{"id":1858613,"date":"2026-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1858613"},"modified":"2026-04-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T21:00:00","slug":"a-large-touchscreen-doesnt-work-in-a-car-sir-jony-ive-on-designing-the-ferrari-luces-interior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1858613","title":{"rendered":"“A large touchscreen doesn’t work in a car”: Sir Jony Ive on designing the Ferrari Luce’s interior"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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\u00a0the time, and its peculiarly challenging properties. \u201cThey really understood it,\u201d he says, \u201cand I realised that I didn\u2019t.\u201d Needless to say, he soon learned.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d been set to quit Apple shortly before the company\u2019s co-founder returned in 1997, but was persuaded\u00a0to stay when Jobs prioritised design over profit. They shared an obsessive understanding of the connection between a product\u2019s design, its engineering essence, and its manufacturing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHe is a wickedly intelligent person in all ways,\u201d Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. \u201cHe understands business concepts, marketing concepts. If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it\u2019s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull the others in and say, \u2018Hey, what do you think about this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Photography: Greg Pajo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Both are devout petrolheads, and own an eclectic bunch of cars between them \u2013 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\u2019s executive chairman, John Elkann, proposed a collaboration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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. \u201cWe 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,\u201d 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 \u2013 a car interior.<\/p>\n

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\"FERRARI<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Left to right: Benedetto Vigna, CEO of Ferrari; John Elkann, executive chairman; Flavio Manzoni, chief design officer; Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson, founders of LoveFrom<\/em><\/p>\n

Top Gear: Can you take us through your methodology?<\/h3>\n

Sir Jony Ive:<\/strong> The first thing we did was try to understand the foundation and architecture of the interface, how things were organised. This isn\u2019t something that\u2019s often apparent. It reminds you that you\u2019re alive and that you\u2019re engaging with a physical thing. Getting into a car and seeing one big display, well, it sucks the life out of me. This is so much more engaging and visceral \u2013 and helpful in terms of establishing hierarchy of use.<\/p>\n

The work you did at Apple, particularly on the iPhone, made you arguably the most influential designer in terms of the car interior. But the Ferrari Luce shuns the most obvious aspect of that thinking.<\/h3>\n

Practically and functionally, a large touchscreen doesn\u2019t work in a car. That\u2019s incontrovertible. I find it easy and lazy. This is a space where there can be an infatuation with style and fashion. Marc [Newson] and I understand culture, and we\u2019ve done a lot of work in that area. But there has to be rigour. User interface design is also a relatively new discipline, and it was very clear why we developed it for the products that we did.<\/p>\n

So what were your aspirations on this project?<\/h3>\n

You have to care. That was great fuel to see if we could try to solve the problem. I don\u2019t mean to sound arrogant but I\u2019ve been lucky in that I\u2019ve worked on products that have had a broad impact beyond the original scope. I had a rather juvenile thing about being copied, but now I would just like it if everybody got to enjoy better design. Maybe I\u2019m growing up a bit. I do think it would be good if people stopped accepting stuff that\u2019s almost unusable and, I would argue, dangerous. When you look at our central screen, you\u2019re not wondering, \u2018how many layers deep am I going to have to go to do something simple?\u2019<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Much of the Luce\u2019s interior is done according to \u2018first principles\u2019. That seems to have surprised some people.<\/h3>\n

To make something simple and intuitive is really difficult. Everything is founded on being functional. It\u2019s not styled, it\u2019s not garnish, because that\u2019s a distraction and it doesn\u2019t last well. The binnacle and steering wheel are intimately connected, and this is about driving. Everything else augments that experience. The binnacle is about output and the steering wheel is about input. All the controls are physical and mechanical. We stress tested these big organisational principles. We felt they were very important, but we also worked hard to verify the assumptions we were making. Fortunately, the best engineers in the world are at Ferrari.<\/p>\n

You and Marc both own classic cars, and have spent years getting your hands dirty. How important is that to what LoveFrom does?<\/h3>\n

Our work, and a lot of my work at Apple, is informed by the fact that I understand how to make stuff. How can you possibly design a shape and not really understand how it\u2019s made? So we spend a lot of time at the machine centres working with the team making it. Those are the guys you listen to, and we just learn<\/em>. We live in a world with sloppy products because they haven\u2019t been properly designed by designers who listen and do so with some humility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The images don\u2019t convey how meticulous it all is. It\u2019s pared back but the result really is powerful.<\/h3>\n

