> So far HTC has been mostly silent on the existence of the T1. That might mean that they either sold the rights to the design of the U24 Pro to Trump Mobile, or (in my opinion the more likely scenario) they never owned the rights to the design in the first place.
Typical ODM-supply contracts define some exclusivity for the lifecycle of the product, depending on the agreement it may be (combinations of)
1.) Full exclusivity (ODM provides exclusivity for the design, spec AND the PCB)
2.) Spec. exclusivity (ODM provides exclusivity for the specification-combo of SoC, display, battery, camera),
3.) Design exclusivity (ODM provides a custom exterior design of the device
Usually such exclusivity agreements are made for a span of 2-3 years from agreed launch-date (with parts having the printed customer-name, i.e. "HTC" covered separately).
The HTC U24 Pro was apparently publicly launched on June 12th 2026, which will be exactly 2 years TOMORROW (!)
--> HTC likely had a 2-year spec/design exclusivity which either expires on June 12th 2026
--> (or was already agreed to be waived based on HTC possibly not reaching the total production-volume agreed with the ODM)
> Given that fact, the only place the T1 could have been made in the very short time the brand has existed, in the limited quantities it’s being produced, and at the same price point as the U24 Pro
--> Or (mind you, no fact-basis for this whatsoever): HTC themselves could have facilitated a deal between that "Trump company" and the ODM in order to get out of their ODM-contract for the U24. HTC could have waived possible exclusivity-agreements in order to settle outstanding agreed supply-volume (in the scheme of "we bring someone else to take the volume" and won't hinder any deal).
In my experience dealing with this kind of smartphone ODM-deals, it's not unusual to negotiate a "transfer" of the outstanding committed volume to a new project (the ODM wants to continue business with the customer, the customer won't do that if he has to pay a penalty). So it's not that far-fetched to negotiate a partial transfer to someone else entirely...
Also, HTC having a corporate office in Washington, while that "Trump phone" company never built a phone before, I wouldn't be surprised if my baseless assumption turns out to have some merit...
> The claim is that the phone is being assembled from around 10 components by a team in Florida. This battery could be one of those components, along with the camera modules, speakers, the USB-C module, the haptic engine, and the mainboard. If that is indeed what’s happening, I’d wager that the chassis and display are imported as a pre-assembled unit owing to the difficulty of installing curved glass displays.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "final assembly" in US is just to apply the battery (which is not from china), associated ribbon-cables and NFC-Antenna on top of it, and the custom back-cover. With some creative phrasing you can count that as "10 components".
Also, the final assembly in US surely also helped on import tax duties, as only "components" were imported from different sources instead of a final commercial product...
-) Estimations are that the HTC U24 Pro sold just ~10.000 units globally since 2024, at ~459 USD*
-) The "Trump T1" variant is rumored to have sold ~30.000 units in 2026(!), at 499 USD
--> So they managed to sell a 2-year old device at a HIGHER price than HTC did, and sold ~3 times the volume in ~6 months of what HTC achieved WITHIN TWO-YEARS just by branding it with the "Trump" Name...
If that doesn't at least demonstrate how broken the competitive landscape in the smartphone industry is (me gently excluding the gravity of the 'Trump' branding), I don't know anymore...
*) approx., with 2024-style memory/storage spec of 8GB/128GB
> While the SoC is the same, the multichip package housing 12GB LPDDR5 and 512GB storage is from Micron, whereas our HTC U24 Pro uses a package from SK Hynix. A relatively small difference, the change may have occurred due to supply chain limitations, tariff fee considerations, or any number of other benign reasons.
It's most likely that Micron was also the second supplier for the HTC U24 RAM/Storage, and was barely/not used due to ultimately low demand of the U24 (estimations are that only ~10k units were sold globally, which is even below a typical minimum contract volume for semiconductor supply).
(Supply-chain management for volume-produced electronics involves secondary suppliers for expensive/time-critical components, to de-risk supply during the lifecycle of the product or decouple different regions)
Assuming that's the case also here, the ODM manufacturer (I assume it's not HTC) just exercised good supply-chain management by tapping into the previously contracted supply of Micron components to produce the T1.
If Micron was already listed as secondary supplier for the U24, they can probably even reuse the certificates and conformance testing results, which saves money for FCC, R&TTE, GCF compliance-testing by only submitting brief sanity-check results...
