The Ferrari Luce might be what the Apple Car never was

For a decade, the Apple Car was the most expensive thought experiment in technology. Now Jony Ive has finally built it. He just put a Ferrari badge on the front.

Eleanor Pace·May 26, 2026·8 min read

For a decade, the Apple Car was the most expensive thought experiment in technology. Now Jony Ive has finally built it. He just put a Ferrari badge on the front.

The Ferrari Luce, unveiled this week and priced at roughly $640,000, is the first major automotive product from LoveFrom, the design studio Ive founded with Marc Newson in 2019 after leaving Apple. Ferrari approached the pair almost immediately and formalized the partnership in 2021. Five years of work later, the Luce is here, and it is doing something stranger than the press coverage has quite admitted. It looks nothing like a Ferrari. It looks, in a very specific way, like what Apple was supposed to be making before the project codenamed Titan was officially killed in early 2024.

The car that doesn't look like its maker

The Luce is a four door electric grand tourer with center opening doors, a trunk, and a body finished in a soft, almost retail friendly blue (among other colors). Its headlights are reduced to two thin strips. Its surfaces are curved and quiet, with the kind of black accent panels that Apple watchers will recognize from a particular era of iPod and Cinema Display industrial design. Reviewers at Car and Driver and AppleInsider have already made the obvious point: it does not announce itself as a Ferrari. One AppleInsider commenter said it looked like a wind tunnel concept for a Chevy Camaro. Another said it resembled a jellybean. Both are within range.

It is worth saying plainly that this is the entire story. Ferrari hired Jony Ive, and Jony Ive made a Jony Ive object. The Ferrari heritage, the long hoods and aggressive intakes and Maranello machismo, has been politely set aside. What remains is a study in restraint, soft geometry, and the kind of material honesty that defined the iPhone 4 and the original Apple Watch.

The interior is the argument

The exterior will get the headlines. The interior is where Ive's intentions become unmistakable.

LoveFrom's cabin pairs an OLED center display with physical switches, machined aluminum dials, and an analog style clock. The instrument cluster is composed of vintage looking gauges that are themselves displays within a larger display, a small nested trick that is very recognizably Ive's. The whole thing has been described, fairly, as something dreamed up in the 1950s for a car of the 2050s, then delivered in 2026.

What is striking about the cabin is what it refuses to do. The current direction in car interiors, set by Tesla and copied with varying success by everyone from Ford to Volvo, is the all screen dashboard. Climate, seat heat, mirror adjustment, drive mode, navigation, everything lives behind a touchscreen menu. Ive's Ferrari rejects that idea. The mechanical controls are real, they click, they have detents, and they are intentionally there for the functions a driver should not have to look down at. The screen handles what a screen should handle. The hardware handles what hardware should handle.

This is not a small philosophical point. It is the same argument Ive has been making, in different products, for almost thirty years. The Apple Watch Digital Crown exists for the same reason. So does the camera control button on the iPhone 16, the force touch trackpad, the AirPods Max crown. Apple's design language at its best has always been about finding the seam where the physical and the digital meet, and making that seam disappear. The Ferrari interior is the same idea applied to a car cabin, in some cases with more conviction than Apple itself has shown lately.

Why this looks so much like the Apple Car

Apple's automotive project was never officially described in any detail. What is known comes from years of reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, The Information, and former employees who spoke to the press after the program was wound down. The car was meant to be electric. It was meant to lean heavily on autonomy, though the level of self driving capability moved several times across the project's life. And it was meant, at various points, to be both a halo product for Apple Services and a serious push into a category Apple had never made hardware for.

What Apple never resolved was the design question. What does an Apple car actually look like? Is it sporty? Is it minimalist in the way the first iMac was minimalist? Is it a rolling living room?

Look at the Luce, and a possible answer presents itself. Not the answer, but a credible one. The car is unmistakably an Ive object scaled up to the size of a sedan. The proportions are calm. The lines are clean to the point of being almost generic, which is the same critique people made of the original iPhone in 2007 before the entire industry adopted those same proportions. The cabin treats software as one material among several, not as the whole experience.

If Apple had shipped a car, and if it had stayed within the design language Ive established at Cupertino, it would have looked closer to this than to any current Ferrari, BMW, or Mercedes. It might not have been priced at $640,000. A long rumored figure, never officially confirmed, was closer to $100,000. But the silhouette, the surface treatment, the studied refusal to announce itself as a high performance machine, all of that is present in the Luce in a way that is hard to read as coincidence.

What the criticism gets right, and what it misses

The critical reception so far has been mixed at best. Car and Driver's coverage emphasized the disconnect between Ferrari's design heritage and what Ive and Newson actually delivered. AppleInsider's headline noted that the car will upset fans of the brand. Comments on the piece were harsher, with longtime Apple readers using words like snooze and anodyne, and at least one suggesting that Ive has been adrift since the passing of Steve Jobs.

The skepticism is fair on its own terms. A Ferrari that does not look like a Ferrari is a genuine product problem, and the company will have to convince a customer base that has very specific expectations. The Jaguar Type 00, mentioned by AppleInsider as a cautionary parallel, ended with its designer leaving the company, and that is a real risk here.

What the criticism misses is the more interesting question. The Luce was probably never going to please Ferrari traditionalists. That is not what LoveFrom does. The point of hiring Ive and Newson was presumably not to deepen the existing brand, but to break it open and see what would survive on the other side. Whether that is a wise business move for Ferrari is a separate matter from whether the object itself is interesting, and the object is interesting.

It is also worth being careful with the Steve Jobs argument. Ive's post Apple work has not all landed. The OpenAI hardware partnership with Sam Altman, announced in 2025 and still unreleased, has yet to produce a public product. The Jaguar comparison is real. But Ive's Apple work was not flawless either, and the Mac Pro of 2013 and the butterfly keyboard are reminders that the same designer made some genuinely bad calls inside Cupertino. Reasonable people will disagree about how much of Apple's design success belonged to Ive and how much belonged to the system around him. The Luce is one more data point in a still developing argument.

The Apple Car will not come back

Apple's automotive program is over. The company has reallocated those engineers and that capital toward Apple Intelligence and the broader AI buildout. Whatever institutional momentum existed for a car has been redirected. CarPlay Ultra is the official answer now, and it is a very different answer. Apple is no longer trying to make a vehicle. It is trying to live inside other people's vehicles.

That is probably the right call for Apple's business. It is also a quiet loss. The Apple Car would not have looked like a Tesla or a Rivian or a Lucid. It would have looked, like the Luce suggests, a calm and slightly strange object that solved problems other automakers had stopped thinking about. The physical switches. The clear hierarchy between hardware and software. The willingness to make a car that does not perform its own segment, that simply is what it is.

The Luce is not the Apple Car. It is, on its best reading, the closest thing the public is ever going to see to it. Whether that is a comfort or a frustration depends on how badly you wanted Apple to try.

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