While Jony Ive Chases Ferraris, Julian Hoenig Is Thinking Smaller — and Smarter
The design world has been buzzing about Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple chief design officer who recently made headlines for his involvement with Ferrari and his new creative venture, LoveFrom. But another Apple veteran is quietly making waves in an entirely different space — one that may ultimately touch far more everyday lives. Julian Hoenig, a longtime Apple designer, has set his sights on something far more grounded than supercars: the golf cart.
It might sound unglamorous at first. But if there is one thing Apple's design culture taught its alumni, it is that the most transformative innovations often begin with the products people overlook. And few products have been overlooked quite as thoroughly as the short-range electric vehicle.
Who Is Julian Hoenig?
Julian Hoenig spent years inside Apple's famously secretive design studio, contributing to some of the most influential consumer products of the modern era. Like many designers who passed through that environment, he absorbed a philosophy that goes far beyond aesthetics — one that treats every detail of a user's experience as a deliberate, considered choice.
After leaving Apple, Hoenig has been channeling that same design-first mindset into a new arena: short-range mobility. His vision is rooted in the belief that the vehicles people use for short, local trips — across campuses, resorts, retirement communities, airports, and neighborhoods — deserve the same level of thoughtful design attention that Apple brought to the smartphone.
In a landscape dominated by utilitarian, decades-old golf cart designs that prioritize function at the expense of almost everything else, that is a radical proposition.
The Problem With Today's Golf Carts
To understand why Hoenig's work matters, it helps to look honestly at the current state of short-range electric vehicles. The golf cart market has remained largely stagnant in terms of design language for a very long time. Most models look and feel like industrial equipment that happens to have a seat — clunky, loud in their own way, and carrying none of the joy or sophistication that modern consumers have come to expect from the technology in their pockets.
Yet these vehicles are everywhere. They ferry passengers through airports and theme parks. They carry workers across large warehouses and corporate campuses. They move residents around retirement communities and resort properties. The global electric golf cart market is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it is growing steadily as more communities embrace low-speed electric transportation as a sustainable alternative to cars for short trips.
The opportunity, in other words, is enormous — and it has been hiding in plain sight.
Thinking Different About Short-Range Mobility
Hoenig's approach borrows the core principles that made Apple products so compelling: radical simplicity, deep attention to the user experience, and a refusal to accept that something must look a certain way simply because it always has. He is applying that lens to a category of vehicle that most designers have never seriously considered.
The result is a vision for short-range rides that feels genuinely new. Rather than treating the golf cart as a stripped-down car or a glorified warehouse vehicle, Hoenig envisions it as its own distinct product — one designed from the ground up for the specific context in which it operates. That means rethinking the seating arrangement, the interface through which a driver interacts with the vehicle, the materials used throughout, and the overall visual identity of the machine.
In the same way that Apple reimagined the phone not as a smaller computer but as an entirely new kind of personal device, Hoenig is pushing for a golf cart that does not feel like a lesser version of something else, but rather like a fully realized product in its own right.
Why This Moment Matters for Micro-Mobility
The timing of Hoenig's work is not accidental. Micro-mobility — the category of small, low-speed vehicles designed for short urban and suburban trips — is having a genuine cultural moment. Cities around the world are experimenting with car-free zones. Corporations are investing in sustainable campus transportation. Resort developers are looking for premium experiences that align with growing environmental consciousness among their guests.
Consumers, meanwhile, have been trained by a decade-plus of beautifully designed technology to expect more from every product they interact with. The bar has been raised across the board, and the short-range vehicle market has not kept pace.
That gap is exactly where a designer with Hoenig's background can make an outsized impact.
Design as Competitive Advantage
One of the clearest lessons from Apple's history is that design is not decoration — it is strategy. Companies that invest seriously in design create products that command premium pricing, inspire customer loyalty, and generate the kind of word-of-mouth that no advertising budget can fully replicate. There is little reason why those dynamics could not apply to the golf cart market just as powerfully as they do to consumer electronics.
Sustainability and Style Together
Hoenig's vision also aligns naturally with the push toward cleaner, lower-impact transportation. Short-range electric vehicles are inherently efficient. A well-designed version of one could make sustainable transport feel aspirational rather than obligatory — a distinction that matters enormously for mainstream adoption.
The Bigger Picture
While the world watches Jony Ive operate at the glamorous intersection of luxury and high performance, Julian Hoenig is doing something arguably more democratically significant. He is asking whether the ordinary, overlooked vehicles that move millions of people through their daily lives might deserve a moment of genuine creative ambition.
If his Apple-trained instincts are as transferable as they appear to be, the answer could reshape an entire industry — one quiet, short-range ride at a time.