That's surely one thing, Apple went all-in on ARM, for Microsoft it's still a kinda "reduced experience".
But the bigger problem in my opinion: How much of the Windows userbase actually sticks to Windows because of its backwards-compatibility?
--> What would happen if they break this model and the OS is only judged based on its user experience and available applications...?
I'm not sure it would stand any chance to compete in the B2C space. If I think about it, there's not a single new feature in Windows of the last ~20 years I particularly care about.
Without backwards compatibility, there's barely any ecosystem. MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc.
> MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc.
True, but if you're only in the ecosystem as a mac user, in many ways it's felt like a mixed bag. I still wildly prefer mac over other operating systems, but if upgrades had a price, I think those sales would mostly go to iPhone users. Even at free, I'm yet to find a compelling reason to install Tahoe, and will probably just continue waiting until the next one.
Agree, it's a fairly closed ecosystem, that's why I personally don't use it.
But despite that, as a Windows user I acknowledge that any kind of interaction with another Mac from within MacOS (Handoff, Sidecar, Universal Control, Bluetooth-pairing to Apple-ID instead of Hardware MAC-ID,...) is leaps ahead of what Microsoft was doing with their OS for the past years.
Just the scenario of an employee getting a Windows laptop as a work-PC, there's barely any halo-effect if he/she also uses Windows at home. No easier handoff, no interaction, hardly any "just-works" connectivity.
Windows is mostly a vessel for the (legacy) applications it can run, and for these Browser-based Microsoft Online-Applications (which work equally-well on other platforms)
They didn't invest in creating "just works" frameworks for their PCs which amplify the ecosystem the more compatible devices you have, instead most of their focus is now on "just-works" stuff in the cloud.
So if Microsoft would make a clean cut on backwards-compatibility, I'm not sure there would be a reason left for most B2C users to even stay with Windows.
The "you can make it work if you invest a bit of time or google it" paradigm is nowadays well-covered by Linux already, and it's getting even harder for brands to compete on price/quality with Apple's scale, for almost any portable device...
Ya I agree. I'm primarily a Mac and Android user, but also use Windows for gaming, and Windows has never been particularly good at anything. It's never been a smooth user experience.
Recently I upgraded my motherboard and tried reinstalling Win10 Pro, but couldn't activate it despite saving the product key. They have at least THREE obscure flows for re-activation depending on how it was originally activated. The license in my flow needed to have been bound to a Microsoft account that I never previously needed, because it ties itself to the hardware. I had to dismantle and rebuild with my old installation, activate it with my old motherboard on a Microsoft account that I wasn't planning to use to login with, then rebuild again with my new components, sign in to activate, and then disable sign in to be able to use a local user account. Insane.
Hmm, that actually is an important difference. I was considering trying to set something like this up so I didn't have to bring two laptops with me while traveling, but was skeptical it would go smoothly, apparently for good reason.
Ignore the naysayers, they are just jealous. You got it totally tight, not everyone get's it like we do. We are facing alot of backlash for our beliefs these days.
Listen, I'm hosting this Telegram channel for people like us, where we can exchange free information without media bias, share the real facts and plan coordinated activities against these poisoning mainstream scumbags.
I also have a 20% coupon code for Wamp® Wolf-Testosteron for you, Wamp® really helped me stay awake and alert in these dire times.
But this is exactly my point -- in a low information trust society things like this our noise. They work in high information trust societies because who would sell medical products that don't work? A doctor is leading Wamp®, surely a doctor would never lie to us for money?
In low information trust society everything is noise except what passes a smoke-test or who you believe, which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.
A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising).
A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".
> I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.
I lived in societies of high and low information trust, and observed first-hand what happens on transition. If trust in public information is high, people contribute and challenge common sources of information, and there is high expectation and punishment to rectify, improving the quality and transparency of commonly agreed information.
In low trust environments, people start to distrust everything, initially seek out explanations but then largely gravitate towards information sources which confirm their assumptions or own bias, because they lack time, energy and skills for any other path. To stabilize themselves, they then build a mental "fortress" around their belief which is periodically fostered not by challenging it but by seeking out others who confirm it.
