The Ferrari Luce reminds me of a £2k Peugeot, but then I am just a man with a Biro
We’re all armchair experts in car design, but in reality it requires real skill, says Porter
I don’t know if you heard but Ferrari announced its first electric car earlier this year. And I’m not sure if you spotted this as well but a couple of people had some thoughts about its design. I’m going to say they weren’t entirely keen. For what it’s worth, I had some thoughts of my own, the main one being that, while I found many aspects of the design quite interesting, I couldn’t get my head around why a brand new, very expensive car on a bespoke EV platform should have its front wheels mounted so far back. In fact, the last time I remember cars so afflicted by front-wheels-too-far-back syndrome it was the Peugeot 407, where the shutline at the leading edge of the front door had to curve rearwards in an unnatural way to clear the wheelarch, or the Austin Maestro, on which the front overhang was so much longer than the rear it gave the whole thing the appearance of a badly assembled hyena. The problem with the Ferrari Luce, I found myself saying to anyone who’d listen, is that it has front-wheel-drive proportions.
It turned out many professional car designers had their own issues with the Luce. At least, the ones who were prepared to join the noise on social media. The trouble is, they mostly seemed to say, it’s been designed by a pair of product designers, and product design isn’t the same as car design. This sounded a bit like gatekeeping to me, but then another thought came to me: what the merry flip do I know? Truth is, those of us who are into cars, we all think we’re car designers. I suspect if you’ve loved cars from a young age, you’ll naturally think you know a bit about designing them because you’ve spent so much idle time doodling cars in notebooks and on bits of paper and during an art class when you were supposed to be drawing a bowl of fruit. It’s a car tic that doesn’t go away, even if in the modern world there are likely to be fewer pens and bits of paper in your immediate orbit. Even so, if I’m on an especially protracted video call I can fill an out-of-shot notebook page with mythical rakish coupes and retro small cars until the blessed moment someone finally says goodbye and everyone scrambles to avoid that weird 10 milliseconds of loneliness caused by being the last to leave.
> Ferrari Luce – price, specs and release date of Italy’s infamous EV
A few days ago I was standing next to a mate as he was thumbing through a notebook and I noticed many of the pages were covered in Biro sketches of cars too. So at least I know I’m not alone. But I also know that neither of us is a car designer. Because there’s a very big gap between idly doodling cars when you should be listening properly in a meeting and being able actually to design a car, and to think otherwise would be like believing you could perform dentistry because you have many years’ experience in brushing your own teeth.
Car design is one of those things that, I’ve come to realise, is actually deceptively hard. Coming up with a basic shape, that’s relatively simple. So is filling in the outline of lamps and windows and suchlike. But to do this for real demands the use of something more than a ratty pen you took from a hotel. For starters, there are myriad rules and regulations, often varying from country to country, and concerning fundamental things like the size and position of lights, and the proximity of occupants to parts of the structure, significantly restricting the more flamboyant parts of a design and nixing fun things like ground-skimming lamps and rakish screen angles. Then you might clatter into your employer’s internal standards for things like snow chain clearance, which will clash with your efforts to make the car look tightly wrapped over its wheels.
In his brilliant book Car Guys vs Bean Counters, gnarly industry lifer Bob Lutz tells some amazing stories about GM’s outdated but immovable self-imposed rules on everything from kerb-strike standards to overhead traffic light visibility, many of which were unnecessarily restrictive and seemed spitefully determined to make it extremely hard to end up with an attractive-looking car. You can imagine pro car designers spending a lot of time wrestling with these minutiae and using every bit of their training and experience towards ensuring the finished product doesn’t seem to have escaped from Minecraft.
And this, as far as I can work out as an outsider, is the really cool and clever bit of car design that makes it such a skilled occupation. It’s taking all these conflicting things, not just rules and regs but the multiple twists and turns of a complicated 3D object, and turning them into one cohesive whole.
We might all be fascinated by car design, we might have dreamt about it as we doodled in school notebooks, we almost certainly have some extremely strident opinions about it, especially when it comes to that new Ferrari. I know I do. But, like most of us, I’m not a real car designer, I’m just a man with a Biro.
This story was first featured in evo issue 348.
