Jony Ive and his team from LoveFrom design the interior of the all-electric Ferrari Luce.

Probably the best writeup about the Ferrari Luce for Apple fans by Jordan Golson (reported by MacRumors).

Some notable quotes from Golson’s interview with Ive:

Then carmakers looked at a product that sold billions of units and said, we should put one of those in the dashboard. But they took the wrong lesson. Your car isn’t supposed to do everything. It’s supposed to be a car. You need to adjust the temperature, change the volume, turn on the heated seats and keep your eyes on the road. These are not problems that require a general-purpose interface. They are problems that have been solved for more than a century — by knobs and buttons and switches — and the industry unresolved them in a decade.

Ive knows this. “The reason we developed touch — the big idea was to develop a general-purpose interface that could be a calculator, that could be a typewriter, could be a camera, rather than having physical buttons,” he told me. “To use touch in a car is something I would never dream of doing, because it requires that you look at what you’re doing.”

He paused. “Touch was seen as almost like fashion. It was the most current technology. ‘We need a bit of touch.’ And, ‘You know what we’re going to do next year? We’re going to have an even bigger one.’ That’s just the wrong technology to be the primary interface.”

So the man who inadvertently ruined car interiors is back to fix them. And on a Ferrari, no less — the new Luce. […]

When Ive walked us through the interior, he started with the organizational logic. “This is driving,” he said, gesturing at the steering wheel and binnacle. “Every other element augments the driving experience, but the focus of the steering wheel and this binnacle is very clearly about driving.” Then the rules: “This is output. This is input. Because these controls are mechanical.”

That clarity of organization sounds obvious. It isn’t. Walk up to any modern luxury car and try to figure out, from a standing start, how to adjust the climate. You’ll be three menus deep in a touchscreen within seconds, and you still might not have found it. In the Luce, Ive said, “When you look at this, you’re not wondering — how many layers deep am I going to have to go to find something to make my bottom warm?”

I asked whether there was ever a discussion about making the physical controls flexible — a button that could be a heated seat toggle or a drive mode selector, depending on context. Ive’s answer was instant and direct: “And you would have hated that.”