Advancing in this direction increases the general consensus that there is no common ground (because this requires common trust in some information source), it gets increasingly difficult to educate such fractured groups, because there is no longer a path for many to accept inconvenient truth in light of a more convenient "alternative truth".
This is poisonous in a democracy, because common agreement on facts is what's so crucial for this process.
Hence my learning that it's not a healthy direction for a society (and also the reason why systems attacking democracies don't aim to gain trust, they build distrust)
> but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.
There is a huge difference between a ideologically open society and a low information trust society. Accepting other ideologies requires trust.
A low information trust society breaks down trust not just in institutions but also among citizens, which is the fertile ground for polarization and actively prevents open ideology.
You may have the wrong understanding of the terminology. A high-information-trust society doesn't mean that everyone blindly accepts a leader, it describes a system where trust is maintained. In a functioning democracy this happens because society constantly challenges institutions, as it DEMANDS to be able to trust them.
In low-information-trust systems, the consensus is that no one can be trusted. So no joint effort is taken to hold power accountable, everyone plays to his own fraction which erodes common grounds, solidarity and citizen power.
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...)
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.
Exactly, I've experienced the same a few times, in different industries.
That's why I can imagine Ive's company wowing the management with an early interior concept pitch, but then demanding also exterior design ownership as part of the agreement because "it needs to be a coherent design, like an iPhone".
Sounds perfectly reasonable and easy to vouch for. Management feels like they are anyway in control because they decide whether to launch the product or not.
But if the product starts to shift over the course of the development, someone in management has to make the call. And that's a very expensive call to make.
I've personally been with companies which had such big-name collaborations that "deviated" from expectations in very advanced development-stages.
I've seen companies successfully intervening, but more often than that scale-down the project or cancelling the entire collaboration and ending the project, as no partial solution could be agreed on.
The latter was especially common with Design Companies (e.g. Porsche Design, Prada, the earlier LVMH), as their contracts were not phrased for collaboration but for creative control. I would assume Jony Ive sees himself in the same bracket...
honest question: is there any difference between this and the Pontiac Aztek? I guess time will answer that one...
>> the Aztek was to signal a design renaissance for GM, and to "make a statement about breaking from GM's instinct for caution. One designer said that during the design process, the Aztek was made "aggressive for the sake of being aggressive." Peters, the Chief Designer said "we wanted to do a bold, in-your-face vehicle that wasn't for everybody."
The Pontiac Aztek was at least bold, and like the Nissan Cube, people didn't like the looks, but those who bought it really seemed to love it inordinately.
This thing isn't even bold, it's just ... a generic car?
If they had made it outrageous (think: teardrop which is most efficient aerodynamically or something) it'd make more sense.
The Luce is stated to hit 190mph. I honestly doubt the reality of getting that speed on real track. Having battery in the floor helps stability of course. Yet it still looks to be too high for such performance. Look at similar EV - Porsche Taycan - top speed from 155 to 190mph for the top model. The 190mph model has similar horsepower, and much better aerodynamics and sits lower.
My cousin bought a brand new aztek off the lot for way way below sticker like 60% because they sold so poorly because of how ugly they were perceived to be. I think the people who love them probably love them because of how cheap they were.
When I first saw the third generation Nissan Primera [1] many years ago, this is the thought that occurred to me: some bold, enterprising designer somehow managed to convince the organization to push through a radical, risky departure from their usual aesthetic. The 2010 Nissan Juke too, felt similar (I owned one myself). In my view, both models worked out. I don't think Ferrari was that lucky.
To sports car enthusists, there is a certain flavor in each car produced by the major companies that one can recognize without seeing the badge. Even the SUVs carry over that recognizable design language like with the Cayenne and Urus. This doesn't look like a Ferrari, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with coloring outside the lines. But then again, this is not something Ferrari fans (with money to buy a Ferrari) would expect from the House of Pininfarina, it looks like an iPad. Maybe that doesnt matter, maybe Ferrari is more angling towards the kind of buyer that wants a Ferrari but also needs something he can take the kids to school in. Maybe the kind of person with Ferrari money but Tesla sensibilities.
Think of it like this: even the most expensive iPhone isn't that much more than the base model. There's a limit on what you can buy, anyone with a decent job can afford the same phone that billionaires use. But what if there was something even more premium? Something that's higher performance and looks better, would you buy it if money was no issue?
