Ferrari’s first electric car was always going to be a big moment. But no one expected the dashboard to steal the show. Yet here we are: the Ferrari Luce – the brand’s first all-electric model – is making headlines not just for its powertrain, but for a wild, layered OLED cockpit built in partnership with Samsung Display.

In a move that says a lot about where car interiors are heading, Samsung Display has confirmed it is the exclusive supplier of four OLED panels for the Luce’s cabin, covering the driver’s binnacle, central controls, and rear passenger interface. It’s not just “screens in a Ferrari” – it’s a deliberate attempt to blend analogue emotion with digital flexibility, and it might be one of the most interesting display experiments in any production car right now.

At the heart of that experiment is the driver’s binnacle, which is genuinely unlike anything else on the road. Ferrari and Samsung have stacked two OLED panels on top of each other – a 12-inch display at the bottom, and a slightly larger 12.9-inch panel floating above it. The lower OLED handles the basics: background graphics, gauge indexes, and core driving data that you’d normally find on a digital cluster. The upper OLED, meanwhile, has three precisely cut circular openings that reveal parts of the panel below, using those windows for analogue-style dials while the surrounding area displays things like torque-shift indicators, pop-ups, and telltales.

This is where it gets really clever. Between those two OLED layers, Ferrari has kept physical mechanical hands – actual moving needles – that sweep across the “depth” created in the space between the panels. Instead of a flat UI pretending to be an old-school gauge, you get real needles moving in front of a live, customizable digital background, which gives the cluster a sense of dimensionality you don’t usually see in modern EVs. It’s a neat answer to a complaint many enthusiasts have about current interiors: screens are flexible, but they rarely feel tactile or emotionally rich. Here, Ferrari and Samsung are trying to have it both ways.

Technically, achieving this layered cluster is much harder than it looks in photos. To make the openings in that upper OLED, Samsung relied on its HIAA (Hole in Active Area) technology – essentially a way to carve openings directly into the display’s active area without ruining picture quality. On smartphones, HIAA is usually used for small punch-hole camera cutouts under 5mm in diameter; in the Luce, the main opening for the mechanical hands is around 100mm across, roughly 20 times larger than a typical phone camera hole. That’s a big deal electrically: you need to route signals around the gap without distorting the image or introducing lag, and you have to protect the exposed organic materials at the cut edges from moisture and air.

Samsung says it uses sophisticated Thin Film Encapsulation (TFE) around those edges to keep the OLED stack sealed, while carefully rerouting driving signals around the “big hole” so the panel still looks uniform. The result is a display that behaves like a single, continuous panel, even though there’s a literal window cut out of its center and mechanical hardware living in the space. It’s not just a party trick; it’s a proof-of-concept that you can sculpt OLEDs into more interesting shapes than simple rectangles without compromising stability.

Beyond the headline-grabbing binnacle, Samsung’s panels are spread across three distinct zones inside the Luce. Up front, there’s the driver’s cluster and the central control panel; further back, a smaller display sits in the rear console for passengers. Across those zones, Samsung is supplying four different OLED sizes: 12.9-inch and 12-inch panels for the layered binnacle, a 10.1-inch display for the center console, and a 6.3-inch panel for the rear climate and info screen. It’s a full-cabin approach where one display supplier shapes the entire digital experience rather than just dropping in a single screen.

The center control panel might not look as dramatic as the binnacle at first glance, but it quietly reinforces Ferrari’s “tactile-first” design philosophy for the Luce. At the top of this panel is a digital multigraph – essentially a small, dedicated section that can show a clock, stopwatch, or compass – and, just like in the cluster, physical mechanical hands are mounted through tiny perforations in the OLED. These hands rotate 360 degrees, driven by real hardware behind the display, giving you a physical pointer over a dynamic digital face. It’s a subtle way of saying: yes, this is a screen, but it still behaves like an object you can intuitively understand without hunting through menus.

Rear passengers get a 6.3-inch OLED tucked into the back of the center console, giving access to climate controls and core driving information without turning the rear area into a giant entertainment wall. It’s restrained by modern luxury EV standards, but that restraint fits Ferrari’s decision to avoid the huge tablet-style displays dominating many premium cabins. Instead of chasing “more inches,” the Luce is going for smarter inches – smaller screens, carefully placed, doing specific jobs.

