Why the Ferrari Luce Looks Like It DoesFerrari (Ferrari)It always made sense for Ferrari's first electric vehicle to be something radical, but the Luce still caught the automotive world off guard when it debuted on Monday. The controversial design has since become the subject of discourse, jokes, and even confusion. Share prices have fallen, and former executives have complained; even Pope Leo XIV weighed in after getting a look at the car on Tuesday. If the design was meant to get people talking, it has succeeded.The design itself started with the choice to build a five-door, crossover-adjacent EV. Ferrari product manager Pietro Virgolin told Road & Track at the Luce launch event that this decision was a matter of form following function, a packaging choice made to slot a huge battery and four-motor powertrain underneath whatever the brand was going to build. He mentions that internal combustion Ferraris have their own sacrifices, like transaxles that have to sit between the rear seats, and the EV's nature allowed for a more spacious cabin with a Ferrari-first third seat in the second row.Things grow more complicated from there. The core of the Luce's controversial design is a body designed to appear as two different parts, painted distinctly in black and a contrasting color to make it appear that the greenhouse and connected passenger elements are effectively wearing a shell of bodywork. This is the work of LoveFrom, a design studio founded by Apple alum Jony Ive.Ferrari (Ferrari)Marc Newson, another former Apple designer at LoveFrom, tells R&T that the firm's work on the car started from the company's decision that it would be a four-door, five-seat EV. He says that the idea of separating out the interior and exterior shapes of the body was an idea his team started exploring early in the design process, something now clearly highlighted in the two-tone look of every Luce shown since its debut on Monday.AdvertisementAdvertisement"So, effectively," Newson says, "what you have is this passenger cell, which lies—sits within, in a way—the body of the car. And there are lots of ways that that's expressed, obviously color. But in a physical sense, it's separated with this gap that runs around the entire perimeter of the sort-of belt line of the car."Newson adds that his team chose to emphasize the natural aerodynamic shape of the passenger shell, a nod in part to the importance of efficiency for an EV. The exterior shape then emphasizes wing designs in both the front and back of the car, contributing downforce and keeping the car's blocky proportions without spoiling the drag coefficient with big, flat surfaces. In short, the rounded black and glass passenger cell section emphasizes EV efficiency, and the blocky, paint colored section evokes more typical Ferrari performance.Ferrari (Ferrari)The interior is another major shift from what Ferrari is doing in its internal combustion models, but unlike the exterior, its emphasis on physical controls drops modern trends to harken back to the recent past. Newson describes the roomy cabin as "like a TARDIS" from Doctor Who—bigger on the inside than you would expect. He jokes that the rear-hinged door is mounted that way because "it's better," before clarifying that his team "wanted to create as clean a possible intersection between these two spaces, between the outside and the inside.""I think what was really, really critical for us," he says, "was that we created an absolutely coherent experience both inside and out, where everything mated well—you know, where you didn't have a sense that anything on the interior was sort of shoehorned, was was conceived by somebody else with different design aesthetics or different values or different objective ... coherence, for us, was really, incredibly key."AdvertisementAdvertisementWhether or not the total package works for everyone, or even most people, Ferrari and LoveFrom certainly made a splash with the design of the Luce. Buyers hoping to get their hands on the new EV should prepare themselves for some sticker shock, though; the Luce starts at around €550,000, which works out to around $640,000 at current exchange rates.You Might Also LikeIf You Can Only Own One Car, Make It One of TheseThese Are the Most Popular Cars by State