Ferrari 849 Testarossa
HMI Design
Flavio Manzoni, Design Director, Ferrari Style Centre
Ferrari 849 Testarossa HMI Details
The 849's cabin is an argument continued from the SF90, not a fresh sentence. Manzoni's team keeps the "single-seater cockpit" idea, a horizontal dashboard wrapped around the driver and the most Ferrari-ish move in the whole car is what *isn't* there: no central touchscreen. Where almost every rival now plants a slab of glass in the middle of the dash, the 849 leaves the centre to a sculpted architecture of "sails" and a floating aluminium shift gate lifted, in spirit and detail, from the F80 hypercar. The gate is the emotional centre of the cabin a nod to the open metal gates of Ferrari's manual era, rendered here as pure sculpture around a PHEV's drive selector.
Materially it splits by intent. Standard cars lean GT: more leather, soft-touch surfaces, hand-finished aluminium. The Assetto Fiorano package strips it back to carbon-fibre door panels and carbon seats with separate cushions and just enough Alcantara to keep it civil. There is a genuine door-handle-as-speaker detail, an aluminium woofer integrated into the door panel that doubles as the pull-cap which is the kind of thing you only do when the interior is being treated as a designed object rather than an assembly of parts.
The thing the interior is arguing for is focus. This is a 1,050 PS plug-in hybrid that will crack 100 km/h in under 2.3 seconds, and the cabin is organised so that everything the driver needs is on the wheel or in the cluster directly ahead, and everything else is deliberately out of the primary sightline. Whether you find that purist or merely stubborn is the central question of the car.
Ergonomics
This is where the 849 earns its place in a gallery about screens by taking some away. The headline: Ferrari has reinstated physical buttons on the steering wheel, including a proper mechanical red start switch, after half a decade of near-universal criticism of the SF90-era capacitive wheel. Reviewers have been unusually direct, one described welcoming "the end of infuriating haptic controls that only seemed to work every third Tuesday." The indicators, the horn, the start button: things you operate by feel, at speed, with adrenaline up, are tactile again. This is the correct decision and it is worth stating plainly, because it is Ferrari conceding that the touch-everything experiment made the car worse to use.
The nuance: the eManettino stays a haptic-style control, managing the drive and hybrid modes. So Ferrari hasn't renounced touch entirely, it has drawn a line between the controls you glance at when settled (modes) and the controls you must hit blind in the moment.
From the driver's seat the 16in curved cluster sits high and close behind the wheel, filling the primary sightline, the readout you race by is where your eyes already are. The passenger's 8.8in display is a genuine novelty, well executed, feeding speed, revs and g-data to the person who otherwise just holds on; it is fun and it is also, honestly, a little gimmicky. The recurring criticism is that with no central screen, some functions get bounced onto the cluster or the wheel and toggling between the various functions is still a little clunky, the price of the no-central-screen purity is that the cluster has to do more jobs than one display comfortably should.
The interface
Architecturally the 849 divides the work between two screens and a set of wheel controls, with no central hub. The 16in curved HD cluster is the whole show for the driver: configurable through the wheel, it carries the tachometer, the hybrid power/charge information, navigation and media, and switches character with the eManettino. The 8.8in passenger display is a satellite, mirroring performance data to the left seat. Apple CarPlay is supported, which is itself telling with no central screen, phone projection has to live in the driver's cluster real estate, which is part of why the interaction can feel busy.
Notable features and interactions
The transferable idea here is the split between haptic and physical by risk, not by aesthetics — buttons for the blind-operated safety-critical controls, a haptic dial for the considered mode changes. It is the most grown-up answer yet to the touch-versus-buttons war, and it comes from the brand that arguably started the fight. The passenger display is a nice piece of theatre that costs the driver nothing. The floating aluminium gate is proof that a physical control can be pure emotion even when it's controlling a dual-clutch hybrid rather than a manual.
The thing to be wary of is the flip side of the no-central-screen dogma: when the cluster is the only screen, it inherits navigation, media, phone and car settings on top of its core job of showing you how fast the engine and motors are spinning, and the reported "clunky" toggling is the symptom. Purity has a usability tax, and the 849 pays some of it.
Verdict
The 849 Testarossa is the most quietly important HMI story of its year precisely because it moves backwards in the places that matter. Ferrari looked at the reception of the SF90's cabin, a car people loved to drive and were frustrated to operate and reversed the specific decisions that caused the frustration, without abandoning the bigger idea. The no-central-screen, driver-wrapped cockpit survives; the capacitive wheel does not. That is a mature act of iteration, and it is a useful counter-signal in an industry that has spent a decade assuming more touchscreen is always progress.
What it gets right: the return of hard controls where your hands work blind, the discipline to keep the driver's information in the driver's sightline, and an interior that still treats itself as sculpture — the gate, the sails, the speaker-handle. What it gets wrong, or at least what it hasn't solved: a single cluster carrying every job will always feel busier than a two-screen split, and the honest reviews say so.
Where automotive HMI is going, the 849 is a signpost worth heeding: the pendulum on physical controls has begun to swing back, and it is the performance brands the ones whose customers actually use the controls at the limit.
HMI Gallery
Image source: ferrari.com/en-EN/media-centre & Kyle Cheromcha | The Drive
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HMI Gallery is a collection of case studies showcasing the features, functionality, fonts and iconography of digital interface design in high performance vehicles.
Curated by Ben Morris
Digital Creative