The striking thing about Motor Trend‘s piece on the rumored Apple car is all the talk of the “user experience.”
The various auto designers and experts interviewed by Motor Trend speculate that Apple will try to redefine the car “experience.” They talk about stuff like acoustics, and look and feel, rather than specs like miles per gallon or engine torque.
They predict that Apple will bring a better “user experience” to the car of the future, not just a better physical product.
This reminded me of interviewing Apple’s designers for my Jony Ive book. They explained that the design group takes exactly this approach when thinking about new Apple products. Instead of starting with chip speeds or screen resolutions, they begin by asking each other how the new product should make the user feel.
And thinking about this made me realize why Jony Ive has a chauffeur. It’s not because he’s a one percenter. It’s about Project Titan, Apple’s future car.
The Jony Ive chauffeur riddle
Why does Apple’s chief design officer ride around in a chauffeur-driven Bentley?
It has nothing to do with being rich, as Dan Lyons writing for ValleyWag has suggested. For Lyons, having a chauffeur is a sign that Ive is out of touch and “dangerously out of control.”
But the chauffeur isn’t about being rich. It’s about the “experience” of Apple’s rumored car development project. It suggests that Project Titan will be a driverless vehicle, and Ive is gathering data on that experience. Because we don’t have driverless cars yet, a chauffeur is the next best thing.
Jony Ive is obsessed with cars
Photo: Nick Wood / Instagram
This is pure guesswork, of course, but it makes sense.
Jony Ive is a car guy. He’s been obsessed with cars nice he was a lad. As a teenager, he restored a classic car with his dad. He originally wanted to be a car designer and investigated car design school, but opted for industrial design instead.
He’s owned an extensive collection of fast, exotic cars over the years, including Aston Martins, Bentleys, Saabs and Land Rovers. Every year, he religiously attends the Goodwood Festival of Speed, the ultimate gearhead gathering.
Most importantly, he likes to drive. Just like Steve Jobs, who sped around in his Mercedes (and parked in handicapped spaces), Ive likes to drive.
He’s had a series of powerful Aston Martins — these are not cars for people who have drivers. When he bought his first Aston Martin, he had it delivered to New York and drove it cross-country with his dad.
Ive drove himself to work in Cupertino from his home in San Francisco for many years, carpooling with fellow designers who lived in the city. It’s a 60-mile round trip every day. He did it for years. In fact, he was almost killed in a car wreck coming home from work in the early 2000s.
About Jony Ive’s chauffeur …
And consider the weird line from last year’s The New Yorker profile of Ive, where it was first revealed that he has a chauffeur:
“We were in Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be…. We were in the back seat: Ive has reluctantly accepted the services of a driver. Ive said to him, “It’s just over a year, isn’t it, Jean?”
“Reluctantly accepted?” Who reluctantly accepts a chauffeur? It sounds like the driver was pressed on him, but by who?
Tim Cook, his boss? That seems unlikely. Cook might want Ive to be more productive, answering emails during his daily commute, but that seems unlikely.
What about his family? Worried he might wreck his car again, they hired a cautious professional to keep the speed down? Maybe.
It seems most likely to me that his colleagues pressed the driver on him. It was the rest of the design team that urged him to get a chauffeur, so he could experience what it’s like to be in a driverless car. In fact, maybe the rest of the design team have chauffeurs too. Actually, Uber seems more likely.
Honing the Apple Car experience
Image: Motor Trend
Why is this important? Because the experience of a product is what informs the most important design decisions. Take the original Bondi Blue iMac, the smash-hit computer that looked unlike any other at the time and helped save Apple from bankruptcy.
Here’s Ive talking about it in Newsweek back on May 18, 1998: “The iMac revolved not around chip speed or market share but squishy questions like ‘How do we want people to feel about it?’ and ‘What part of our minds should it occupy?'”
When Ive’s team was brainstorming the iMac, the feelings they wanted to evoke were “intuitive” and “approachable.”
That’s why they gave it a handle on top. The handle wasn’t for picking the computer up (although it could be used for that). It was a visual cue to the user that they could touch the computer. The handle gave them “permission” to put their hands on it. And that made the machine much less intimidating and precious.
This might sound wishy-washy, until you realize that this is the secret sauce of Apple’s design. Thinking about the feelings and emotions that will be evoked by a product leads the designers to do stuff like throw away a keyboard on a phone in favor of a touchscreen, because a tiny keyboard stinks. It really moves things forward in big leaps.
Apple stock has made Jony Ive insanely rich. He’s a car guy. He could ride a helicopter to work if he wanted, and it would be far more efficient. Instead, he’s riding in the back of a chauffeur-driven Bentley, testing out the “experience” of Apple’s future self-driving car.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
29 responses to “Why Jony Ive rides in a chauffeured Bentley”
The Apple car will be about user experience? Isn’t that basically the Tesla?
And Fords aren’t. Isn’t that basically the Chevrolet, Chrysler, Toyota, Kia, or Volkswagen? What’s your point?
