Cleo Abram sat down with Jony Ive, the former Apple design chief behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, and Flavio Manzoni, Ferrari's chief designer since 2010, at a private track in Italy before the Luce's public debut. The resulting conversation is one of the more substantive explanations yet offered for why Ferrari chose to build its first electric car as a five-seat GT rather than a two-seat sports car, why they commissioned LoveFrom rather than keeping the design in-house, and why Ive and his team spent roughly eight months in San Francisco developing the concept in isolation before presenting it to Ferrari. The interview goes to places most automotive launches don't: the ethics of design, what responsibility designers carry for the things they make, and the pointed question of what Enzo Ferrari would have said about a car built around electric motors.
Ive's involvement in the Luce was announced before the car's reveal, but the depth of LoveFrom's contribution became clear only with the full debut. LoveFrom covered exterior styling, interior design, and even the typeface used throughout the cabin. Ferrari's chairman John Elkann described the collaboration as intentionally disruptive: the goal was not an evolution of existing Ferrari design language but a genuinely different vehicle made possible by an outside perspective. That logic echoes what happened when Ferrari introduced the Purosangue SUV, a product the company's own CEO once said Ferrari would never make. The Purosangue became Ferrari's best-selling model. Manzoni draws the comparison deliberately, and it is the clearest signal of how Ferrari expects the Luce to be received once the initial controversy settles. The electric car that nobody asked for tends to become the car everyone eventually wants, if the product is good enough.
Two ideas in this interview stand out well beyond the car itself. The first is Ive's position on touchscreens: that multi-touch technology is genuinely wonderful in a phone because when you use a phone you are looking at the phone, but that multi-touch in a car is an active safety problem because basic operations require the driver to take their eyes off the road. The result in the Luce is a cabin defined by physical toggle switches, rotary dials, palm rests, and tactile controls rather than a large central touchscreen. The second idea is Manzoni's framing of the design brief using the observation that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. Ferrari is not abandoning its heritage with the Luce. It is arguing that the heritage was always defined by the willingness to do something nobody expected, not by any specific powertrain or body shape.
Bottom line: This is the best explanation available for why the Luce is what it is rather than what most people assumed it would be. Ive's point about touchscreens and driver distraction is one the broader automotive industry should be forced to sit with. If the Luce's physical-first cabin approach gets copied downstream into mass-market cars, the way the iPhone's design principles eventually touched every product category, that becomes the actual legacy of this project. Whether it does depends on whether Ferrari's buyers vote for it, and whether competitors decide the argument was right.