DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJune 25, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

Luxeed claimed a Ferrari designer. Ferrari asked who.

Luxeed teased its new RX this month with a line meant to settle the argument before anyone could start it. The brand — Huawei's software and electronics married to Chery's engineering, sold under the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance — said a "former Ferrari chief designer" had styled the car, with chassis tuning help borrowed from BMW and Aston Martin. It was a single sentence engineered to do an enormous amount of work: turn a closed-grille coupe-SUV with a roof LiDAR pod into something with Maranello in its blood.

Ferrari declined to play along. Ingrid Sun, the company's PR director for Greater China, replied in public with the only question that mattered: what is the name of this former Ferrari chief designer? The post was deleted shortly after, but the internet had already done the arithmetic. Ferrari has had exactly one design chief since 2010 — Flavio Manzoni — and his chair has never been vacant. "Former Ferrari chief designer" is, on the available evidence, a job that has not opened up in sixteen years.

This is the part worth slowing down for, because it is not really a story about one brand fibbing on a spec sheet. It is a story about what happens when a design cannot carry its own weight, so the marketing borrows a reputation to carry it instead.

Look at the RX on its own terms and the anxiety is visible. Five metres long, a fully smooth front fascia, an L-shaped light signature, a three-section lower intake and an aggressive rear diffuser that lands the car squarely in Purosangue comparison territory. It is a competent, fashionable shape. What it is not is a shape that announces who made it. So the brand reached for a pedigree it could attach by press release — and chose, of all the names available, the one name it apparently could not actually say out loud.

That is the tell. A real design credential is specific. It has a person attached, a portfolio you can name, a line of decisions you can trace from one car to the next. The moment a brand has to describe its designer by the building he supposedly left rather than by anything he drew, the credential has already collapsed into atmosphere. "Ex-Ferrari" is not a design language. It is a smell the company is hoping wafts off the bodywork.

Design chiefs know the difference better than anyone, because they live on the other side of it. Authority over a form is earned in the concept phase — in the hundreds of small, defensible decisions about proportion, stance, surface and signature that make a car legibly itself before a single badge goes on. A Purosangue looks like a Ferrari with the badges removed. The test of the RX is whether it would look like a Luxeed with the badges removed, and the brand's own behaviour suggests it suspects the answer is no.

There is a cheaper-than-Ferrari lesson in here for everyone building in the concept-rich, identity-poor middle of the market. You cannot rent conviction. A borrowed résumé buys a week of headlines and then evaporates the instant someone asks a follow-up question — as Ferrari just demonstrated, with one sentence, before deleting it. What survives that question is design that can explain itself: this stance because of this brief, this signature because of this lineage, this surface because of this decision and not the other one.

That is the unglamorous work the press release was trying to skip. It is also exactly the work that pays off, because it is the only kind of credibility a competitor cannot challenge on social media. At DEPIX we spend our time helping teams make those concept-phase decisions defensible — testing whether a form actually says what the brand wants it to say, long before anyone is tempted to claim a designer they can't name. The RX may well be a good car. But "trust us, a Ferrari guy did it" is not a design language. It is the absence of one, dressed for the reveal.