Clockwise from top left: Jony Ive’s New Yorker Portrait, the Bentley Ive prefers to drive, Apple designer Marc Newson, the concept car Newson designed for Ford

This week Apple managed to make the news twice. First, reports surfaced that the company was indeed working on a car, and second, The New Yorker had a profile on it’s star designer, Jony Ive.

News about the car was short on details. We learned that it would likely be electric, cost around 40,000 dollars, and drive with at least some degree of autonomy. News about Jony Ive was not short on details but because the writer interviewed Ive last fall and because Apple would prefer not to talk about it, we didn’t hear much about Apple’s automotive ambitions.

This isn’t to say we didn’t learn about cars from the article. Far from it, we repeatedly learned about cars as well as Ive’s taste in them. Apparently Ive is driven around in a Bentley Mulsanne, but when driving himself prefers a Bentley Brooklands. He also doesn’t like the Toyota Echo. One of Apple’s other designers, Julian Honig, previously worked at Lamboghini. Every summer Jony even goes with another Apple designer, Marc Newson, to a car festival in England where they watch old men drive old cars up a small hill.

For a story that makes no mention of an Apple car, the topic of cars seems to have a way of popping up. Perhaps Ian Parker saw or heard something else in Apple’s studio but couldn’t write about it. In other words, snippets about Apple designers being car guys could be clues as to what an Apple car might look like, or at least what an Apple car should look like.

How should an Apple car look? Well if Ive’s taste is any indication, it should look like a car. The article mentions Ive being in two different Bentleys, one of which is described as a car for a head of state and the other as having flat spaces with rounded edges, like an iPhone. Both of these are true but they miss the larger point, which is that neither car is Bentley’s most popular model by far, the Continental GT. That car shares its platform with a Volkswagen and an Audi, which also means that it is front wheel drive, or front wheel drive based all wheel drive.

Driving the front wheels as opposed to the rear ones leads to completely different proportions. The transmission must move from the back to the front, and to make room for this, the engine often sits sideways. This leads to a shorter hood with a larger overhang ahead of the front wheels. This also causes a blob like shape and moves the car away from its platonic “three box” ideal. The hated Toyota Echo is very much a front wheel drive car.

Ive’s fellow designer, Marc Newson, seems to share this sentiment about how a car should look. In the late 90’s Ford hired him to design a concept car. The result, called the Ford 021c, looked like a playful and miniaturized Dodge Charger from the 1960’s. The car’s edges were rounded and its sides striped of extra detail, but it very much retained that three-box shape.

But wait! Some reports have shown one more detail about the Apple car, that the mockups are said to resemble a minivan. This is where speculating becomes difficult and the minivan shape could mean lots of different things.

Apple designers probably don’t drive minivans themselves now, but Apple wouldn’t design what we consider to be a minivan. Electric motors are far smaller than gasoline motors and batteries are far larger than fuel tanks, and neither has really been used in cars on a serious scale. With designers being designers, they could be just be finding interesting ways to arrange space. They could stick the motors (yes, plural) by the wheels and use the battery as a thick kind of floor. Such placement could lead to a car that resembles a minivan from the outside.

A minivan shape could also mean something more sinister. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has gone a long way towards crafting a more worldly and inclusive company. Under him Apple has actually given to charity and adovates openly for causes. Such a warm and fuzzy company might not care for a classically shaped car. All that negative space wouldn’t work in “today’s growing cities” and the whole thing could seem a tad selfish. A car from the new Apple should be for people, not driving. After all, driving is serious business with lives and the environment at stake. Maybe design principles should take a back seat for once.

Such an outcome-the bad guys winning-wouldn’t be impossible. In the New Yorker article Ive seemed pretty frustrated about the iPhone’s raised camera.

In the coming years we will hear a bunch of facts about an Apple car but perhaps none is so important as which wheels drive it. If the back ones do, Ive won. If the front ones do, Cook won. If all of them do, it’s less clear. Perhaps the electric drivetrain is so revolutionary that the front wheel drive vs. rear wheel drive argument no longer makes sense and we, as mere mortals, cannot yet comprehend Apple’s latest product. If this is the case, then Apple won.