The self-driving technology available in most E.V.s turns the car into something summoned on demand. Our work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that autonomous driving could allow cities to operate with a small fraction of today’s vehicles while reducing parking demand by as much as 85 percent. And once your hands and eyes are freed from the steering wheel, they can be used for other activities, like eating, working and scrolling through your internet feed. Italians have joked that the nation’s low birthrate may ultimately benefit from the disappearance of stick shifts — long a major obstacle to four-wheeled romance.
Car design is a different beast from every other form of design. Ferrari’s cars, especially, are more movable art than mere transportation. Growing up as an aspiring designer in one of the world’s automotive meccas, I always looked on the process with a mix of awe and terror. Car design answers to aesthetics, yes, but equally to the wind tunnel and to velocity. It eludes most of us, unless your brain is wired like that of a speed-loving futurist.
All design is a quarrel between two impulses: the wild idea and the cold edit. Unleash the wild, and you get baroque chaos. Lean too far toward cold, and you get vanilla or gray. The danger for Ferrari lies between them. Each designer knows how difficult it is to balance both forces, like reconciling the right and left brain hemispheres.
This is also why many great design stories are, in essence, love stories. Charles Eames needed his wife, Ray. Domenico Dolce needed his partner, Stefano Gabbana. Mr. Ive, one suspects, might have needed Steve Jobs — and that intense, intolerable temperament — to push against. This could explain why, since Mr. Jobs’s death, Mr. Ive’s production has been plentiful but not so memorable.
Switzerland’s watch industry, after quartz movements arrived in 1969 from Japan, lived through a design transition like the one occurring in autos. Quartz nearly buried Swiss mechanical watchmaking until Swatch rescued the industry by making quartz watches that were cheap and playful — accessories, as opposed to jewelry. The mechanical watch survived, reborn as a luxury product that sells precisely because it is revered old tech. The internal combustion engine may follow the same path: kept alive for love.
