You might have thought getting the designer of the iPhone to design the interior of a new car would have resulted in a Tesla-like cabin with almost everything controlled via a touchscreen.
You’d be wrong.
iPhone designer Sir Jony Ive runs creative collective LoveFrom with Australian Marc Newson, with the firm collaborating with Ferrari on the interior of its new electric Luce.
And while the Ferrari Luce has a touchscreen, its interior has plenty of functional toggles, dials, switches and knobs.
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Sir Jony told Autocar that touchscreens are “the wrong technology to be the primary interface” in cars, even though his iPhone design – through Apple – popularised touchscreen functionality in the world of mobile phones.
“The reason we developed touch [for the iPhone] was that we were developing an idea to solve a problem,” the designer explained.
“The big idea was to develop a general-purpose interface that could be a calculator, could be a typewriter, could be a camera, rather than having physical buttons.
“I never would have used touch in a car [for the main controls]. It is something I would never have dreamed of doing because it requires you to look [away from the road].”
Sir Jony said the Luce’s interior has been designed so that the “vast majority” of the interfaces are physical, with every single switch feeling different.
He blamed fashion trends for the proliferation of interiors devoid of physical buttons and switches and dominated by screens.
“I think what happened was touch was seen almost like fashion. It was the most current technology, so [companies thought] ‘we need a bit of touch’, then the next year ‘we’re going to have an even bigger one’, and it will get bigger and bigger,” he told Autocar.
Tesla, which has long had large touchscreens, has taken this to the extreme, moving to screen-based controls for gear selection. Its touchscreens are even exclusively used to view the vehicle’s speed and open the glovebox.
The American electric vehicle (EV) brand has appeared to inspire countless Chinese brands, with a sea of vehicles now offering minimalist interiors with virtually no buttons and a giant touchscreen on the dash.
Even stalwarts like Mazda and Ford have debuted vehicles with huge touchscreens that control functions previously accessed via buttons, such as the air-conditioning.
Ford, along with other brands such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac, have also introduced pillar-to-pillar screens that dominate their vehicles’ interiors.
Ferrari hasn’t confirmed how large the Luce’s touchscreen is, but it doesn’t appear all that large.
It’s also mounted on a ball-and-socket joint so it can be oriented towards either the driver or the passenger, and features a palm rest to make it easier to operate.
Ferrari isn’t the only brand pushing back against the proliferation of screens getting both larger and greater in number in vehicle interiors.
Audi’s 2025 Concept C previewed a return to simpler interiors, after the brand launched increasingly large touchscreens and removed key physical switchgear.
The concept’s approach, which Audi describes as “shy tech”, extends to its 10.4-inch tablet-style infotainment touchscreen, which can be folded neatly into the dashboard like in older Audi models.
That’s a marked contrast with brands like Geely, which use huge touchscreens that are impossible to ignore with vibrant, adjustable wallpapers like you’d find on a computer.
Audi is also returning physical switches to various vehicles, replacing touch-capacitive switchgear – something else many automakers have embraced alongside ever larger screens controlling more and more functions.
MORE: Ferrari Luce EV has the same name as a Mazda, but an interior unlike any EV
