Ferrari unveiled the Luce — its first EV — and by day two the stock had dropped six points, about five billion dollars in market cap. The former CEO Luca di Montezemolo publicly asked them to take the Prancing Horse off the car, then added a knife: “too ugly even for the Chinese to copy.” Italy’s deputy PM Matteo Salvini joined in: “doesn’t look like a Ferrari at all.” Lamborghini’s CEO took the opening and called their own EV cancellation “the right decision.” Social media settled on the verdict — the car looks like a Ford Mach-E, like a £30,000 Nissan, like a Chinese Xpeng.
A few days ago I wrote about the interior of the same car — how Ive pulled the big-screen cult down from the center console. That half of the car, designers loved. The other half — the exterior, the overall brief — got the opposite. Designers didn’t catch it. The market didn’t catch it. Ferrari veterans and Italian politicians didn’t catch it. Same hand, two opposite verdicts on the same car.
The dominant explanation right now is some version of “Ive got too cocky, he’s washed up.” For other cases that might be the right read. On the Luce it’s just emotional venting. This car, if anything, is not the product of Ive being arrogant.
Let me say what this piece is. I’m going to walk through Ive’s career arc as a designer and try to reverse-engineer what actually went wrong here. Most of the noise right now is venting. I’d rather try a cooler read from inside the discipline. If I’m wrong, at least there’s a version on the table that can be argued against.
Two Ives, same hand
Ive spent twenty-plus years at Apple. Roughly two phases, one important pivot.
Early Ive (from taking over the design group in 1996 to around 2010): defining new categories. Translucent candy-color iMac G3, iPod, the original iPhone, iPad. What these had in common is that they weren’t improvements on existing things — they were category-creating. Multi-touch in 2007 was not what the market was asking for. The iPad in 2010 was globally mocked as “a giant iPhone.” The iMac G3 turned the beige PC box into a translucent piece of candy. Each one was Ive and Jobs together, ramming something the market hadn’t asked for into the market. This was Ive’s offensive period — pushing the boundary of what a product category could be.
Late Ive (~2010 onward): not new categories, but making existing categories more pure. Each iPhone slightly thinner than the last. Each MacBook slightly lighter. The first Apple Pencil, in pursuit of an absolutely wireless silhouette, had to be charged by plugging its butt into an iPad — the internet called it “forcing users to perform a shameful act.” The 2013 cylindrical Mac Pro was beautifully symmetric, then thermally cooked itself; in 2017 Apple held a press event to publicly admit they’d lost. The 2016 butterfly keyboard, made thinner by replacing scissor switches, had seven straight years of reliability problems before Apple killed it in 2019. This was the form-driven phase — what was being pushed wasn’t a product concept anymore, it was the designer’s personal preference about shape. “Obstinacy” wouldn’t be unfair.
Both phases look the same from the outside: designer-led product. The insides are opposite. Phase one is a product concept leading users by half a step. Phase two is a form preference asking users to pay the bill.
Jobs was alive through the first phase and the start of the second. He acted as a filter: he’d ask, “is this thing actually convenient for a person to use?” After Jobs died in 2011, that filter was gone. Ive’s form preferences had no one in the room to push back. The flops I listed above — Mac Pro, butterfly keyboard, the Pencil-charging gesture — are nearly all post-Jobs.
These flops share a tell: it wasn’t engineering constraining Ive. It was Ive forcing engineering to surrender to his form language. “I like this silhouette.” “I like this symmetry.” “I can’t tolerate a cable.” Engineering’s objections couldn’t outrank design, and Apple’s design group quietly became an outlet for one person’s aesthetic.
When Ive left Apple in 2019 to start LoveFrom, this run of flops was right behind him. I think this experience changed his late-career design philosophy in a specific way. He probably wrote himself a rule: stop forcing engineering. Let the brief lead. Let design and engineering constraints support each other.
Carry that rule into the Luce and you get exactly what’s on the floor. Nowhere on the spec sheet did Ive force a single engineering parameter past its comfortable range. Zero to a hundred in 2.5 seconds — quick but not the EV peak. Range of 530 km — middle of the pack. Five seats, four doors, fit for daily use. The interior is minimal, but the minimalism isn’t a place where any process has been pushed to “cost no object.” Every spec is reasonable. The whole car is reasonable. And reasonable is exactly the problem.
The rule itself, by the way, is worth disputing. The right version of the rule is something I’ll get to. The point for now is the path: top designers age in a specific way, and the usual story — “his taste went bad” — is wrong. The more common path is that he got burned enough times that he packed up his offense and turned into a “reasonable optimization” designer.
Imposing personal will isn’t the sin — what you impose is
There’s a more basic question underneath all of this. Should a designer be imposing their personal will on a product that ships to the public? This line gets discussed badly because it tends to collapse into “designers should never impose personal will on the market,” which is the wrong conclusion.
When the iPhone shipped in 2007, multi-touch was not the market demand. Ive and Jobs forced an interaction paradigm into users’ hands that the market hadn’t asked for. The iPad was globally mocked at launch as “a giant iPhone, useless.” The iPod was not the obvious choice in a crowded MP3 player segment. Every one of these is Ive imposing his personal will on the market. If “designers shouldn’t impose personal will” were the rule, none of them would exist.
