Because Apple has finally put the mysterious and long-suffering Project Titan to rest outside the pasturewe wonder what an Apple Car designed by Jony Ive would look like. Now, we might have a clue. This, however, is no Apple Car. It’s the Ferrari Luce (“light” in Italian), the actual name of the EV formerly known as the Elettrica, and I’m fresh off getting a walkthrough of the thing from Sir Ive himself. At a glance things are as you would expect, but there are some surprises here.

While Ferrari has been selling hybrids in one form or another since 2013’s LaFerrari, Luce (née Elettrica) is the company’s first all-electric machine. We got our first look underneath Oct.when we saw the chassis, battery pack and other details that pointed to this being a bigger, more family-friendly machine than your average Ferrari. Last week, I looked at the next major component, the interior, which comes courtesy of LoveFrom.

LoveFrom is the home founded by Jony Ive after leaving Apple in 2019. The obsessive design firm, which currently has about 60 employees, obtained by OpenAI for $6.5 billion last year. LoveFrom has so far secured a medley of projects, such as $60,000 Linn Sondek LP12 turntablebut Luce will be one of the company’s biggest projects to date – at least in terms of literal dimensions.

If you’re familiar with the designs Apple created during Ive’s time, especially the era starting with the iPhone 4, you’ll feel right at home here. The overall aesthetic is one dominated by squircles and circles, all with perfect, minute perfection and symmetry.

At first blush, it’s a little clinical, but dig deep, start poking and prodding, and you’ll see that there’s a real sense of beauty here. Fun little details and really satisfying tactics start to reveal themselves. The key, for example, has a yellow panel with an E Ink background. Push the key into the magnetized receiver in the center console, and the yellow of the key dims, moving across to glow above the glass shifter. It is meant to symbolize some kind of transition in life.

The shifter is not the only glass item. There are 40 odd pieces of Corning Gorilla Glass scattered throughout the cockpit, everything from the shifter surround to the slightly convex lenses of the gauge cluster. The non-glass is aluminum, most of which is anodized in your choice of three colors: gray, dark gray and rose gold.

Yes, it all sure looks like I’m writing about a new iPhone and not the latest Ferrari. But where Apple has pruned every physical control it can from its devices lately, LoveFrom will play a smart trick with Luce. The shifter moves through its detents satisfyingly, the air vents open and close with a clear snick and the paddles behind the steering wheel pop with great feel.

My favorite part is the windshield wiper control, a small dial on the top right of the steering wheel face. It shows a small lens that magnifies the current setting. It actually enlarges one of the four conventional OLED panels, 200 ppi units from Samsung, cut and shaped to deliver the LoveFrom style.

The gauge cluster behind the steering wheel, or binnacle as it’s more formally called here, are two OLED displays stacked on top of each other, with a physical needle inserted between serving as a pseudo-tachometer for this engineless car. The gauges change and morph as you move from one mode to the next.

The central display is a 10.12-inch perforated OLED with plenty of holes to let some delightfully chunky toggle switches through, plus a glass volume knob. The small clock in the upper right can be a stopwatch or a compass, whose hands rotate depending on the mode. The entire central control panel pivots and swivels. Just grab the big handle at the bottom and drag it where you want it.

The attention to detail in everything is amazing. Even the rails that hold the seats to the floor are gently shaped and anodized to match the rest of the interior.

Ive was on hand to reveal the interior, clearly a bit nervous about showing it all off for the first time. After five years of confidential work on this topic, Ive said he was “very excited” and “absolutely terrified” to give us our first real look at Luce.

Marc Newson, who founded LoveFrom with Ive, said: “Jony and I share a real, deep interest in automotive stuff and cars.

Both Ive and Newson own several vintage machines, and Ive says that modern cars “have lost some of the things we loved about our old Ferraris.” Things like tactility. “It was very clear to us that we needed to figure out as many ways as possible to connect viscerally and physically with the interface,” Ive said.

So, while the Luce has that pivoting touchscreen, it’s far from the car’s main interface. Ive says he hopes the physical connectivity and all the clever touches will make for an incredibly attractive car.

I am told that the LoveFrom team is delighted to be working with Ferrari. “It’s great,” he said, and he praised Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna’s dedication to this project and where it will lead down the road. “Benedetto is an amazing engineer,” he said, “he is very interested in what can be learned in a broader way.”

The biggest challenge is probably working within the automotive industry. Here, design, form and function are key, but safety is paramount. “It’s very difficult,” Ive told me. “I’ve never worked in a place that’s so regulated. Some of it’s good, because you understand why, and people’s safety is definitely important, but some of it scares you.”

Far and away the most exciting and fresh interior I’ve ever seen outside of ultra-rare machines like the $4 million Bugatti Tourbillon. But it’s so clinically precise and refined that it lacks the rough and raw feel that characterizes many classic Ferraris. Whether it’s a good or bad thing is debated endlessly, and I look forward to reading your comments, but I think it goes a long way to deliver the kind of new clients that Ferrari should target at Luce.

In the end, which one you prefer depends a lot on how good the rest of the car looks and how much it costs. Those are questions we won’t be able to answer yet, at least until May, when CEO Vigna says we can expect the full Luce reveal.

For Ive, however, that doesn’t seem to be the end of the road for this road trip. “At the end of a project, there are two products. There’s what you’ve done, and there’s what you’ve learned. I’m always fascinated by what you’ve learned,” he told me. “And honestly, we learned a lot.”