alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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This happens all the time. Ferrari taking inspiration from BYD is certainly brave, but it there is a fine line between bravery and good old stupidity.
As the saying goes: It's good to keep an open mind, just not so open your brains fall out.
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."
Isn't this how the Jaguar fiasco came to be?
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.
Well I'll say this for the design (as a non-designer):
1. It doesn't look like any other car, though it still obviously looks like a car
2. The buzz, good or bad, is going to mean people hear about it, talk about it, and see it
3. If you see it in public you're likely to recognize it; whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen
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).
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...