The Ferrari That Jony Ive Helped Build

I drive a Tesla now. Before that I had a Porsche Macan, and one of the things I miss is the cold start. The V6 would fire at a high idle, near 2,200 rpm with the exhaust valves open, hold there for 30 or 40 seconds, then settle into a normal idle. You felt it in your chest a beat before you heard it. Some mornings I started the thing just to listen. I taught 40 miles away at the University of Hartford, about 5 miles to the highway on the way home, and the part I waited for was getting on it at the Route 91 on-ramp. The Macan would dig in and snarl through the acceleration. The Tesla does the same merge faster and says nothing. Most days that's fine. Some days, on an empty road, I want internal combustion back.

Ferrari just showed its first electric car, the Luce, Italian for light. Four motors, one per wheel, 1,050 cv, zero to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds, a 122 kWh battery on 800 volts, about 530 km of range. It also weighs 2,260 kg, seats five, and has a hatchback. 

What got my attention was the design credit. Ferrari handed the inside and outside to LoveFrom, Jony Ive and Marc Newson's studio. Ive ran design at Apple for twenty years. You can see it in the cabin: clean surfaces, glass buttons, real switches you can feel, a passenger shell that sits almost on its own inside the body. Ferrari has never let an outside firm shape a car like this. That alone is news.

They know about the sound, too. The Luce mounts an accelerometer at the center of the rear axle, reads the real frequencies coming off the spinning parts, then equalizes and amplifies them like a guitar pickup. So it isn't a fake V8 played through the stereo. It's the actual car, turned up. The motors use a Halbach array in the rotor, borrowed from Formula 1, and the front pair spins to 30,000 rpm.

Not everyone agrees the bet is worth making. Lamborghini scrapped its first EV, the Lanzador, in February, with CEO Stephan Winkelmann saying demand for an electric supercar was close to zero and calling EV work an expensive hobby. The Lanzador comes back later as a plug-in hybrid instead. Part of his reasoning was the exact thing I keep talking about: their buyers want engine sound and mechanical feedback, and the battery cars don't deliver it yet. After the Luce reveal, Ferrari's stock dropped and Winkelmann went on CNBC to say canceling was the right call. So one company is amplifying real vibration through a sensor, and the other decided the problem isn't solved and walked away.

So Ferrari looked at the same gap I feel every morning and tried to fill it with a sensor and some signal processing instead of an exhaust pipe. I doubt it gives you the cold start, that high-idle bark before the valves close, or the snarl of jumping on it on a highway on-ramp. You can't fake combustion you don't have. But I'm pretty sure I’d rather hear what the car is really doing than a recording of an engine nobody built. But…. I'll reserve judgment until I sit in one.