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Everybody feels some type of way about the Ferrari Luce, and I’m not here to debate your deep-rooted opinions today. What I’m here to do instead is point out a little design quirk of the controversial Ferrari EV that we hadn’t originally noticed—that is, until our man on the ground in Italy, Jerry Perez, walked around one for himself and spotted it.
The Luce obviously carries a theme of circles and squircles that will surprise nobody that has picked up an Apple product designed over the last 30 years. This motif runs through the gauges and the instrument binnacle they sit inside, screens, and copious dials, some of which contain even tinier displays of their own. The sedan’s interior is the one aspect that I see folks generally warming up to now, if for no other reason than the exterior is vacuuming all the ire.
When Jerry pans the camera over the dash in the reel below, a pair of eyes and a nose reveal themselves, between what look to be two large circular vents and another circle of a similar radius below them, that might be a speaker. A seam in the tan leather between the two tiers of the dash form a wide mouth, and that leaves us with a veritable emoji behind the glass, greeting the sky.
It’s goofy and, some might argue, fits the car’s un-Ferrari soft and friendly vibe. The Luce is endlessly customizable, like all exorbitantly expensive cars, and the upper dashboard can be upholstered in one of eight colors, per the online configurator. If you choose a darker shade, like Charcoal or Cioccolato, those black circles aren’t going to stand out as much. Something to perhaps consider when optioning your electric, $600,000 Ferrari.
What better way to highlight the top-of-the-dashboard vents on an old Ferrari than with OutRun 2’s cockpit cam? Ferrari, Sega
Now, did designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson intend to slap a face on this thing? In a way, they pulled from Ferrari history with those dash-top vents; legends like the F40 and 512BB had them, too, though they weren’t quite as large and were usually positioned further apart. They also didn’t spell out a big grin from above. What’s old is new again.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
