Jason Fried on Ferrari's Jony Ive-designed EV interior: fresh ideas, but can Ferrari execute?

Speaker 2: If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Sorry, Jason. Welcome that thought. Hold that. That's a

Speaker 5: great product. I love it.

Speaker 2: It's great. Thank you. Well, how are you doing?

Speaker 5: I'm doing well. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Are you a Super Bowl guy?

Speaker 5: Not really Okay. Actually.

Speaker 2: Did you see any of Once I saw the TV once I

Speaker 5: saw the end the ad, I I Yeah. Kinda tuned up.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. You're you're like, okay. Three we're three hours before the game, job's finished. I'm good. That's right. That's right. And and and you flew to San Francisco to see it because it was a regional buy. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Of course. Yeah. Couldn't miss

Speaker 2: it. Yeah. Okay. I couldn't

Speaker 1: miss it. Well, the the

Speaker 2: news that we wanted to talk about

Speaker 1: Yeah. Wanted we we were texting a little bit about the the new Ferrari EV. Yes. And I think there's nobody that I was excited to talk to more Yeah. Than you about it, just given your I've always appreciated your your personal taste in cars and just also in design choices broadly. And I think this is such a for anyone that missed it, Ferrari is making a their first electric vehicle, the loose Luce. Yeah. Am I saying that correctly?

Speaker 5: Italian. Luce. Sounding Italian.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sounds Italian. I thought they we don't know exactly what the car looks like, but it's like meant to be kind of a daily driver. Mhmm. It look it looks to be like some sort of hatchback, something like that. So not as aggressive looking as as the g t GTC four Lucio Lucio or the FF. But looks fine and highly anticipated. And then just on the interior, they partnered with Johnny Ive and the Yes. Lovefront team. So I before I share my thoughts, I'd I'd love to kind of, like, hear how you've been processing it.

Speaker 5: Yeah. So I saw it this morning like everyone else did. I think they came out with it this morning or announced it this morning. And, obviously, it's a demo. It's a three d demo of kind of what this thing appears to be, at least the the video was. And I think the first thing you go is that, well, that's at least very fresh. Like, it's about time. It feels like car interfaces have really gone mostly in the wrong direction, just like black glass screens and everything's touchscreen, and they're starting to bring some switches back and dials back. But, clearly, this feels a bit more considered. There's more tactile stuff. There's more real stuff integrating with with virtual stuff. And, of course, all all of the design choices were, you know, very beautiful. Transitions were lovely, and there's no lag in all these things. Again, this is a demo. It's hard to say what this will really be driven on, but it looked great. I think it looked great. There was a really nice I would say the thing that really stuck with me was the integration between the virtual and the physical Switches that when you when you move them up, like, then a digital display comes up, little buttons on the top right corner adjusting some display stuff. Really, really nice. A lot of inspiration from other brands I saw too. I saw I kinda felt like there was a little Aston Martin thing going on here.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: So the the DB nine era of Aston Martin's, you take this key, this glass crystal thing and you push it into a slot Yeah. To start the car. Yeah. And I think that's what they were showing here is they put this

Speaker 1: like, you can imagine the experience of, like, pushing the key in, having it lock in place and then tapping it because it it's just a nice experience. Still, there's I mean, I I feel like so often I'm like putting my key in random different places at different times and it's nice to just have a place in the car. Push it, lock it in, you know where it is.

Speaker 5: And to leave it there. That's the thing. Yeah. Exactly. It probably is magnetic, so it probably snaps in, snicks in, and down. But that's kind of an Aston derivative. And also, the way the the dials, when they light up, they they go counterclockwise is also something that Aston was doing. So, Johnny, I'm being British. I wonder if there's little bit of a call out to Aston there.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Good point.

Speaker 2: But it's cool. I would say, though, one thing that,

Speaker 5: you know, no no one knows is what the outside of the car looks like yet. And I think great interiors need to be matched up with great exteriors. The best interiors in history, I think, were complete ideas. You think about, like, the and I'll go off on this, you tell me to stop. But, like, the the the VW first VW GTI Mark one, special interior. It felt like it fit with the exterior, the, like, Lancia Delta Integrale is another car like that. It's just like the interior and the exterior just were perfectly built together. The Porsche nine twenty eight feels like the interior had to be in that car. It couldn't have been in a different car. Totally. And so it's hard to evaluate with interior design like this. It's like, what does it look like? Fit in? Does it fit with

