New Ferrari Amalfi Revealed... Complete with Buttons!

Sit down. Strap in. And prepare yourself for some genuinely good news from Maranello, because it seems — after a brief detour into lunacy — Ferrari has stopped sniffing glue.

They’ve launched a new car. It’s called the Amalfi, presumably because “Bipolar Touchpad V8 Battery Roulette” didn’t roll off the tongue. And for the first time in what feels like a decade, it comes with… drumroll… actual, real, physical buttons on the steering wheel.

Yes. Buttons you can press. With fingers. Like a normal human being. I know. I’m emotional too.

You see, for years now Ferrari has been on a mission to turn their steering wheels into something between a PlayStation controller and a haunted Ouija board. Want to heat your posterior? Better brush your thumb across that barely-there haptic nub. Want to turn on the wipers? That’ll be the swipey-sensory-witchcraft-thingy that may or may not activate the horn. And if you’re lucky, the lights might come on. Or the car might launch into orbit. No one knows.

The haptic era was Ferrari’s equivalent of drunk texting your ex. You know it’s a bad idea, everyone else knows it’s a bad idea, and yet - somehow - you still end up pressing something you didn’t mean to and being screamed at for three hours.

The worst was the haptic start button. Oh, you thought your car was off? How adorable. That soft little pretend button didn’t always register. So the car would silently sit there, sulking and on, slowly draining itself of power until you came back three days later and found your £350,000 dream machine was now a £350,000 brick.

But now - hallelujah - someone at Ferrari has either sobered up, been shouted at, or been attacked by a mob of angry owners wielding charging cables. Because the Amalfi has real switches. Chunky, solid, clicky ones. The kind you can operate with gloves. Or while turning. Or while doing 130mph through a tunnel and singing Nessun Dorma.

And the start button? An actual push button. One you can press and feel. No more stroking the dashboard like it’s a shy cat in the hope the car might wake up. No more black magic rituals just to turn the thing off.

And here’s the cherry on top: Ferrari has confirmed that if you already own one of the haptic-nightmare cars, you can upgrade to the new steering wheel. Which is wonderful news. Until you remember this is Ferrari. So the steering wheel alone will probably cost more than your house, and that’s before someone named Giacomo spends four days programming it to speak to the car.

You’ll get a bill that reads something like this:

• Steering wheel - £9,000
• Fitting - £2,500
• Special Amalfi screw you didn’t ask for - £312
• Coffee while you waited - £40
• Emotional recovery fee - £1,200

Still, worth every penny not to have to explain to your wife why the indicators only work if Mercury is in retrograde and you’re wearing a mood ring.

So bravo, Ferrari. You’ve finally remembered that drivers have hands. And fingers. And that sometimes, the best tech isn’t the newest - it’s the stuff that actually works.

Now, if you could just bring back the gated manual gearbox…