Ferrari’s electric car has a design story that would be remarkable even if the car itself weren’t remarkable: its interior was shaped by Jony Ive, the designer who spent nearly three decades at Apple defining what a generation of technology looks and feels like. Ive left Apple in 2019 to found LoveFrom, his independent design practice, and Ferrari is among the first major commissions to show what that practice is actually capable of outside of consumer electronics.
The significance of this collaboration goes beyond namecheck. Ferrari’s first electric vehicle enters a category — the luxury EV — that is increasingly crowded and increasingly design-serious. Porsche, Rimac, Lucid, and others have already established that an electric drivetrain is no barrier to driving excitement or visual ambition. What Ferrari needed to prove was that an electric Ferrari could feel like a Ferrari — that the soul of the brand, built on sixty years of combustion drama, could survive the translation.
“Ferrari’s challenge wasn’t making an EV. It was making an EV that feels inevitable rather than compromised.”
What Jony Ive Brings to a Car Interior
Ive’s design philosophy at Apple was defined by a few consistent principles: the removal of everything unnecessary, materials chosen for how they feel as much as how they look, and a belief that the best design is invisible — that objects should feel natural and self-evident rather than designed. Applied to a car interior, this translates to a cabin stripped of visual noise, where every surface and control has been considered from first principles rather than inherited from convention.
Ferrari hasn’t released full interior specifications, but what has been shown suggests a cockpit that departs significantly from the layered complexity that characterizes most high-performance car interiors. The driver-focused architecture remains — this is still a Ferrari — but the execution is cleaner, more resolved, more interested in the quality of individual moments than in the accumulation of features.
Why This Matters for the EV Market
Ferrari’s entry into the electric vehicle market carries weight beyond the brand’s own customer base. When a manufacturer that has built its entire identity on the sound and feel of combustion commits to an electric platform, it signals a maturation of the category. And when that manufacturer chooses to collaborate with one of the world’s most celebrated product designers on the interior, it signals something else: that the electric car interior is now a serious design problem, worthy of serious design attention.
- The platform: Ferrari’s bespoke electric architecture, developed entirely in-house, targets performance figures consistent with current V8-powered models
- The collaboration: LoveFrom’s involvement with Ferrari spans design and brand — a deeper relationship than a single project
- The timing: Ferrari’s electric launch positions the brand ahead of the EU’s 2035 combustion phase-out, on its own terms rather than in reaction to regulation
The Ferrari electric car is, in the end, a bet that the future of performance doesn’t require the past’s soundtrack. Jony Ive is there to make sure it still feels like something worth getting excited about.
Electric Future 