- Anton Ruckman
- 7 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Why Product Designers
Should Not Design Cars (Even at Ferrari)
Right now, LinkedIn is exploding with opinions about the collaboration between Ferrari, Jony Ive, and Marc Newson. Everyone has something to say. Designers, founders, UX people, car enthusiasts. Praise, criticism, excitement, fear. And that reaction itself already tells us something important: this collaboration was designed to provoke. Before anything else, I want to be clear. Ive and Newson are extraordinary designers. They are heroes of modern product design. Their influence on industrial design over the past decades is undeniable. But this collaboration raises a deeper question that many designers are avoiding. Should product designers design cars at all? My answer is no. Not because they lack talent. Not because they lack taste. But because automotive design and product design are fundamentally different disciplines with fundamentally different priorities.
Both product designers and automotive designers work with CMF, forms and shapes, engineering constraints, ergonomics, usability, manufacturability, brand language, and trends. That overlap is real. The difference is not capability. The difference is hierarchy of values. In product design, the usual order looks like this: function, simplicity, usability, manufacturability, visual clarity, and only then emotional character. Products are devices. Tools. Objects that support life. Phones, watches, speakers, wearables. They are designed to integrate quietly into daily routines. Minimalism is not just aesthetic, it is philosophical restraint. The product should disappear into life.
Automotive design works in almost the opposite direction, especially for brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche. Here the hierarchy becomes emotion first, then character, identity, proportion and stance, brand heritage, motion language, performance philosophy, cultural symbolism, and only then usability and engineering. Engineering still matters deeply, but it exists in service of emotion. A car is not a device. It is a modern horse. It carries you. It represents you. It amplifies you. You do not fall in love with a phone. You fall in love with a car (unless, of course, you are a very young person who cannot appreciate the disturbing sound and smell of a combustion engine and is happily leaning toward EV silence… haha).
Even within automotive design there is already a split. Exterior designers live in proportion, silhouette, surfacing tension, and movement in stillness. They sculpt presence through form, volume, and surface transitions. Interior designers choreograph space, tactility, light, driver psychology, and emotional enclosure, using shapes, materials, and geometry to create atmosphere. Even inside the cabin it is not simply UX. It is spatial theatre. Light, materials, seating posture, steering feel, acoustic character. That is not interface thinking. That is emotional architecture.
Marc Newson is not just any product designer. He has a deep emotional relationship with heritage brands and classic cars. His personal collection shows genuine appreciation for automotive culture. He even explored automotive territory with concept work for Ford Motor Company. That project was clever, refined, playful, very Newson. And that is precisely the issue. It felt like a beautifully designed object on wheels. Not a car with tension. Not a machine with aggression. Not a creature with presence. It felt like an artefact. Even at genius level, product designers instinctively approach vehicles as objects defined by clean forms and contained shapes. Cars are not objects. They are characters.
Ferrari does not need product designers to teach them emotion. They already employ some of the best automotive designers on the planet. So why this collaboration? Because we are in the EV transition. Because Ferrari must reposition itself in a tech-driven future. Because attention is currency. We saw this recently with Jaguar and their radical concept direction. Huge backlash. Huge debate. Huge awareness. Break your own heritage, make loyal fans uncomfortable, trigger designers and enthusiasts, generate global reach. It is a strategy. Ferrari is now doing the same. This is controlled provocation.
Bringing Ive and Newson into the narrative reframes Ferrari as part of the Apple-adjacent design universe, connected to tech culture, innovation, and a new future. It is smart marketing. But marketing and authorship are not the same thing. When product-design thinking leads automotive identity, we usually start seeing screen-first interiors, flattened minimalism, generic calm-tech aesthetics, and digital replacing mechanical drama. Cars become polite. Safe. Interchangeable. You do not fall in love with polite machines. You fall in love with wild ones. A Ferrari should feel alive even when parked.
This is why the reaction feels disturbing for many people. Ferrari’s heritage is sacred. Automotive culture is deeply emotional. The EV transition already threatens identity. Product-design aesthetics risk flattening character through overly controlled forms and softened shapes. Ferrari is not asking permission here. They are forcing a conversation. It is brave. It is risky. It is marketing-first. And it has very little to do with who is actually best qualified to design cars.
That said, I genuinely find it exciting to see what the final result will be. Whatever comes out of this collaboration will almost certainly trigger a second wave of Wow and Nooo reactions, and from a design culture perspective alone, that is fascinating to watch.
The core truth is simple. Product designers create devices that support life. Automotive designers create emotional companions. One designs tools. The other designs modern horses. Cars are not gadgets. They are identity machines. And horses should not be designed by saddle makers.
And just to be clear, all of this comes from my personal perspective as a product designer, with huge respect for automotive designers as true shape maestros, and equal respect for product designers as creators of tools that support everyday life. These are different crafts, serving different human needs, and both deserve to be valued for what they uniquely do best.
Product designers support life, automotive designers create emotion, and when we blur that line, we risk designing machines without souls. P.S. This is a truly revolutionary design decision for an automaker like Ferrari: creating a completely new design language where only real design experts can immediately see the analogies and historical references in this new appearance. Most revolutionary designs meet antagonism at first sight, but slowly become iconic and turn into new design references for others. Let’s see how this story unfolds. But personally, and controversially to everything above, the more I look at the renders on Ferrari’s website, the more I fall in love with their beautifully crafted products, inspired by Ferrari’s heritage.