Ferrari Luce - the first Apple Electric Car - what went wrong?
The point is, that design of Ferrari Luce is very good, and overall it looks really nice. But, it doesn’t fit the general Ferrari expected look. Ferrari Luce looks much better than most electric cars (resembling soap boxes on wheels), but it doesn’t look like a Ferrari car. However, it may have functionality like a Ferrari car - this is for drivers to estimate. But first impression is always car shape, because no matter what, you need first to see car, before you get into it.
Maybe this is a good move, to use a totally different look. Electric cars give opportunity to start something new, appealing to a different market.
On the other side there are some things people expect from Ferrari both in terms of functionality and look, beause word “Ferrari” means something.
As it is Ferrari Luce looks more like the first Apple electric car. I think, that this is the main problem - the common denominator for Ferrari cars is a kind of aggressive look, and this is what Ferrari Luce misses.
Ferrari Luce looks nice, like an elegant Apple product, but nothing above that. It is a very good example, that design is about something more than only nice shapes and functionality.
What was lost here with Ferrari Luce was opportunity to re-invent Ferrari style, so it would be a new (electric) Ferrari, but still Ferrari, I would say: Ferrari in a new era. But, let’s be honest - to re-invent a style is an extremely difficult task.
The positive side is of this whole situation is, that some options related both to shapes / layout and functionality were tested, and can be used as a reference for next electric Ferrari models, because the truth is, that electric cars will not disappear.
What could be done differently?
In my opinion, the main stuff which connects a driver to a Ferrari car is emotion, and to be more specific it is the look and the combo of mainly two things: sound and vibration. In Ferrari Luce Ferrari decided to use native sounds produced by electric cars. They compared fuel combustion engine cars to electric cars like acoustic guitar to electric guitar, where the later one needs amplifier to get proper sound. That is all nice, and this is a good comparison. But still, you can split the electric sound option into two possibilities:
use just rotation-based boring hoover-like wheezing sound of an electric engines, and modify it a bit, or
get the boring sound, which still has embedded data related to what is going on with the engine and car, and translate it into combustion engine equivalent using state of the art audio system.
So, basically, this is about translating language of an electric engine - boring wheezing, where some frequencies may be not audible to human ear, but may still be usable as they contain car’s dynamic - into language of combustion engine in relation 1:1. More or less it requires electric engine working parameters to be sent to a kind of matrix, which will deliver the final result. Compared to neural networks it is rather relatively easy mathematical task.
With the option 2 you can go one step further - translate the sound also into vibrations and feed them to driver chair. Ferrari is a kind of car where to go from point A to point B is not that important as what you experience moving from point A to point B.