We treated every single element as if it was a camera or a watch. Nothing was vague or hand-wavy. You can see how obsessive the collective teams have been. It felt like designing hundreds of products, but in aggregate it feels singular and coherent. You can see our nuttiness with all the individual components. The seats are particularly simple, beautiful and elegant. Some things are gentle and small observations, that you might only discover after a while of ownership, but they do speak of enormous care. Over time your respect and affection actually grows.<\/p>\n

Did you worry about entering an area that was new to you?<\/h3>\n

What I worry about is whether I\u2019m working hard enough to learn about the distinct issues of a new project or problem. It could be a building, something in your pocket, or something you sit on. I love that I don\u2019t need to obey the traditional dogmas around something. I remember being told by someone at Nokia, \u2018you have no idea what you\u2019re doing. You should just leave it to the experts\u2019. The important thing when you cross boundaries of expertise is that you do it in a deferential way, where you really are aware of what you don\u2019t know, where you learn, but still have the opportunity to think in a different way.<\/p>\n


\n <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What was it like working with Ferrari?<\/h3>\n

The older I\u2019ve got, the more I\u2019ve been up to, I\u2019ve felt a real shift in what I care about. And to me, who I work with has become much more important than what I work on. One of the characteristics of this project is a sincere and authentic friendship. We actually really like each other. I\u2019m more interested in what I\u2019ve learned. I\u2019m more interested in that than I am in being right, actually.<\/p>\n

One of the saddest things in a big company is that there\u2019s a tendency to value what you can measure… you know, price, weight, speed, but not all that you can measure is valuable, and not all that is valuable is measurable. I think Einstein may have said that. The most important decisions we make here are generally made in the absence of data. One of the reasons I love Benedetto [Vigna, Ferrari CEO] is that he\u2019s a brilliant engineer who pays attention to the things you can\u2019t measure.<\/p>\n

I interviewed Giorgetto Giugiaro and the late Marcello Gandini, arguably the two greatest car designers of all time. They both described themselves, first and foremost, as problem solvers.<\/h3>\n

That\u2019s exactly what Marc and I said. One of the biggest mistakes made is that people don\u2019t frame the problem properly. I spend a lot of my time saying to my team, \u2018that\u2019s not the\u00a0problem\u2019. The problem is this<\/em> not that… If you\u2019re a stylist, you can say, \u2018why is it like that?\u2019 \u2018Well, because I like it, it\u2019s sexy.\u2019 If you\u2019re a problem solver, you can\u2019t do that.<\/p>\n

\"Ferrari\"<\/p>\n

In anticipation of the real thing, we made this one up ourselves. Give us a job, Jony!<\/em><\/p>\n

Every element in the Luce\u2019s interior could exist as a piece of sculpture in its own right. The air vents are incredible.<\/h3>\n

I know the geometry of the cutting machine that did the air vent. Most people won\u2019t understand that, but I do believe that people sense care. With most products I use, I feel that the people responsible just didn\u2019t give a s***. Yet I believe that people see more than they do with just their eyes. They sense things even if they can\u2019t see them. All the great consequential work was very often done with a quiet, humble sense of wanting to be useful. [pause] Steve really protected me because he knew what I could do and do well. What makes me happy is being useful, being of service. That\u2019s not a very groovy word but it\u2019s important and it\u2019s what I do. I\u2019m a tool maker, really.<\/p>\n

And yet, when you look at the universe that opened up beyond the iPhone, you accept that there have been unintended consequences to some of the things you designed.<\/h3>\n

Yes, there have been. It was clear when we were working on it that it was going to be a very powerful tool. Things like that need frameworks and structures to fully understand them, but things move so fast now that I don\u2019t think these frameworks were developed. If you innovate there will be unintended consequences but you still need to own them, so it\u2019s one of the reasons I\u2019m not at the old company, and one of the reasons I\u2019m doing what I do now. But yeah, I take it very, very seriously.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0the time, and its peculiarly challenging properties. \u201cThey really understood it,\u201d he says, \u201cand I realised that I didn\u2019t.\u201d Needless to say, he soon learned. Born in north London in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-1858613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1858613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1858613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1858613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1858613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}