That restraint is intentional. Long before the full car was revealed in Italy, Ferrari had already started talking about the Luce’s interior as a “tactile-first” environment designed in collaboration with Jony Ive and his LoveFrom collective. The idea was to push back against the trend of all-glass, all-touch interiors, where basic tasks like adjusting the temperature or changing drive modes require digging through layers of UI. In the Luce, tactile knobs and physical switches coexist with the OLED displays, offering redundancy and giving drivers more ways to interact than just tapping on glass.

Samsung’s OLED implementation fits neatly into that philosophy. Rather than turning the dashboard into one huge, continuous slab, the displays are processed into freeform shapes that integrate closely with the surrounding binnacle modules. OLED’s lack of a separate backlight unit and its thin construction let Samsung and Ferrari pull off distinctive profiles, combining straight lines and curves without the thickness penalties of LCD. It makes the display feel less like a bolted-on tablet and more like part of the architecture of the interior.

Crucially, this collaboration is not just a design flex – it is a strategic statement for Samsung Display. The company has been talking up automotive OLED for a few years, showing prototypes like multi-laminated cockpit displays and flexible center fascia panels at events like IAA Mobility. It even introduced a dedicated automotive OLED brand, emphasizing design differentiation, robustness, safety features, visual quality, and scalable sizes as key pillars for car makers. Landing Ferrari’s first EV as a showcase customer gives Samsung exactly the kind of halo project it wants as more brands rethink their in-car UX.

In recent statements, Samsung has framed the Luce as a “milestone” collaboration that demonstrates OLED’s ability to support almost any design OEMs can imagine, from big hole cutouts to freeform outlines. The company says it now holds more than 500 patents related to HIAA technology, which gives it a defensible edge in building displays with holes formed directly inside the active area – a capability that’s suddenly relevant far beyond smartphone selfie cameras. If multi-layer stacks like the Luce’s cluster catch on, HIAA-like processes could become table stakes for premium cockpits.

For Ferrari, the stakes are different. The Luce is not just another model; it’s the brand’s first fully electric production car, expected to sit at the very top of the luxury EV market with a price reportedly north of €500,000 and deliveries planned from late 2026 into 2027. Under the skin, it packs a four-motor drivetrain delivering over 1,100 horsepower, a 122kWh battery pack running at 880 volts, and performance figures that put it firmly in hyper-EV territory: around 2.5 seconds from 0 to 62mph and a top speed near 193mph. The interior, then, has to sell not only comfort and luxury, but also the sense that this car is technologically ahead of anything Ferrari has done before.

Against that backdrop, the OLED story carries more weight. Instead of adopting the giant, wide-format curved panels we’ve seen in cars from Mercedes, BMW, and others, Ferrari is signaling that “premium” doesn’t have to mean “more glass, bigger display.” The multi-layer binnacle, with its mechanical hands and deep-set graphics, reads as a modern interpretation of classic Ferrari instrumentation rather than a clean break from the past. It leans into nostalgia, but it does it with cutting-edge display engineering.

There’s also a user-experience angle here that shouldn’t be overlooked. One common criticism of digital clusters is that they can be visually noisy, especially when they’re asked to serve as navigation displays, performance dashboards, notification centers, and settings menus all at once. By physically separating some functions – and giving critical information analog-like treatment via real needles – the Luce’s layout can help your brain parse what matters at a glance. The layered design literally creates foreground and background planes, which developers can use to prioritize data more intelligently than just changing font weights on a flat screen.

From an industry perspective, the Luce also sends a message about the direction of high-end interiors beyond Ferrari. The fact that a flagship EV with Jony Ive’s name attached has chosen carefully integrated, multi-layer OLEDs instead of a wall of glass suggests that design and UX teams at other automakers will feel more confident pushing back on the “iPad on wheels” aesthetic. Samsung, meanwhile, gets to show that its OLED tech is flexible enough to support that shift – that it can disappear into the car when needed, rather than demanding to be the star of the show.

There are obvious questions, of course. Multi-layer stacks are more complex than single-panel clusters, both in terms of manufacturing and long-term reliability. Automakers already obsess over backlight bleed, uniformity, and condensation behind gauges; now they have to worry about alignment between panels, durability of mechanical hands in a tiny cavity, and serviceability if something goes wrong. But if any environment is going to stress-test a concept like this, it’s a limited-production, ultra-high-end EV where customers expect – and pay for – something genuinely different.