> Maybe that doesnt matter, maybe Ferrari is more angling towards the kind of buyer that wants a Ferrari but also needs something he can take the kids to school in.
If Ferrari wanted to build a Cayenne, I'm sure they could have just leaned on Porsche's expertise in slapping badges on beige SUVs for boring upper middle class suburbanites...
I wonder whether the mere-exposure effect [0] could also be at play here.
For me, the first reaction to the Ferrari Luce was utter shock, but after looking at it again several hours later I'm starting to see some of its exterior elements differently (although my brain finds it hard to call the car "beautiful" in the same way as some of the other recent Ferrari models).
It looks like a decision was made to depart from the "modern"-looking Ferraris, but the direction of that departure seems to be very different from what the competitors are doing and what the general public is looking for visually in such a car (but it's worth keeping in mind that members of the general public aren't really customers of this car).
Just to clarify: I'm not saying the car is ugly, it's a good looking design.
But it's not a Ferrari design, it dropped almost all of the brands' identity and design language in favor of becoming a more "uniform sportscar design".
To me personally this is quite on-brand for Jony Ive's past work, where the exterior design of the product is diluted to the "least-offending version of its kind", a vessel to the high-quality interior experience which is focused to "excite the user".
In the mobile phone space this was disruptive, because (accidentally) it created the "normalized mobile computing platform" needed to transform the industry into a Smartphone industry.
But I'd say the sports car industry is different, I don't see a benefit in having the "most normalized sports car"...
I've only ever sat in a Ferrari, never driven one, but the interior looks exactly like what I'd expect from a modern Ferrari.
As for the exterior, I really don't like the front - but I think that's because a tall Ferrari is just wrong (for example, I think the Purosangue looks incredibly generic too).
When I saw the design, I thought "This looks like a Tesla".
I'm sure it's an awesome car, and also a high quality premium experience. The question is whether it can command supercar prices - they are selling it for $650,000, and I don't quite understand the value proposition of a superior Tesla selling for that much.
Now you can say, well what is the value proposition of the other ICE Ferraris selling for that much? And that's the point, when they first came out, they didn't sell for such high prices, it was a long period of decades in which collectors were bidding up the prices due to their interest in collecting Ferraris and reselling them, at which point the cars became an investment and collectible item, rather than just "expensive high end vehicles".
So when you break from that tradition, but assume you can carry over the collector premium -- particularly for a disposable tech-heavy EV -- then that is where Ferrari made a mistake, and not only Ferrari, but there is a reason none of the EV supercars have sold well, or will sell well. Tech and collectables don't mix.
If you want an example of a brand that is doing this well, look at Rolls Royce. Rolls is selling actual luxury experiences, and their prices reflect the unique ownership experience, not the collectible value, as all Rolls Royces suffer massive depreciation, and have always suffered massive depreciation. No one buys a Rolls Royce expecting it to go up in value, it's understood that in 30 years, you can pick it up for less than the cost of the tires on the brand new model. In that environment, EVs work very well, and Rolls is having success with their high priced EVs that none of the automakers are having in the hypercar market.
Rolls knows their customers, as absurd as it may seem. The electrics hit the Royce brand first because it is the car “in which you are driven” and likely the reasons you state. Bentley, the car “you drive” has a different customer base and will be closer to the “normal” hypercar experience.
Where is the Ferrari in this at all? I completely agree that they missed the mark in design. While the interior is 100% Jony Ive, the exterior screams "design by committee."
An electric Roma successor would have been much better received and possibly cheaper for them to develop (who knows?).
The silver lining in all this is that it means that the EV arm will not cannibalize their ICE cars.
The exterior screams asian-EV design langauge to me - which may not be an accident. Ferrari have made no secret of their hopes this car will succeed for them in China.
It looks like the EV version of Apple widgets and the iPhone home screen. There's so much rounded squares /rounded rectangle bullshit...it looks like something that was designed in 2010 and is about to get the shit sued out of it by Apple.
Every automaker is desperately trying to chase Chinese buyers. Most of them are too stupid to realize the Chinese can just....buy better Chinese EVs, and if they're not buying a chinese EV, it's because they don't want a Chinese EV, they want the foreign company's design and cachet.
