The Lucid Lunacy of Ferrari’s Luce

I had to laugh watching the coverage of Ferrari’s Luce, their new, 5-passenger EV.

The press’s video presenters at the event mostly looked like deer in the headlights, slowly walking around the car, reciting facts and figures, then periodically glancing back at the camera with frozen pauses, like they wanted to say something more, but – as they say – when in Rome... Or, uh, will Ferrari cancel my return flight if I actually say it?

Everybody else, though, went rabid rabbit crazy with the most devastating reviews I’ve ever seen, from the highlight reel of forehead slaps by AI video mock-meisters AngelesDeathHighway (made in impressive time, I must say) to a sky-darkening locust storm of really creative and funny online condemnations. (But special cred, though, to uber influencer, Marques Brownlee who had access to the Luce in Italy but still said it’s rear looks as if a BYD had eaten a Ferrari 360.)

However, I am not here to pile on. Instead, I shall provide a rather more mature perspective on the dust up.

First of all, let’s give this car a little time percolate. Remember that the first audience of Stravinsky’s 1913 opera The Rite of Spring, broke into fist fights in 1913. Okay, that’s one.

And let’s remember that the principals of LoveFrom (the Luce’s designer) are as top drawer as they get. Marc Newsom (a proper one-time car designer) and Jony – Sir Jonathan Paul Ive (one of the greatest industrial designers of all time - iPhone, iMac, etc, etc) – are Apple design all-stars.

Then there’s that Apple connection. It was interesting to read so many commentators mention that Ive and Newsom were both involved in the ultimately aborted Apple Car (Project Titan) several years ago - and was the Luce what that car would have looked like? I wrote Motortrend’s cover story about that project, assembling a group of students and instructors at Art Center of Design in Pasadena to collaboratively conjure their version of the Apple Car. No, not much similarity, actually.

What do I think of the Luce? Like art, automotive design is a subjective and my credentials on the subject include having the legendary instructor and design mentor, Strother MacMinn once nearly toss me out of an Art Center open house. However, my mental wiring of good design was permanently imprinted at the LA auto show (then called Auto Expo) in 1972. once in the cavernous hall (after several hours of public bus transits - I couldn’t drive yet), I strolled in silent awe past a series of icons – the V-12 Jaguar E-Type, the Lamborghini Miura, the Ferrari 365 Daytona. Them were days when design giants walked the earth. But the car I stopped and stared at for maybe an hour, was a concept, the Ferrari 512 Modulo, created by Paolo Martin at Pininfarina.

It was a wedge spaceship reduced to simple arcs above the road; symmetrical patterns of round holes in a huge plexiglass engine cover with two, smaller arcs to smoothly blanket the rear wheels on either side of it. Simple minimalism, reduced to its necessary form. As if Brancusi formed it.

Brancusi’s reflection in automotive shaping were Marcello Gandini and Ital Design’s Giorgetto Giugiaro, the greatest and most artful origami-folder in the era of wedge cars.

Gandini (Miura, Countach) passed away in 2024. Giugiaro is now 87 and the doyen of the drawing board, still sketching, with his son, Fabrizio, rolling art at GFG Style in Turin. Among them was the 2018 four-door EV concept called the Sibylla GG80 you can see in the nearby images and compare to the Luce.

Personally, I’m bored numb with the cartoonish flippery of modern supercars. Compared to the severely architectural Modulo or the frozen, almost frightening violence of Gandini’s Countach, today’s McLarens and yes, Ferrari’s, are prepubescent, crisscrossing carnivals of unnecessary and illogical scoops and wings. So the idea of a blank screen for Ferrari’s first EV could maybe, just maybe, be a long overdue reset to the essence of clean exotic automotive beauty? Certainly, Sir Jony Ive knows clean design.

But now look how Giugiaro, then nearly 80 for God’s sake, proportioned and finessed the idea of an Italian four-door EV exotic.

Just look at it. I don’t need to tell you what you see, just look at it.

Where the Luce would gather an eager line at an LA Apple store, Giugiaro’s Sibylla would sell tickets like tacos at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries.

Appropriately positioned as it is over Wilshire Boulevard. And I’d buy one of those tickets.