Jony Ive Didn't Just Style the Ferrari Luce — He Shaped It

The Man Who Shaped the iPhone Just Shaped a Ferrari

The starting price is €550,000 in Italy — and that's not even the most striking number attached to the Ferrari Luce. The more consequential figure is 2: the number of designers from outside the automotive world who were handed the keys to define Ferrari's entire first electric vehicle, from the first sketch to the final door handle.

Jony Ive and Mark Newson, operating through their design studio LoveFrom, didn't just style the Luce's cabin. Ferrari confirmed this week that LoveFrom was given authority to "define the design direction of the project from the outset" — inside and out. After months of partial reveals, the full car is now visible. What it represents is harder to summarize than what it looks like.

Three Firsts in One Car

The Luce carries an unusual amount of symbolic weight for a single model launch. It is Ferrari's first pure electric vehicle, its second four-door car, and its first five-seater. Each of those facts alone would make it newsworthy. Together, they signal that Ferrari isn't treating electrification as a reluctant concession to regulation — it's using the EV transition as cover for a broader repositioning.

Earlier this year, Ferrari revealed the Luce's interior, which showed LoveFrom's unmistakable minimalist sensibility applied to a cockpit that traditionally celebrates mechanical complexity. The response was divided: some saw it as a natural evolution, others as a dilution. Now that the exterior design is also confirmed as LoveFrom's work, the debate sharpens. This is not a Ferrari styled by Ferrari's design center with outside input. This is a Ferrari whose visual identity was authored by the person who made Apple's products look the way they do.

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Engadget's Tim Stevens, who saw the car firsthand, described the Luce as carrying a distinctly different aesthetic from Ferrari's existing lineup — the kind of observation that will read as praise or alarm depending on who's listening.

What the Luxury EV Market Makes of This

The competitive framing matters here. Porsche, Bentley, and Aston Martin have all approached electrification as a technical upgrade applied to an existing brand identity. The Taycan is still unmistakably a Porsche. The strategy is: reassure your existing customers that the brand's soul survives the powertrain change.

Ferrari's move with the Luce is structurally different. By handing design authority to Ive and Newson, Ferrari is effectively saying that the EV transition is an opportunity to expand who Ferrari is for — not just to preserve what it has been. The Luce isn't competing only in the supercar segment. The moment Ive's name attaches to it, it enters a conversation that includes luxury tech objects, collectible design, and the broader cultural cachet of Apple-era aesthetics.

US pricing hasn't been announced. Given the Italian base of €550,000, the American sticker will almost certainly land higher — placing the Luce firmly in a bracket where purchase decisions are as much about identity signaling as transportation.

The risk is real, though. Ferrari's existing customer base didn't buy into the brand for Ive's minimalism. They bought in for the engine note, the racing heritage, the barely-street-legal aggression. Whether the Luce can carry that emotional weight without a combustion engine — and with a cabin that looks more Cupertino than Maranello — is a question the market will answer, not the press release.