So imposing isn’t the problem. What’s being imposed is the problem.
Early Ive imposed product concepts — multi-touch, a mobile OS, true wireless. That’s the legitimate kind of personal will, because it’s actually a design judgment: seeing a need at the edge of what users can yet articulate. Late Ive imposed form preferences — thinner, more symmetric, more wireless, more pure. Not a new concept. It’s “I prefer this shape,” pushed past the point where it serves the user. If the first kind flops, you get called a pioneer (Newton). If it doesn’t, you get called the founder of a category (iPhone). If the second kind flops, you get ego — and worse, you actually hurt users.
The butterfly keyboard is the model failure for the second kind. Now look at the Luce. You won’t see ego in this car. But you won’t see product vision either. Both axes are gone. What’s left is reasonable optimization.
The real problem isn’t Ive. It’s Ferrari.
Ive’s retreat explains half of the Luce. The other half is Ferrari’s.
When I’m reasoning about luxury, the criterion I trust most is this: a luxury good’s legitimacy doesn’t come from “looks great” or “easy to use.” It comes from “cost-no-object extreme.” That’s the actual line separating it from a high-end commodity. Patek Philippe isn’t selling precision (a quartz watch is more precise) — they’re selling movement extremes plus unmeasurable handwork. Rolls-Royce isn’t selling comfort — they’re selling materials and process taken to the edge of absurdity. The Bugatti Chiron’s W16 plus 1500 hp is engineering pushed completely past practicality. Ferrari’s own greats — SF90, LaFerrari, Daytona SP3 — run on the same logic: four-figure horsepower, extreme aero, naturally aspirated V12 held to the last possible moment, limited production.
In these cars, engineering isn’t capping the product. Engineering is being dragged behind a cost-no-object extreme. The relationship between engineering and design in luxury is inverted from the consumer market — it’s not engineering constraining design, it’s the spec extreme pulling engineering along behind it.
Hold the Luce up to that ruler. Five seats, four doors — for daily use. Range of 530 km — so you don’t have anxiety. Minimal interior — looks clean and works well. Shell-like body — for aero coefficient and visual calm. Zero to a hundred in 2.5 seconds — fast, but in the same price bracket the Rimac Nevera does 1.85 seconds with 1914 horsepower. Every single feature of this car is on the “fit / compromise / optimize” side of the line. Nothing is on the “extreme / cost-no-object / no compromise” side.
And the EV era doesn’t lack room for extremes. There’s the acceleration extreme (Rimac Nevera). There’s the material and craft extreme (Bugatti Tourbillon’s 8.3L V16 hybrid plus extreme handwork). There’s the form extreme (Pininfarina Battista). You could also push energy density, scarce materials, sound design, an L4-only customer experience, manufacturing rarity. Ferrari picked none of them. The brief they chose was: “we’ll build a 5-seat, daily-usable, pure electric Ferrari.” That brief, by itself, vacates the luxury position. €550k for a reasonably optimized high-end EV is expensive in price but not luxury in category. It’s expensive. It isn’t luxurious.
So when Montezemolo says “take the Prancing Horse off the car,” from inside the discipline that isn’t a tantrum. He’s pointing exactly where the wound is. The Prancing Horse is the badge of luxury legitimacy, not just decoration. A car with no extreme dimension cannot carry it. That’s a separate question from whether the body looks ugly or whether it looks like a Mach-E. The actual problem with this car is: take the badge off, put it in a Lucid showroom or a Mercedes showroom, and it might be a genuinely fine car.
Two surrenders, one failure
Look back at it and the difficulty isn’t really in Ive alone, and it isn’t really in Ferrari alone. Both sides vacated their load-bearing position. Same act, two doors.
The designer’s load-bearing position is this: outside the brief, see a need that isn’t yet being served, or a user experience that the current form has bottlenecked, and then push engineering to deliver it. Early Ive did this over and over. Late Ive did it crooked — substituted form preference for product vision. Then got burned. On the Luce, he just stopped pushing.
A luxury good’s load-bearing position is the cost-no-object extreme. Ferrari handed that position over to “reasonable adaptation” — a car for daily use, five seats, painless charging — and bought commodity-grade excellence in return.
Splice the two together and you get the Luce: a designer who no longer dares to push engineering, working for a luxury client that no longer wants to chase an extreme, jointly producing a reasonably optimized high-end EV. The car isn’t ugly. It’s just not a Ferrari. Ferrari has never been selling cars. Ferrari has been selling the legitimacy of cost-no-object engineering. Hand that legitimacy over to “reasonable” and the Prancing Horse can’t hold up a €550k sticker.
The part designers did catch — pulling the big screen down off the center console — is what it is because Ive saw an actual user scene being blocked by the screen and pushed. That’s early Ive showing up.
But the same hand, on the exterior and the overall brief, did the opposite thing. He let the brief lead. He retreated behind engineering constraints. That’s late Ive showing up — the aging version.
So this single car contains two Ives. One is still pushing. One has packed it in. For designers, that fact might be more worth remembering than whether the body lines work.