Peopel don't buy Ferraris because they look like Chinese EVs. People buy them because they look like Ferraris and are exclusive.
Audi is doing stupid shit, too. They recently started making cars under the "AUDI" brand. Yeah. "AUDI". Versus "Audi" with rings.
If Ferrari wanted to sell more cars in China they could just stop be absurd dicks about a)who can buy their cars b)what people can do with them.
Things like "prohibit people from lending them to reviewers so Ferrari can game the review by putting on different tires and tuning the suspension for the specific track the reviewer will be using." Although might actually impress Chinese buyers since it aligns with them so well, culturally.
But that's not because Asian EVs have a specific identity, but because the Luce's design has NO identity. It has no heritage, like a sports car from a company that didn't exist 15 years ago.
At the moment I don't even see alot in it to BUILD a design-heritage upon, not many accents you could carry onwards to other cars.
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is also an Asian EV. But it has character, it has accents, it has "rough edges". I can see aspects of it carrying onwards to the point that I see a van on the street and instantly know "it's a Ioniq". I don't see much of that in the Luce right now...
This is a disaster for Ferrari. You buy the brand, the car and its lack of reliability is well known and the difficult handling also well known. But its La Ferrari.
This is the type of car that will be seen in the hands of people buying Cybertruck or the UK chavs that now buy Rolex. The moment that happens your brand is dead. Your customers will flock away back to Buggati and Aston Martin.
Ferrari doesn't need to sell a massive number of these to keep the lights on, they can sell as few or as many as they want. Remember that this thing costs $500k, the market is relatively small compared to all of the other EVs for sale, even the luxury models.
IMO this is a risk worth taking. The Ferrari brand is rather stagnant and not innovative. They need to do something like this to drive more attention and sales. Even if this particular model does not sell well they can refine and make better selling EVs down the line.
>> They need to do something like this to drive more attention and sales.
The objective of a luxury brand is not volume sales.
There is the well known anecdote of somebody asking André Heiniger, then chairman/president of Rolex: "How is the watch business?"
and he answering something along the lines of: "I have no idea. Rolex is not in the watch business..."
According to one of the recent Acquired (podcast) episodes, they could ramp up production to increase sales at any time, they just don't in order to keep brand value and desire high, so I'm not sure it's that.
> The Ferrari brand is rather stagnant and not innovative. They need to do something like this to drive more attention and sales.
Wild assertion. Ferrari is currently #8 largest market cap for a car manufacturer. They're valued above Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen and every other Euro car brand.
They couldn't be more successful as a small automaker if they tried. But you think they need to do something like this to drive attention and sales?
I don't agree that difference equals boldness. Boldness of Cybertruck comes from its statement. There is no such statement behind Ferrari Luce. It's a cheap Ferrari-for-your-kid kind of design.
Stagnant? Is that why their value has gone up 8x in the last decade? Does the market reward stagnant businesses?
It's very clear you don't follow the market or the auto industry. The fact that Ferrari is the most valuable European carmaker makes it clear they are not "stagnant". A "stagnant" brand wouldn't outvalue Volkswagen, etc.
Overall market value doesn't have anything to do with how innovative a business may be. Ferrari has a high value because it has a very large profit margin, due to their deliberate low supply and high sale prices. That doesn't mean it's innovative
So the company that earns more per vehicle sold isn't "innovative". How do they command their deliberate high sales prices then? Magic? Why doesn't every car maker have a similar strategy? Why doesn't Porsche, Aston Martin, etc have the same success?
Ferrari is innovative and their brand is vibrant. As evidenced by their extreme success.
If you want to argue in the alternative, try submitting facts or evidence.
Ferrari makes a ton of money per vehicle because there is a long line of wealthy elites waiting to buy a new tailored model. They are not known for innovation, in fact you have not provided any evidence to the contrary. They are even terrible at F1, having not one a title since 2008, despite having some of the best drivers racing for them. Yes these are different departments but the same culture.
Would you call Rolex an innovative brand? No one would, because they are a luxury watchmaker brand, who also happen to be one of the most valued brands in the industry.