Speaker 1: yeah. That's that's the the big unknown for me right now. Because I look at the the mock up that everyone's been sharing and it's this, like, hyper modern sporty hatchback. And then on the inside, have all this analog buttons and you have what looks almost like a restomod, like, heavily inspired by some of legacy Ferraris from, you know, you know, traditional classic Ferraris. And so right now, when you look at Johnny's work and you look at the mock up, it doesn't feel cohesive at all. And the experience when you get into the sporty hatchback and then you have, like, an old classic Ferrari kind of like racing inspired steering wheel just it looks strange. So I think we need to withhold judgment there. The kind of going into some of the more negative, like, I never have something I've really disliked about some of the more modern AMGs is this like iPad. This like iPad interface, and you've seen this in in some of the Astons too where it's like, hey, we didn't know where to put this screen, so we're just gonna like bolt it on to the front dash and like put it out in your face. And the experience of being a car in a car, it's just so incredibly nice when everything just kind of, like, blends in in the front and you're able to just focus. And I don't want I don't want a screen kinda pushed into my face. So some of the, like, it it feels like like, my big concern with this project is that Ferrari is not Apple. So Johnny Yes. Doing Johnny doing work, doing doing product design work and building products at Apple, one of the greatest hardware manufacturers in history, probably the greatest hardware manufacturer and and consumer electronic manufacturer in history. And then you put him in in a team at, like, Ferrari, and then, like, it almost like, he's gonna be handicapped to some degree by Ferrari's own internal capabilities, which, like, anybody that's owned a Ferrari is, I never, in my Ferrari ownership experience, was I like, oh, Ferrari is just exceptional at at, you know, making electronic interfaces. Right? Like the they can't even there was like a very long period where the buttons would be sticky after a year. Right? And that was just like an ongoing problem that they couldn't seem to And so my concern is that Johnny's probably deeply handicapped not just by the Ferrari team, even though they're so great at making vehicles overall, but also from regulation. Right? And that, like, just because you wanna do something doesn't mean you can do it, even if it, is would be a nice consumer experience. And so the excitement comes from, like, fresh look at the interior, a bunch of new ideas, bringing back these kind of, like, analog, tactile experiences, taking inspiration from history. But then the concern is that it's Ferrari, and they don't they can't fully deliver on it. And and some of these features, like, aren't as reliable as you'd want them to be and and on and on and on.

Speaker 5: You know, I yeah. I agree with all that. I also think your your point about the Mercedes AMG GT floating iPad. Like, I love the way that car looks.

Speaker 8: Yeah. It's

Speaker 5: amazing. I love that car. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I

Speaker 5: hate the entire I will not buy one.

Speaker 1: I know.

Speaker 5: Because it looks it's so bad. The other thing that's interesting is he also seemed to kinda you know, Mercedes has these iconic round vents. And I've kinda got that vibe from this interior too. Yeah. The back,

Speaker 1: Yeah. In the back, the passenger vents look really cool, and they can point around in a unique way. It's a bit of

Speaker 5: an AMG thing. But anyway yeah.

Speaker 2: Not to go, like, too gigabrain, but is there any translation that you think you can do? Any, like, red string drawing from, like, skeuomorphism to flat design, like UI to what's going on with the Ferrari interior design language? Or any even just, like, reflections on your career and how you processed skeuomorphic design and the transition to flat design, which sort of I I believe it was led from Apple, and then everyone else just fell in line. But what what was your experience there? And then is there anything to pull from it?

Speaker 15: Yeah. That's a

Speaker 5: great point. I mean, I think that we lost a lot. Actually, we lost skeuomorphic design, we went to flat design. And I think what we're seeing now is a pullback, and you're seeing it everywhere. I think you're seeing it more in software too where there's more sort of textures and transitions and different things happening and shading again. You're seeing it in car design now with knobs coming back and neural surfaces. And, like, I saw in the new Audi I think they called it the concept c or something like that. This new TT inspired design they're working on. Their interior is, like, very tactile. It's not just that there's buttons. Like, there's buttons. But there's also the buttons have texture and there's clicks and snicks and all these things that are going on. Yeah. And I think that that just it's so deeply satisfying Yeah. To know that when you put an interface into a certain position that you did it right and then it works and that Yeah. Status

Speaker 1: That physical feedback. All

Speaker 5: that stuff. And I think we lost some of that. I I love seeing that it's coming back. And, you know, I think look. I I saw some criticism online that, like, what Johnny Ives was, you know, designing stuff for billions of people and now he's designing something for, like, a thousand rich people or whatever. But I think this idea is going to make its way down the chain Yeah. Across. I think people are gonna be inspired by this design in general and hopefully pay more attention to these things. I do think, though, it's very important that with what we've seen, every pretty much every car interior today can just be, like, pulled out and put into a different car. It just feels like they're all the same. And I think that these brands need to figure out the whole idea and not just kind of just throw a bunch of screens and go, we we've done it. We've we've made Yeah.

Speaker 1: Mean, the Aston Martin has been ripped apart on some of their halo cars, the Val Valhalla, the Valkyrie, where they they just built this beautiful, like racing machine and then they're like, here's an iPad. Right. And it's like, we gotta we gotta get beyond that. Is the other

Speaker 2: Is the INEOS Grenadier underrated, overrated? Is it a gimmick or is it the future?

Speaker 5: I like the outside of it. I've never driven one.

