seen on Apple product. It's almost like someone went "let's make the infotainment a giant Apple watch".
I would expect you call up a good designer and they design something special that works in the language of your product, something uniquely new, but also uniquely Ferrari. But what seems to be happening here is if you phone up Johnny Ive you'll get a slapdash re-run of 2010s iPhone design.
I don't think you are not understanding design, big-name designers do have a design language but in this case it just feels like Ive re-applied whatever his design language for Apple in the early 2000s into a Ferrari car.
Very little care on aligning the design to the brand design, except for the seat and a few selector switches (which somehow Ferrari seems to have accepted? Strange from such a picky client), no care about keeping refined design elements like stalks for the turn signals and wipers and instead applying this buttons-everywhere-for-every-function approach that is considered a regression in EVs input design.
The screens are just different shapes of iPhones/iPads instead of something uniquely Ferrari-Ive, feels like a Ferrari-Apple car collab.
Really don't understand it, Dieter Rams did a lot with the same design language because he worked for Braun for a long ass time, Ive is completely untethered from Apple so re-applying the same design language he created for the brand unto another brand is just unimaginative.
I have an relatively old car that was made before the fad for touch screens, I am desperately hoping real tactile controls come back into fashion before I have to buy my next car.
Then I would have managed to avoid the touch screen stupidity entirely.
Needing to “dock” the key in the center console to start the car is clunky. We’ve had the proximity key thing figured out for like 15 years. It also seems impossible to have the car key on a ring with anything else?
It’s not bad UX, it’s part of the experience of driving the car. Something that a Ferrari buyer probably cares more about than a Tesla buyer.
I personally miss the physical keys on older cars that you had to insert and turn to start the car because you’re directly controlling the starter/engine. It feels like you’re driving a car and not using an appliance. There are people who prefer manual transmissions for similar reasons.
While I quite like the choices around physical vs digital controls, this aesthetic feels refined to the most unexciting degree: objectively good, but locked in the past. In fairness, automotive interiors (especially EVs) seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis across the board.
While I don't think the center console is very ferrari-like, and kind of looks more like a piece of consumer electronics to me, I quite the gauges.
Using round oleds with inset bezels and physical needles to emulate a traditional 90s (and earlier) gauge cluster is an interesting idea. Honestly refreshing in a sea of sameness in the car industry today.
Ugh, maybe I need to see it inside an actual car but overall looks like it could belong inside a small truck/SUV if you took away the Ferrari logos.
I like the physical controls. I actually just traded off my truck over the weekend and the climate controls being through the screen were a major part of that decision. It still seems like the switches here are pretty minimal and might be annoying - do you have to go through the screen when your windshield starts to fog?
glad to see some physical buttons, but there aren't nearly enough of them and they aren't differentiated enough
the emergency lights button should be colored red and elevated because it needs to be interacted with in high-stress situations
temperature should be set with a slider rather than a toggle switch because then a given temperature selection becomes spatially consistent and selecting max-hot or max-cold is instant and obvious
and so on
all in all better than expected and shows that we are moving past the "everything is an ipad" phase of civilizational development
There are several ideas here about how to elegantly combine physical switches, knobs, and dials with digital displays that I quite appreciate in this design.
Some nice details:
- There's digital readouts around the binnacle gauges
- The physical needle on the speedo comes from the outside to leave the center available for the digital screen
- The drive selector has a small screen (light?) in the center as an indicator
The combination seems like it may create a quite polished feel if it's done well in motion.
Maybe the font (looks like SF pro), parts of the GUI, and the liberal use of glass surfaces.
But there's absolutely no way the apple car would've had gauges anywhere near this physically complex, or a steering wheel that looks like this with the thin spokes and manettino. A lot of the switches also look significantly more premium that what you'd realistically expect from someone like apple making their first car.
That steering wheel looks absolutely awful. Like a budget car. And the UX is rubbish. The easiest to reach buttons are ones that are nearly never needed: drive mode (usually used 0-2 times per trip), wiper mode (but no single wipe?). The only frequently used ones are the indicators - which I don't love but I guess stalks are a bit meh aesthetically - and the speed cruise. But sensors? Suspension? Why are they there?
The clock looks like a dollar store alarm clock. The center console otherwise looks okay, environment management can be done easily, that's a good trend to continue.
The instrument cluster has no aura - completely anonymous, doesn't make me think "Ferrari" or "high performance, high technology".
Rounded square design language isn't fit for purpose in a ferrari, which is about aerodynamic shapes that reinforce that you're in a high-performance sports car.
