Ferrari 458 Italia: One More Step in the Wrong Direction

I'll just come right out and say that having spent considerable time looking at one this summer, I think the Ferrari 458 Italia is just one more set of screw-ups to add to Ferrari's and Pininfarina's recent lists. It is so bad that, really, I am not even sure where to start so I guess I'll start at the front and work my way towards the back.

Firstly, the stupid little flexible wing things in the front grill…UGLY!!! I'm sure they have a superbly important aerodynamic purpose that makes the car 0.000001s faster in it's 0-60 time and all of those little fractions of seconds spread throughout the car add up to a big difference. If this were the Enzo, I would almost definitely excuse the unsightly blemish as a necessary evil working towards the greater good of becoming the top performing car available. However, it is not the Enzo and it is not competing to be the top performing car on the market. Therefore, the stupid little wing things should have been left off the car and replaced by something nicer looking.

Next, the lines on this car are way too numerous, confusing, and over-the-top. I absolutely love the line that curves down along the door from just below the mirror to just below the door handle. I also like the line that comes and meets it from the rear of the car. It makes the whole car look hunched up and ready to pounce. I have no problem with a Ferrari looking that way. I also don't mind at all how the hunched up back end makes the whole cockpit area look pushed to the front. It takes on a bit more of the F1 style racing feel without going all out to the Enzo design.

 However, I don't like the second hunch line above and inward from the first line I talked about. Why are there two lines when the visual effect could and already is done by only one line? It looks like they decided they needed that air intake after the car was already designed and they had to find a way to fit it in without completely redesigning the car. I'm guessing that it didn't actually happen that way, but they managed to still make it look like they screwed up in designing the car even though they didn't.

I also hate the lines on the mirror. Was it just too hard to find a good looking mirror design that was a kind of classic oval shape maybe with one line splitting it in half or something? Apparently that would have been too simple for their tastes or something. So instead of doing something that looked nice, they used something with two lines up the stalk, a mirror head that looks like a pedestal with half of an egg sitting on top of it. Why is that horizontal line in the mirror? It just looks stupid!

The last disgusting element of this car that I'm going to spend time whining about here is the rear wing-looking thing. I am quite sure that the whole shelf-looking piece between the tail lights does not move. Which is perfectly fine except that it looks like it should be some kind of pop-up spoiler or something. It looks like they couldn't decide between putting a spoiler on the car or not putting a spoiler on it, so they compromised by putting a spoiler-shaped body piece between the tail lights. It looks like something out of a transformers movie that should pop up and wings should pop out from under the doors and the car becomes a jet! Ridiculous is the word that comes to mind!

There are definitely parts of the car that are very cool and modern looking and I think are great styling pieces. There are also, obviously, parts that I can't stand. Unfortunately, it seems to me that even the parts I like, don't all work together in the way one would expect from Pininfarina. It looks to me like the car is way too much of Pininfarina adding some styling around the performance and aerodynamics that Ferrari already decided on. It seems to me that the priorities were in the wrong places when this car was built. I would suggest that the other option is that Pininfarina is going downhill except that I think the New Stratos looks absolutely amazing!