Ive says the emphasis on physical buttons, each with a single purpose, allows drivers to keep their eyes on the road and away from the screen. “When you look at it, you don’t think, ‘How many layers do I have to go in to warm my bottom?’ He said.
“You don’t touch anything except aluminium, glass or leather,” several Ferrari employees said several times at the event. (The only pieces of plastic they had were some gears in the control panel.)
The result is a truly tactile experience. Everything feels satisfyingly clicky or choppy. The aluminum buttons, surprisingly, have an incredible feel. The glass knobs were also equally smooth. We were particularly taken with the air vents, which have aluminum shields that move around when you open and close them. We fiddled with these over and over until the guys from Ferrari had to come and tell us it was time to leave the room.
familiar friend
Ferrari’s glass partner is Corning, the company whose Gorilla Glass is used on every iPhone model. Corning says the Luce has more than 40 glass parts, including buttons, screens, and even the center console and gear-shift knob casing.
I call glass the “true substance.” Compared to the more standard plastic option, glass definitely feels more premium, as do the knobs or gear shifter. But if you get caught in a wreck, will it fall apart in an instant? Hopefully not, as Corning says its technicians have conducted countless crash tests to make sure this version of Gorilla Glass is safe enough.
The steering wheel features the signature three-spoke design that Ferrari is famous for. It is almost a circle but has a depressed bottom which gives the wheel a shape that reflects a dumpling (or a flat tyre). Sure, there’s the leather grip around the wheel, but the aluminum buttons that click right next to your fingers let you cue up or change the music track and volume.
Behind the steering wheel is the binnacle, the console where the odometer, speedometer and other indicators are placed. Taken by itself, the screen looks like a large iPhone in landscape mode with three Apple Watches positioned in the center. Convex lenses with parallax effect magnify the circular OLED screen supplied by Samsung, with whom Ferrari has partnered for the display technology. Additional icons appear in the top-right corner to indicate things like road conditions.
Although the screen is dominated by the binnacle, very select bits are entirely analogue. Namely, the speedometer and odometer hands, which are made of aluminum and polycarbonate. When the car is turned off, the dial screen goes black and the hands appear to float in a black void. When the screens come on, they also illuminate the needles, making them glow.
take control
To the right of the wheel is a control panel display, a rectangular screen with smoothly curved edges and almost no bezels. In other words, the size of an iPad. However, the screen is mounted on a ball-and-socket joint and can therefore be moved around in a way that brings to mind another relic of Ive’s tenure at Cupertino, the iMac G4.
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