From the Apex · Axle to Grind · 2026-06-02

The Ferrari Luce problem isn't that it's ugly

The internet spent a week deciding it's the ugliest supercar ever made. Almost everyone is looking at the wrong part of the car.

• Ferrari's first electric car is a five-seater over five metres long, with more than 1,000 hp.
• Ferrari's share price fell close to 8% within 48 hours of the reveal.
• The design came from Jony Ive's studio, not Ferrari's usual hand.
• The argument is about the badge, not the shape. Ask yourself if you would mind it wearing an Apple logo.

The internet spent a week deciding it's the ugliest supercar ever made. Almost everyone is looking at the wrong part of the car.

When Ferrari pulled the sheet off the Luce in Rome on 25 May, the reaction was instant and brutal. Within 48 hours the car was a meme, the internet had decided it looked like a Nissan Leaf, and Ferrari's own shares had dropped close to 8% in Milan. Luca Cordero di Montezemolo — the man who ran Ferrari for two decades — told the Italian press they risk the destruction of a legend, and should take the Prancing Horse off it. For a brand that spent eight decades making the cars that ended up as posters above ten-year-olds' beds, that is not the launch you could ever script.

So let's get the dunking out of the way. The Luce is Ferrari's first fully electric car, its first five-seater, and at over five metres one of the largest series-production Ferraris ever. Over 1,000hp, 0–100 km/h in around 2.5 seconds, roughly 500 km of range, about €550,000 — roughly ₹5 crore at today's rates, and that's before the import duties that would comfortably double it by the time one reached India. Absurd in all the expected Ferrari ways. But the design — by LoveFrom, the studio Jony Ive and Marc Newson founded, working with Ferrari's Flavio Manzoni — looks almost nothing like what the badge has trained people to expect, so the internet found a cheaper car with a similar silhouette. Squint at the third-gen Nissan Leaf and you can see it: coupe-ish roofline, blue paint, black pillars. Nissan Ireland then posted the comparison itself and "thanked" Ferrari for the flattery. A reach — but a reach that lands is still a landing. The sharper jab was the Apple one. Apple spent a decade and a reported billion dollars a year chasing an electric car under the codename Titan before quietly killing it in 2024 — and then two of the designers most associated with Apple's golden age built an electric car that looks more like a high-end device than a supercar. So the internet flipped it onto its back to put the charge port on its belly, Magic Mouse style. Which raises the only question in all of this worth keeping: would we be this annoyed if it simply wore an Apple logo? The badge, not the shape, is doing most of the emotional work.

But all of that is the outside of the car.

The actual story isn't out there at all.

It's in the cabin. Jony Ive has been openly scornful of the industry's drift toward a single giant touchscreen running everything, calling it the lazy option. His reasoning is the part that matters: touch was right for a phone because the phone was the object. In a car, the object is moving at speed while your eyes are meant to be somewhere else, and a touchscreen forces you to look away from the road to do basic things. That's not minimalism. It's an ergonomics and safety problem dressed up as modernity — and, quietly, a cost exercise: every physical switch is a part to source, wire and assemble, so collapsing them into one screen trims the bill of materials as much as it cleans up the dashboard. It's a point we keep coming back to when we score cars.

I know exactly what we lost, because I lived with the good version. Ten years in a W204 Mercedes C220d, and the COMAND dial under my left hand became muscle memory I never had to think about. The notches as you turned it. The slight resistance, then the dampened click of a button pushing back against your finger before it gave — a small tactile reward every single time. Nudge the dial, and you'd move across the screen with the barest flick of your eyes, attention still on the road. Now? Any screen bigger than about ten inches is, in my admittedly laid-back driving style, as natural to me as dunking a basketball at five foot eight. You tap the pixel that's supposed to do the thing and it does nothing — three tries to land it, like the old USB Type-B that never went in first time. The eight-inch screens of a few years ago struck the right balance. Then they grew, even the HVAC controls got absorbed into the touchscreen, and the whole thing became worse.

The Luce's answer is the opposite of that mess: real switches, real dials, mechanical buttons with detents, paired with digital displays where digital genuinely helps. Apple Watch-style crowns, Corning glass, brushed aluminium, a pull switch above the console to arm launch mode. Crucially, the screens aren't gone — they're demoted. They live where a glance can take them in, not where your hand has to fish blindly for a target. And the detail I love most — a small handle at the base of the screen to rest your palm against, which alone kills the friction of hovering a full arm-length out to land on the little "+" of an AC panel that's all pixels. Even reviewers who hate the exterior keep circling back to the interior, because inside it's asking the right question: what if the future of the car isn't fewer controls, but better ones?

And honestly, that idea makes even more sense in a Fiat, a Mini or a Smart than in a half-million-euro Ferrari. The collector who keeps one climate-controlled in a garage doesn't need it. The driver in stop-go traffic — the one whose eyes should never leave the road — needs it most, and is the least likely to be sold it. If the industry takes the hint from the inside, everyone and their aunties will follow within a couple of model cycles. That's a far bigger idea than "Ferrari made an ugly EV."

Which brings us to the standard cope after any polarising launch: it'll grow on you. Sometimes that's wishful. Sometimes it's history. The closed case is Chris Bangle's BMW 7 Series. When the E65 arrived in 2001 the press eviscerated it — the rear was the "Bangle Butt," iDrive baffled everyone, the whole thing looked like nothing else on the road. Yet it became the best-selling 7 Series in history, and "flame surfacing" pushed the industry out of the soap-bar conservatism of the late '90s. The cars from BMW design on his watch — the E60 M5, the Z4, the Z8 — are now remembered as some of the most beautiful of their era. The cars that got laughed at became the cars that aged best. A gut "no" on day one only tells you the car broke a pattern you were used to. It says nothing about whether breaking it was the right call.

Jaguar is running the live version of that experiment — the Type 00 was savaged, and the company's bet is that a brand which lands to universal approval hasn't changed enough. The jury's out; Jaguar is selling essentially nothing while it retools, a hole made deeper by the cyberattack that froze JLR's production for weeks. I'll admit a bias: that pink Type 00 has already grown on me, because I'm a sucker for a long-bonnet, slab-sided GT — it reminds me of my second-favourite car ever, the Bentley Brooklands. The Luce doesn't move me the same way. Twenty years from now, will I look back at that exterior fondly? Honestly, no. There's even a cynical reading, argued well by Throttle House's Thomas Holland — soon to be one of the new faces of The Grand Tour: that legacy makers, dragged into electrification they never wanted, are building EVs just ugly enough to quietly make the case — to the public and to regulators — that going electric kills the things we love about cars. Too cute to fully believe. But it lands harder now that Brussels has moved to soften the 2035 petrol ban it once treated as settled, easing the very pressure that forced these cars into being just as they arrive unloved.

axler8's take

Design polarisation is noise. It's the most visible, least informative thing about any new car, and it resolves in about three years — sometimes into ridicule, more often into "actually, that was ahead of its time." Betting against a polarising design on day one is how people end up sheepish about the E65.

The signal is the interface philosophy. Ferrari, of all companies, just spent five years and its most expensive EV launch ever arguing that physical controls and eyes-on-the-road ergonomics beat another acre of touchscreen. If even a fraction of that trickles down to cars normal people can actually buy, the Luce will have mattered far more than its silhouette ever could.

Ugly is temporary. Usable is the whole point.