No interior design is less of a priority for their designers(or at least that is dictated to them by their board members). The point the article is making is that Apple (particularly Jony) will apply their own design principles to their car, but the point I’m making is the Tesla has basically done the same thing they’ve taken the approach often used by personal electronics manufacturers and put a larger emphasis on interior design and acoustics. Even compared to other cars those you mentioned are generally pretty cheap and plasticky.
No. Those auto makers focus on horse power, milage, model name history. Interior design comes into play when the committee sees how much money is left over. This is why a $40,000 Mitsubishi can track along side a BMW two and three times that cost. But it has a cheap interior, is terribly loud and far more uncomfortable than the $90,000 BMW.
Um… As an owner I can say no to that. Apple have many ways that they can up the UX on a Tesla.
Maybe, except Teslas seem over the top. Too busy and distracting. The genius of the touch wheel iPod was simplifying. MP3 players were either stick built around tiny flash chips with 8-10 buttons and poor navigation and the larger Rio players were Cd walkman castings with HDD shoved in and had 12-20 buttons with horribly primitive interfaces. Scroll wheel made the MP3 player actual usable.
It’s that mentality we are all hoping for. If apple jams an iPad Pro into the dashboard of a BMW, then yes, it’ll be a Tesla and it will fail. They have to identify the problem no one else is addressing and solve it. If they don’t, they should bother.
Isn’t Tesla about technology?
Mr. Ive’s value to Apple is substantial and he would not be easily replaced. Apple has a key man insurance policy on Mr. Ive. The insurance underwriter for this policy can specify certain actions to reduce risk. Using a chauffeur is a common condition.
Given recent product design faux-pas I thin kMr Ives is already out of the day-to-day Apple design process.
“It suggests that Project Titan will be a driverless vehicle, and Ive is gathering data on that experience.” wow, you’re really reaching here
For many people, 1-2 hours per day (commutes/errands/soccer) in a vehicle is typical. Think what you would do if you had that time as “free time.” An artist could draw, a student would study, a gamer would pay, and the rest of us would look for entertainment and conversation. The future with self driving cars will be about filling the free time.
Or in my case (legally blind) I could go wherever, whenever, I wanted without having to rely on public transportation, or the kindness of friends.
When they become available you’ll find me in line with check in hand.
The big difference is freeway driving vs city streets. I feel comfortable on the freeway with auto driving but there’s no way I’d let go of the wheel around town.
Driverless car? DO NOT WANT!
You will once you try it.
Not a chance. I LIKE driving, I’ve been driving for thirty three years. Ever just drive to see where the road takes you? I can just picture people sitting texting and playing Facebook games in the driverless car while it suggests commercially sponsored places to stop…. And don’t tell me it won’t happen.
Also these cars will be too expensive for the poor in both cost and upkeep. These cars would price people like me out of cars entirely and onto a filthy overcrowded bus. At least they can’t take diving away from motorcycles yet.
I bet you are one of those people who don’t understand why people like a manual transmission.
But, you, an enthusiast…are a dying race… in 50 years, when both you and me are dead. Manually driven cars will be prohibited – probaly earlier—. You will not be able to access public roads with them. And everybody will be perfectly happy about it. New things will coma, old things will disappear. That’s life.
And how much gas does a Bentley consume from San Fran to Cupertino and back? Hope the Apple car is more significantly more efficient.
It gets 15 MPG for city/highway. The trip from San Fran to Cupertino is 46.3 miles one way (92.6 miles round trip). That’s 6.17 gallons per day or 30.86 gallons per week, and 1,357.84 gallons/year (44 weeks).
By comparison a Prius gets 53 MPG city/highway and this annual trip would cost only 385 gallons, or 1/3 that of the Bentley.
After riding in a Prius for an hour, you will arrive to the office in a grumpy mood since those toy cars were not meant to be driven more than 5 miles. Get an used MB diesel if you want to save the planet.
Yeah, okay I’ll concede that Prius’ are not the definition of luxury. I guess I just expected Johnny to personally value efficiency in his private life more than this. More like the way Apple publicly values efficiency.
But then again it is a Bentley and I’m sure it brings plenty of comfort and joy.
And your average Lexus gets 22MPG on the freeway. Let’s not start a Bentley bash.
Why? Obviously because he can.
Not so obvious for a guy who LOVES to drive.
I want a Bentley and I will even drive it myself.
Saw him many times driving himself in his black bentley coming down 29th St in SF. Always thought is was a way too “comfy” care for a gear head…..
The Top Gear gentlemen love the Bentleys performance. They are heavy as tanks, but they have a ton of horsepower. Also British gear heads tend to have very different sensibilities then US gear heads. US tends to be 1/4 mile times and displacement. Brits tend to be more driving feel. Hence their love of true grand touring cars like the Astons, and not the muscle cars of the US or the garishness of something like a Lambo.
Leather and Wood…thought he hated all that lol