Jony Ive is a garbage-tier car designer. He'd fit in better at Kia. Or Volvo.
It's very clear that at some point they decided stalks are bad, and so instead of having an indicator stalk - a universally understood control they decided to stick them all on the steering wheel so you can drive around looking at whether you want to be in Range, Tour or "Perfo" mode.
I think it's fine to lose the stalks - in a Ferrari. You're making tradeoffs in usability for aesthetics anyway so a few more makes sense. But the locations of these particular ones - at prime thumb access location, plus the high visibility of them... Not good!
Heh, my thought on opening the article and seeing the image was "huh, without the badge in the photo, if forced to guess the make, I'd have gone with Kia."
Good car interior design fulfills the functions of: usability; sensibility and brand identity. What's good for a LaFerrari (which has many of the same feature on the wheel as this, but imo, better) is not going to be good on a Hyundai i20 and vice versa.
But BMW is, in general, very good at finding a design language that fits all the right buttons in the right places while feeling like a mid-to-up market car. It's a blend of usability and aesthetics and brand (+model) identity that finds a really good balance across all three categories.
This is the first automotive interior design for the blind.
It’s a mess. Disparate palettes even in grey is a serious WTF accomplishment. The ring over the Launch button is absolutely superfluous and idiotic at the same time. No function and even worse form.
Ugh. Enzo at least can power the first charge from the output of him spinning in his grave. Yes, I could do better.
I can't tell if it is just me, but a digital analogue clock is weird. I'm all for analogue time keeping with hands circling a face, but when it is put on a flat screen, it feels cheap.
There aren't enough buttons, there is too much to read, and all of this while I'm driving.
I remember my friends dad had a Corvette or something in the mid-late 90s, and it had this red projected HUD on the windshield. All of your information was right at eye level, and you never had to look away from the road to see your RPM or speed, and probably more, but that was 30ish years ago, and I barely remember yesterday.
GM has kept the HUD thing going for a few decades now. They offer it on a good number of vehicles in their GMC lineup. I have it on my vehicle now and it's absolutely amazing. I find I rarely look inside the vehicle at the 14" infotainment screen. It shows speed, cruise control status and alerts, navigation, and a popup of song title if I manually change songs with the steering controls. I find I'm lost and heavily distracted when I get in my wife's vehicle without a HUD.
Also, my vehicle is a truck, one of the last places where manufacturers still let you have buttons and knobs to control climate.
The watch face can change, repurposing the hands for a stopwatch and compass mode.
See the multigraph section: https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/auto/ferrari-luce
The whole thing kind of looks cheap tbh.
> There aren't enough buttons, there is too much to read, and all of this while I'm driving.
The speedo and rev counter are exactly where they should be. What else do you need to read while driving?
What buttons are you missing?
Who needs a rev counter on an EV?
Everything about this design has a dichotomous personality. The smoothness of the materials and rounded edges can’t make up for the disparate and forced combobulation to get…this…
I welcome to physical buttons. But multiple rectilineal shapes dominate without harmony. Almost feels like a semi truck interior.
British sports cars in the sixties for safety reasons had to remove toggle switches. The problem was that during crashes people were losing eyes or suffering puncture wounds. This was the story handed down to me by my uncle.
This is second hand account but here are my uncle's credentials...
https://mossmotoring.com/manhattan-mechanic/
If those corner radiuses got any bigger they'd turn into circles
yeah, or cop car, stuff with bolted on displays
Yes, similar response. I like all of the individual elements, but they don't work together visually.
I feel like nobody has figured out yet how these screens and components in a modern car should fit together that don't look like little iPhones and iPads just mounted in a car.
There are some nice buttons here, and individual components (as photographed) look good on their own.
BUT altogether it still seems like disparate components who share design language, just slapped into a vehicle.
Agreed. This projects looks like they couldn’t find a meaningful way to innovate and had to reach for impact-less uniqueness - physical clock on a digital screen, Oled gauges for no reason.
screens are for output, buttons (and toggles, knobs & sliders, they all have their strenghts) are for input. Voice is also good for input but should never be the only (or primary) way of interacting with important functionality.
automakers are slowly figuring this out but, unfortunately, the move to electric may retard this realization because "high-tech"
Voice is only good for languages which have broad support, and for native or almost-native sounding speakers. Anyone with an accent or speaking a language with broken support due to few speakers or just models not heavily trained on hates voice commands.
I don't have a heavy accent but as a non-native speaker still do have an accent in English, and I hate the failure modes of voice commands when it misinterprets something since it is much harder to correct. I actively avoid voice commands just due to this 1-5% of failures that are extremely annoying.