> They are even terrible at F1, having not one a title since 2008, despite having some of the best drivers racing for them
zero relevance to this discussion (but unsurprising you conflate), and if you don't understand F1 is a marketing exercise that Ferrari wins, I don't know what to tell you
> Would you call Rolex an innovative brand
Yes I would, the deep sea dweller was a stroke of genius, as was the Tudor renaissance, they are deeply connected to their customer base and innovate for their customers.
You seem unable to understand that for the market of demand that Ferrari and Rolex seek, they innovate perfectly. They innovate for the pool of customers, not for you or the public. They've been rewarded richly by creating new vehicles that their customers demand.
Again, you've provided zero evidence of your fact-free claims, no need to respond further
maybe learn the markets you're commenting on? also try learning what innovation means, it doesn't mean coming up with an imbecilic vehicle like the cyberdumpster
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.
Never buy a Hyundai/Kia. They make the dumbest cost cutting decisions, like their recent immobilizer fiasco. The dealers are also, largely without exception, terrible.
Several Kia models produced around 2005 incorporated the questionable design of having the engine control electronics located below the oil sump - as I've seen first-hand what that does to the vehicle's maintenance costs, I'm inclined to agree with you!
I know a number of people with this view on Kia and Hyundai. "They were garbage back in 199X or 200X so they're still garbage now." Except that was twenty or thirty years ago and from what I've heard they made advances in design and quality since then.
Most of what I've heard is about the electric vehicles they produce, not the ICE cars. My understanding is their EVs are different beasts and much better.
Kia has some competitive vehicles in niches that not many seem to want to service, and I suspect many of their buyers do not live in areas where immobilizers are going to be a major issue.
Our dealer was fine, and it's been fine. It's a car car, not really doing anything amazing.
Brands, but especially Asian ones, seem to go through cycles - this thing is absolute shit, nobody buy it, company fixes the problems and gets reliable, but still thought of as crap, company keeps improving, people start to notice, becomes known as a real good and reliable deal, company starts charging more and more. Kia's on the ascendant right now, where Toyota was 20+ years ago.
The immobilizer thing isn't due to stupidity, but corner cutting taken to ridiculous extremes. I don't think a company can recover from being run down by bean counters.
They offer (still I assume) a ten year warranty in the States. They offer such a long warranty because the perceived reliability of their vehicles is so low.
The dealer issues are true, but we have been very happy with our 2021 Hyundai Palisade Calligraphy after owning it for 5+ years and 82k miles. Budget luxury with pretty good handling and performance. It's a great value package if you need a 3rd row vehicle (I have 4 kids).
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.
No, the V12 buyers will buy these in droves. Ferrari is incredibly elitest. You’ve got to buy multiple lower tier vehicles to even be allowed to maybe eventually buy a build slot for one of the high end cars.
They’ll likely have to buy several of these, in different colors, and agree to sell them back to Ferrari at a massive loss… only for Ferrari to repeat the process over and over.
The shenanigans manufacturers like Ferrari and Porsche are allowed to get away with is so frustrating. But when people treat cars like collectibles and never even intend to drive them, I suppose there’s little reason not to.
Not really, I love the original Taycan. It's too bad the second generation looks a bit more like BYD/Model 3, I wish they would have stayed with the original design even if it means staying with lower range.
Mm... yeah I guess except the weird front grill it's doesn't look exactly bad... but then you scroll down to the other Ferrari at the bottom of the page... "oh".
Ferrari has historically worked with outside designers. Pininfarina being probably the most prominent. Bertone, as well. Ferrari brought design in-house relatively recently.
> 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.
Ferrari already got their exception from the EU regulation for CO² reduction via the E-Fuel loophole, which was tailored for them and allows them to continue selling V8 and V12 ICE-based cars beyond 2036 if they only use synthetic e-fuels.
This secures their existing business model for customers who insist on ICE-based cars and are willing to pay the premium for it.
A portion of their addressable market shifts to EV-based sports cars though, they are shooting themselves into the foot by not establishing a BOLD identity in this space soon. A bland product with a "we used to be big in ICE" brand won't cut it there
it was created after lobbying/intervention of Italy and Germany, so yes, also for Porsche.
But Porsche has a much wider palette of cars, if ICEs would be banned without exception they could adapt.
Their concern was that Ferrari could be exempted entirely from the regulation due to their low total volume, with Porsche ending up unable to compete on ICE sports cars with them because they're no longer allowed to build one.
