There is plenty that’s weird and controversial about the Ferrari Luce, a 1,035-horsepower electric sedan with an exterior and interior penned by designers that made names for themselves in electronics and furniture, not cars. Even if you have strong feelings about it, and even if those feelings are negative, one thing that’s pretty clear is that LoveFrom, the firm Ferrari contracted to style the Luce, has employed some ideas that are decidedly left-field for automotive design—and they even extend to how the car stows its windshield wipers.
This might be the least weird thing about the Luce, in fairness, given its narrow and tall stature for a Ferrari, that big mail slot in the front, and its supersized Apple Watch infotainment screen. But it is still strange to see a production car that keeps its wipers upright, perched right up against the A-pillars, when not in use.
They sweep towards and then away from each other, of course, rather than in the same direction. And the reason Ferrari had no choice but to leave them there is because the Luce’s cowl is so low, with an almost seamless pool of glossy black stretching from the leading edge of the windshield and through the top of the body, that there isn’t a gutter for the blades to hide in.
This makes the wipers strangely prominent aspects of the sedan’s design, which almost seems at odds with the exterior’s smooth, pebbly form, and objective of an ultra-low drag coefficient. If you’re familiar with the work of Jony Ive, though—the industrial designer that made a name for himself at Apple architecting a range of segment-defining products, who is also partly responsible for the Luce—then it kind of makes sense. This is the guy that brought the “notch” to the iPhone, at a time when every other company making phones was fighting physics to make selfie cameras invisible. He chose to draw attention to a technical difference, rather than cover for it. The same is arguably true here.
Is it right? Wrong? I don’t have an art degree and won’t answer that, but even if it’s the fifth thing you notice about the front of the Luce, it’s yet another signifier that this Ferrari has been engineered in a completely different way than any other, and hails from a different world, with different inspirations. Will that pedigree encourage Maranello’s most loyal clients to drop at least $640,000 on one, though? Only time has the answer to that question.
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