I clearly don't understand Design. My expectation is that an amazing prolific designer would deliver different designs in different contexts. At Apple maybe it's this minimalist industrial design. But what I'm seeing here - and forgive me if I'm just an idiot about design, is exactly what you'd get it you asked ChatGPT "Ferrari but Johnny Ive apple design interior".
It's all the same design language and materials you'd seen on Apple product. It's almost like someone went "let's make the infotainment a giant Apple watch".
I would expect you call up a good designer and they design something special that works in the language of your product, something uniquely new, but also uniquely Ferrari. But what seems to be happening here is if you phone up Johnny Ive you'll get a slapdash re-run of 2010s iPhone design.
This looks exactly like “we had the one trick pony, Jony, design an iPad car interface”
I don't think you are not understanding design, big-name designers do have a design language but in this case it just feels like Ive re-applied whatever his design language for Apple in the early 2000s into a Ferrari car.
Very little care on aligning the design to the brand design, except for the seat and a few selector switches (which somehow Ferrari seems to have accepted? Strange from such a picky client), no care about keeping refined design elements like stalks for the turn signals and wipers and instead applying this buttons-everywhere-for-every-function approach that is considered a regression in EVs input design.
The screens are just different shapes of iPhones/iPads instead of something uniquely Ferrari-Ive, feels like a Ferrari-Apple car collab.
Really don't understand it, Dieter Rams did a lot with the same design language because he worked for Braun for a long ass time, Ive is completely untethered from Apple so re-applying the same design language he created for the brand unto another brand is just unimaginative.
There's a more in-depth page on the Ferrari website:
https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/auto/ferrari-luce
I see lots of physical buttons in the pictures. I believe that is good and the way forward.
I have an relatively old car that was made before the fad for touch screens, I am desperately hoping real tactile controls come back into fashion before I have to buy my next car.
Then I would have managed to avoid the touch screen stupidity entirely.
It looks nice but nothing groundbreaking. If you hadn’t told me Jony Ive did it, I wouldn’t have ever known or thought it was unique.
I was genuinely expecting neon colours, gradients and whatnot.
Needing to “dock” the key in the center console to start the car is clunky. We’ve had the proximity key thing figured out for like 15 years. It also seems impossible to have the car key on a ring with anything else?
It’s not bad UX, it’s part of the experience of driving the car. Something that a Ferrari buyer probably cares more about than a Tesla buyer. I personally miss the physical keys on older cars that you had to insert and turn to start the car because you’re directly controlling the starter/engine. It feels like you’re driving a car and not using an appliance. There are people who prefer manual transmissions for similar reasons.
It's more secure
Why would he block cup holder access with a big steel bar?
While I quite like the choices around physical vs digital controls, this aesthetic feels refined to the most unexciting degree: objectively good, but locked in the past. In fairness, automotive interiors (especially EVs) seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis across the board.
While I don't think the center console is very ferrari-like, and kind of looks more like a piece of consumer electronics to me, I quite the gauges.
Using round oleds with inset bezels and physical needles to emulate a traditional 90s (and earlier) gauge cluster is an interesting idea. Honestly refreshing in a sea of sameness in the car industry today.
Ugh, maybe I need to see it inside an actual car but overall looks like it could belong inside a small truck/SUV if you took away the Ferrari logos.
I like the physical controls. I actually just traded off my truck over the weekend and the climate controls being through the screen were a major part of that decision. It still seems like the switches here are pretty minimal and might be annoying - do you have to go through the screen when your windshield starts to fog?
glad to see some physical buttons, but there aren't nearly enough of them and they aren't differentiated enough
the emergency lights button should be colored red and elevated because it needs to be interacted with in high-stress situations
temperature should be set with a slider rather than a toggle switch because then a given temperature selection becomes spatially consistent and selecting max-hot or max-cold is instant and obvious
and so on
all in all better than expected and shows that we are moving past the "everything is an ipad" phase of civilizational development
Agreed. I wonder why they didnt immediately think of that (slider for temperature etc).
Is it our hubris as armchair UI designers that we miss obvious problems? Is it internal politics? Is it bureaucracy? Is it hardware difficulties?
i think physical sliders are aesthetically fairly ugly (although two vertical sliders on either side of the control cluster could look good)
they also make it difficult to support an "auto" function, because they would need to move automatically to maintain a consistent user experience
sliders aren't used very often in cars now so it is probably harder to find well made components for them
etc
hopefully as the automakers move back to physical inputs they bring back these sorts of controls
There are several ideas here about how to elegantly combine physical switches, knobs, and dials with digital displays that I quite appreciate in this design.
