Jony Ive reimagines Apple Car in skeuomorphic Ferrari Luce interior rebuffing Tesla touchscreens

Apple's former king of design with a human touch has crafted a skeuomorphic interior for the first electric Ferrari, which is now called "Luce" and might exemplify what the Apple Car could've looked like.

Sir Jony Ive has been pivotal for the success of Apple's iPhone, as his vision aims to design technology that humans will find intimately familiar to work with right out of the box. After leaving Apple, his independent design studio has partnered with OpenAI, while Jony Ive has retained the freedom to work on other projects, and one of those—the Ferrari Luce interior—has been five years in the making.

As can be expected, Apple's former lead designer is not a big fan of Tesla's minimalistic, button-less, screen-centric interior that has been sweeping the car industry as of late and calls it "easy and lazy." The concept of a sole touchscreen serving as the main vehicle control center got old quickly, he said, and now screams "cost savings" rather than cutting edge.

"Powerful tools" like touchscreens "need frameworks and structures to understand how to use them responsibly, and things move so fast now that I don’t think those frameworks were developed" when it comes to car interiors, he added.

As a counterpoint to that trend, Ferrari picked Jony Ive's human design credo to transfer its heritage as a classic Italian sports car brand into the new electric vehicle era without a loss of character. The main vehicle-human interaction points have been formed by equipping the Ferrari Luce with "precision-engineered mechanical buttons, dials, toggles, and switches" as inputs but "multifunctional digital displays" as the output, albeit with a decidedly retro look.

Volkswagen did something similar with the new interior concept of its upcoming electric cars, capitalizing on a storied and instantly recognizable design, and Jony Ive seems to have reinvented the Ferrari interior for the digital era while staying true to its heritage as an ode to the tactile feel. Ferrari will be unveiling the Luce in May, when its fans will learn what Sir Jony Ive's studio has done with the car's overall looks as well.