Makes sense from corporate perspective to hire the "Apple Designer" to craft the interior experience, it's fresh input from a very respected UX design-lead of another industry.

But handing over responsibility for the exterior is quite questionable IMO.

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 wonder what political struggle was behind that within Ferrari. I can't imagine this design was received well, and I doubt that Ferrari actually asked for help on exterior design. It's more likely that Jony Ive demanded it...

(Also the fact that they presented the interior much earlier than the exterior could be an indicator for internal disagreements...)

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.

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.

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.

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.