Some nice details: - There's digital readouts around the binnacle gauges - The physical needle on the speedo comes from the outside to leave the center available for the digital screen - The drive selector has a small screen (light?) in the center as an indicator
The combination seems like it may create a quite polished feel if it's done well in motion.
Yuck looks like someone grabbed an AI and said “design me a car interior where everything looks like an iPhone”
Don't vibe with it. Give me a 2 door Porsche EV.
Everything is a squircle (or whatever those continuously curved corners are called). I quite like it - but it definitely has Ives signature style.
It would look better in some Mini Cooper version
This makes Jony Ive look like a one trick pony. The dashboard is now a collection of tablet-looking things.
Fun to see Ive's pivot to adopting skeuomorphism (false analog clocks, etc) a design trend he famous opposed iirc.
It's going to be the thinnest Ferrari ever, machined out of a single block of aluminium (or is it aluminum).
So wait a couple of iterations for him to get used to designing for cars?
It looks like those "Xbox 720" "leaks" in 2009
It looks very much like something out of the Alien universe. I kind of love it.
Nest on wheels. Not my cup of espresso.
Is this a glimpse into what the Apple Car interior components may have looked like?
Maybe the font (looks like SF pro), parts of the GUI, and the liberal use of glass surfaces.
But there's absolutely no way the apple car would've had gauges anywhere near this physically complex, or a steering wheel that looks like this with the thin spokes and manettino. A lot of the switches also look significantly more premium that what you'd realistically expect from someone like apple making their first car.
Not a big fan, get Dieter Rams to do it.
That steering wheel looks absolutely awful. Like a budget car. And the UX is rubbish. The easiest to reach buttons are ones that are nearly never needed: drive mode (usually used 0-2 times per trip), wiper mode (but no single wipe?). The only frequently used ones are the indicators - which I don't love but I guess stalks are a bit meh aesthetically - and the speed cruise. But sensors? Suspension? Why are they there?
The clock looks like a dollar store alarm clock. The center console otherwise looks okay, environment management can be done easily, that's a good trend to continue.
The instrument cluster has no aura - completely anonymous, doesn't make me think "Ferrari" or "high performance, high technology".
Rounded square design language isn't fit for purpose in a ferrari, which is about aerodynamic shapes that reinforce that you're in a high-performance sports car.
Jony Ive is a garbage-tier car designer. He'd fit in better at Kia. Or Volvo.
It's very clear that at some point they decided stalks are bad, and so instead of having an indicator stalk - a universally understood control they decided to stick them all on the steering wheel so you can drive around looking at whether you want to be in Range, Tour or "Perfo" mode.
I think it's fine to lose the stalks - in a Ferrari. You're making tradeoffs in usability for aesthetics anyway so a few more makes sense. But the locations of these particular ones - at prime thumb access location, plus the high visibility of them... Not good!
> He'd fit in better at Kia
Heh, my thought on opening the article and seeing the image was "huh, without the badge in the photo, if forced to guess the make, I'd have gone with Kia."
What are some car interiors with good/better design to you?
Good car interior design fulfills the functions of: usability; sensibility and brand identity. What's good for a LaFerrari (which has many of the same feature on the wheel as this, but imo, better) is not going to be good on a Hyundai i20 and vice versa.
But BMW is, in general, very good at finding a design language that fits all the right buttons in the right places while feeling like a mid-to-up market car. It's a blend of usability and aesthetics and brand (+model) identity that finds a really good balance across all three categories.
It doesn't work for international users.
these links are ok:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/1r04f0x/official_ferr...
https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/auto/ferrari-luce
one trick, out of fashion, pony.
Very iPhone
"Jony, I've designed [the] Ferrari Luce EV interior".
This is the first automotive interior design for the blind.
It’s a mess. Disparate palettes even in grey is a serious WTF accomplishment. The ring over the Launch button is absolutely superfluous and idiotic at the same time. No function and even worse form.
Ugh. Enzo at least can power the first charge from the output of him spinning in his grave. Yes, I could do better.
Agreed. It's a travesty.
"Ferrari EV"
This is something that we need to read slowly.
The "ferraristas" have been the most ardent sect on the cult of the internal combustion engine.
If these guys can be converted, then, probably, the last holdout in veneration of oil will probably be the government of the United States.
Iphone 4 vibes.
I wonder how an ai would design it.
Aren't those designs copyrighted by apple?