Hence the "Ferrari loophole". Not just for Ferrari, but BECAUSE of Ferrari
"Look, we tried to create an EV and no one bought it. So we need to retain that carve-out in the regulations that mean we do not have to electrify our entire product line or we will go out of business entirely."
I'd totally buy this car if it looked like that and was from a mainstream manufacturer (i.e. priced normally), but yeah I cannot see a typical ferrari owner buying one.
Its a divorce car. You get to keep your real ferrari(s), and buy her one of those. Good for school/grocery runs, has the right badge, probably will drive like a normal car. There exists a demography for those kinds of cars. Lots of people dont care one bit about the style, its all about the brand. (I doubt anyone would consider Bentley SuVs as good looking, for instance - yet they seel well).
That was the deal with the Aston Martin Cygnus as well. It wasn't meant for enthusiasts. It was generally sold to wives who bought them alone - much to the fury of husbands later that day. Some Aston Martin salesman once mentioned this in an interview, mentioning that otherwise there was no way to move that vehicle.
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.
And the press-release [0] sounds like Ferrari had very limited creative control:
"Introducing a team from outside the Ferrari Design Studio led by Flavio Manzoni invited a new perspective and cross-fertilisation, enabling a new design language to be introduced."
"LoveFrom was given the creative freedom needed to define the design direction of the project from the outset, translating this design language into an authentic Ferrari experience."
"(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.
Maybe I'm being silly, but I felt a strange existential dread watching the video. I asked myself: who is being marketed toward? In my head, it's Apple lovers that want to larp as car people, and having the money to waste on such an endeavor.
edit: I just realized, I don't know the price, but I've basically described tesla people. I wonder how many of these buyers already own one...
edit 2: price is around 600,000 USD -- it's a super tesla!
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 felt the web site was "lights on nobody home", I think the interesting fact about this vehicle is that it is electric and even though you can pick different colors and a heated steering wheel as an option there isn't a single word about power train.
Just being a legendary brand like Ferrari doesn't mean that 100% of us understand 100% about 100% of your products.
> what political struggle was behind that within Ferrari ... could be an indicator for internal disagreements.
A while back I read a couple books on the history of Ferrari and came away with the clear sense that Enzo was one of those unique iconoclastic entrepreneurs who was brilliant, flawed and irreplaceable. After Enzo, Ferrari's management has mostly hovered between being inconsistent and incomprehensible. From the racing team to road cars, the company has become legendary for political fiefdoms and internal conflict.
I agree the Luce exterior may be the least Ferrari-looking Ferrari ever. I suspect it's going to be a disaster for the brand.
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).
EVs generally have more "freedom" to design the car the way they want, as it's usually motors (in the wheels, which you probably need to have anyway) and then the battery (which can be a giant slab, but that's for cost and maintenance reasons; there's nothing stopping a $650k car from having batteries custom laid to fit however they want).
I kinda doubt it. Ive doesn't have that much pull, most people don't know him, definitely not as much pull as Ferrari, one of the most recognizable brands in the world. And I bet Ferrari was into this, they make a ton of new models anyways, and they probably know that sport car enthusiasts would not have jumped to an EV no matter what. Much better to try to make something very different than their lineup than just an engine swap.
Exterior has frequently been Pininfarina w/ a distinct design language...changing it up wholesale would necessarily result in something quite different
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.
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.
They can easily afford to pay the fleet emission fines even if they apply to them (I'm not sure since they are a small volume manufacturer and there might be exceptions for them). And they have produced hybrids since 2013 already.
As many legacy brands, Ferrari is looking to refresh itself in order to stay relevant to a new generation of buyers, and not "die out" together with their existing customer base. They need to do this rather sooner than later while still standing on a pillar of good legacy identity, to not end up like Jaguar does...
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.
Disregarding whether I like it or not (I don't), it's a strategically interesting product.
This appears to be an AI-device to mainly check the boxes for "low-complexity tasks", "high user-dependency" and "continuous flow of training data".
Perfect to catch the high-profit consumers of AI: They will use AI-services for the most mundane tasks, which won't be taxing on AI-infrastructure but also very sticky, as it will be a core of the desktop-experience.
Kinda RF-nerd clickbait... :)
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