I lived through similar dynamics (though not at Ferrari, of course).

The management knows that they need something new and out of their comfort zone. Someone (from within or without) suggests an idea that would never been accepted in the olden days.

The management, for the sake of their company, would suppress every instinct they have built over the years, often over-correcting. This inevitably results in some questionable choices seeping in, in the name of openness to new paradigms.

And not every time this goes well.

I'm not saying this is what's happening here. These are world-class engineers and designers, but nobody is immune from a bad decision or two.

The exterior is just a magic mouse! At least those switches in the dashboard are real switches, not touchscreen buttons.

I thought the same. If it had a Kia badge on it, it wouldn't shock me, and I think Kia make some quite nice cars now.

I don't like the interior. I think this style can work for some things, it reminds me of a NuPhy keyboard, blocky plastic that looks nice in some circumstances.

For me this is not a Ferrari-standard of car, Ferraris are strikingly beautiful, and this just isn't.

  > To me, the exterior has lost almost all of Ferrari's identity. It's a nice car-design, but if you'd tell me it's a Hyundai, Lexus or BYD I would believe you.

I think that is the idea. Ferrari presented a plausible EV exterior, albeit one that will not appeal to Ferrari's target market (and budget). The resulting non-sales could be used to justify the position that Ferrari's target market is not interested in EVs, should the need arise.

Doesn’t matter as long as it isn’t ugly. Porsche made the cayenne and the panamera, too. The V12 buyer won’t even look at this, but the luxury EV buyer now has a new thing to consider.

"(Also the fact that they presented the interior much earlier than the exterior could be an indicator for internal disagreements...)" - not necessarily, they did similar already back in the 1990ies, when the new line of front-engined GTs as successors to the mid/rear-engined Testarossa came up. At first some appetizers about the new way of building chassis (Ferrari had a decades old legacy of building rather outdated tubular space frame chassis), followed with tidbits about exterior and interior designs of at first the 456, and then the actual two-seater successor to the Testarossa, the 550.

To what extent is the design a response to the constraints imposed by the electric drivetrain? The car is built around the engine. An EV has a large battery and small motor(s), while a gasoline sports car has a big engine in the front. I'm curious how much of the Luce design is a direct result of having to work around the drivetrain (noting that the Mustang Mach E also deviated significantly from the classic designs of past Mustangs in some of the same ways as the Luce deviates from past Ferraris).

Ferrari have long worked with third-party coachbuilders such as Pininfarina. I'm not sure how much autonomy Ive had over the final design, but if it's anything like the relationship with Pininfarina, etc. the design would have been a collaboration.

The problem with cars is if you take all design constraints into consideration you will always end up with something that looks similar.

It looks like a Polestar.

The performance is certainly what you would expect from Ferrari, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a car that should have a Ferrari emblem on it. This will go down as one of the all time automotive blunders.

I think Jony Ive is done too. He was responsible for those awful MacBooks that generated a class action lawsuit and now this. It’s hard to come back from two consecutive flops.

I just feel they were required to start an EV offering to comply with EU standards, but have designed something of a joke entry to protest being dragged into the EV game.

That, or they truly have insight into where consumer trends will go, and like the F50 etc, this will be better received in a decades time than now.

(Conspiracy) Plot twist:

Teams inside Ferrari despise EV's (because they lack 10,000 moving parts and loud noises), so they pushed hard for this design, ensuring a flop, and giving ferrari cold EV feet for the foreseeable future.

It’s a brilliant design. Everyone here is complaining about it, and hardly anyone is saying “EV is no true Ferrari”.

The whole point of Ferrari is high enough volume to print money, low enough to make almost bespoke cars whose sheet metal can change quickly. If the platform is adaptable for that purpose, it will be a success.

Ferrari has certainly outsourced design of the exterior before, often to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pininfarina

Edit: ignore

If you don’t like it then you’re not the demographic they’re targeting. Let me say that I think it’s bland but I won’t say I don’t like it. The market they’re targeting is probably young and can’t afford it but those that can afford it will buy it to appear young, as if they belong to the demographic.