No one noticed the enormous smiley face on the dashboard of the Ferrari Luce.
Jerry Perez
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Every person has their own opinion about the Ferrari Luce, but I’m not here to discuss your strong feelings today. Instead, I want to highlight a design feature of the controversial Ferrari EV that we hadn’t noticed at first—until our correspondent in Italy, Jerry Perez, examined it in person and discovered it.
The Luce clearly embodies a theme of circles and squircles, a design language that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Apple products from the last three decades. This motif appears throughout the gauges, the instrument panel, screens, and numerous dials, some of which include even smaller displays. The sedan's interior seems to be the one aspect that people are starting to appreciate, perhaps because the exterior is drawing all the criticism.
As Jerry films the dashboard in the video below, a pair of eyes and a nose emerge between what appear to be two large circular vents and another similar circle beneath them that could be a speaker. A seam in the tan leather between the two levels of the dashboard creates a wide mouth, producing a sort of emoji behind the glass, engaging with the sky.
It’s whimsical, and some may argue it aligns with the car’s softer, friendlier image, which is not typical for a Ferrari. The Luce is highly customizable, like other pricey cars, with the upper dashboard available in any of eight colors through the online configurator. If a darker color, such as Charcoal or Cioccolato, is chosen, those black circles will be less noticeable. This is something to keep in mind when selecting options for your electric, $600,000 Ferrari.
What better way to showcase the dashboard vents of a classic Ferrari than with OutRun 2’s cockpit camera? Ferrari, Sega
So, did designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson mean to give this car a face? In a sense, they drew inspiration from Ferrari's past with those dashboard vents; iconic models like the F40 and 512BB featured them too, though they were not as large and were generally spaced further apart. They also did not create such a noticeable grin from above. What was old is becoming new again.
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The electric Ferrari Luce has attracted a lot of attention due to its polarizing design, yet oddly, no one has pointed out the most peculiar aspect so far.