"A large touchscreen doesn't work in a car": Sir Jony Ive on designing the Ferrari Luce's interior
Maranello’s first EV has been entrusted to Sir Jony's company. Time to meet the man and mark his homework
Jony Ive once spent three weeks in northern Japan working with craftspeople in an area renowned for its metal working. He was fixated on titanium at the time, and its peculiarly challenging properties. “They really understood it,” he says, “and I realised that I didn’t.” Needless to say, he soon learned.
Born in north London in 1967, Ive is the son of a silversmith, and was educated at Newcastle Polytechnic. Hired by Apple in 1992, he rose to prominence as the design alter ego of company CEO, the mercurial, perfectionist Steve Jobs. He’d been set to quit Apple shortly before the company’s co-founder returned in 1997, but was persuaded to stay when Jobs prioritised design over profit. They shared an obsessive understanding of the connection between a product’s design, its engineering essence, and its manufacturing.
“He is a wickedly intelligent person in all ways,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. “He understands business concepts, marketing concepts. If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull the others in and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’”
And what products they were: the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, era-defining technology that transcended its sector to rewire culture itself. When Jobs died in 2011, many speculated about how long Ive would continue at Apple, during a phase when it was developing a car of its own (Project Titan, later abandoned), but it was 2019 before he departed. Then he co-founded the design collective LoveFrom, with old friend and colleague, the industrial designer and polymath, Marc Newson.
Both are devout petrolheads, and own an eclectic bunch of cars between them – a Bentley Continental S3, Bugatti Type 59 and Ferrari 250 GT Europa, to name a few. Selective about who they worked with, the prospect of designing the nascent electric Ferrari was too tempting to resist when the company’s executive chairman, John Elkann, proposed a collaboration.
Five years on, the Luce is due to be revealed in May. Thus far, we know about the hardware that underpins it, and now also the interior. “We wanted to explore an interface that was physical and engaging and to take the most powerful parts of an analogue display and combine them with a digital display,” Jony Ive tells Top Gear. The result is undeniably Apple-y, a material-rich greatest hits reimagined in one of the most demanding of all environments – a car interior.