Speaker 2: So inside, it's all physical switches for everything. I mean Okay. There are so many switches. I mean, still have a screen a little bit, but, like, you know, you have switches up on the top of the ceiling and all the way down to the cup holders. Airplane cockpitty? Yeah. It's a little airplane cockpitty. But people love it, but it is it feels like it's intentionally contrarian, which I think is a good exploration. But yeah.

Speaker 5: I think they've leaned into what that is, which is like trying to go to become an old school Land Rover again. I have a Land Rover Defender, the current version, and I think they've done a really nice job with the interior in that car.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 5: There's some screens. They're relatively small, but a lot of things are still tactile. It's a and also the interior really mimics the exterior. I think that's one of the best designed cars at the moment, actually. Mhmm. Inside and out, like, combination full ideas.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: There's some good stuff, though.

Speaker 2: But and I think, like,

Speaker 1: Kia is doing some great stuff.

Speaker 5: There's a lot of cool stuff.

Speaker 1: I was telling a friend like, yeah, it seems like the the INEOS is like a huge hit. I just like, it's like every fifth car and it's like It's the only car. Dude, you live in Malibu. It's like the prime. It's like I was like Yeah. The the one the other criticism, again, I wanna hold actual criticism until we see what the actual outside looks like. But but the current renders that we're seeing just look like Kias. Like, if this looks like it

Speaker 5: could Yeah. Be I mean, I mean was the

Speaker 1: same criticism of the Purosangue. Which is like, hey. Like, this could be you could put a Kia badge on it, and I would think

Speaker 2: But you you can contrast it with, like, the Lamborghini where, like, everything's an octagon or hexagon, and, like, it looks like everything is the most extreme. Like, just to turn it on, you have to, like, click up and push down, and there's, like, 25 different things. It's, like, overengineered, but it's unmistakable. And that's sort

Speaker 1: of Yeah.

Speaker 2: The shtick, and it works.

Speaker 1: I don't know. So my my prediction

Speaker 5: I agree. But I think this is credit to Kia, though, and not discredit to Fowler.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. It's good. He is

Speaker 5: He is doing some amazing design Totally.

Speaker 7: Totally.

Speaker 1: And it yeah.

Speaker 2: It shows Who knows? Maybe they're a love from client and they just said, keep our name off the web page.

Speaker 1: Quietly. Conspiracy theory here. My prediction with the with the Luche is that it prices in the mid 3 hundreds, somewhere in that range. You'll be able to buy it for 200 within Yeah. A actually think they'll sell I actually think they'll

Speaker 2: Oh, because

Speaker 5: they're EVs.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The EV

Speaker 2: thing is so rough.

Speaker 1: Think they'll sell well because there's certainly demand for a daily able Ferrari, but the Purosangue being priced at over half $1,000,000, it just like really cuts out so much so much of the market who can who can actually there's very few people that will daily a Ferrari that want that kind of brand surrounding them at all times.

Speaker 2: And it's twice an Urus. And then

Speaker 1: you're gonna probably a quarter mil Yeah. Within a couple years. Like, these cars are gonna be available for a quarter million dollars and not that long. Yeah. And and I expect the EV, the depreciation to be even more vicious, but I expect these to do numbers in Cupertino from the old Apple guard that wants to just By the

Speaker 2: I like that.

Speaker 5: I did comment on this on on x about how the worst part of this interface is Apple CarPlay integration.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Why?

Speaker 5: And I feel like I feel like there's a sweet revenge in that for for

Speaker 2: For Johnny.

Speaker 5: For Johnny and I think Mike who's kind of a iOS designer Sure. I forget his name. Fantastic designer.

Speaker 2: Is that the fact that

Speaker 5: they made this look the worst? Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, Because yeah. The design language doesn't match or it's customizable. Okay.

Speaker 7: Well, and

Speaker 5: It doesn't match, but what's interesting in most cars, it's the best part because the rest of their interface sucks.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 5: Totally. In this case, it's the Apple looks the worst. The Apple bit looks the worst. And I think that I just think it's sweet revenge for them, frankly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We're still in this messy middle where cars have basically two operating systems. Yeah. And Yeah. It's unfortunate.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It is really bad in some cars where if you turn the volume knob, you can't access the the the the CarPlay UI because it's a layer on top, and it's like, oh, come on, guys. I think Apple's working on solving that, but it takes years and years to roll all this stuff out. It is it is it is an odd revenge to, like, spend your entire career building a walled garden and then be on the outside of that walled garden and be like, but I'd really like to get into the garden. And you can't because you built it.

Speaker 5: That's right.

Speaker 1: That's right.

Speaker 2: Well, cool. Thank you so much. Great to

Speaker 1: catch up. Thanks for

Speaker 13: popping up. Anytime.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Talk to cars

Speaker 1: on floor. We'll come back on soon. Great to see you.

Speaker 9: See you guys

Speaker 2: in person. Have a good one.