http://www.carscoops.com/2017/02/new-lawsuit-claims-ferrari-allowed.html Ferrari has been accused of allowing illegal odometer rollbacks in a bombshell lawsuit from a former dealership employee. suing Ferrari of Palm Beach, a dealership and a wealthy client after he says he was wrongfully terminated from his position due to age discrimination reasons and after discovering the dealer’s rollback practice. He alleges that Ferrari’s DEIS Tester diagnostic tool allowed the dealership to roll back the odometers of customer cars so they could be sold for a higher sum. It is reported that Ferrari itself had to authorize any actions using the DEIS Tester and was therefore aware of the rollback scheme. In the lawsuit, Root also says that a former client, retired Sara Lee chief executive Steven McMillan, payed off a dealership employee to roll back the odometer of his car. The Daily Mail says by winding the odometer of the vehicle back to 0, the value of the LaFerrari hypercar increased by over $1 million. The lawsuit makes specific mention of a policy from Ferrari itself which instructs its technicians on how to perform a rollback. “The Ferrari entities published a written policy manual dating back to at least April 2010 specifically detailing how to perform an odometer rollback and expressly authorizing its use. Upon information and belief, this Ferrari policy was used at the Ferrari factory in Italy as recently as March 2015 to instruct Ferrari technicians how to reset to “0" the odometer on a Ferrari vehicle,” it is alleged. In a statement, Ferrari of Palm Beach attorney Jason Kairalla said “The dealership does not litigate in the newspaper. Of course, we believe this case is wholly without merit and will be vigorously defended in court.”
I truly doubt the veracity of this story. If u click on the link, it goes to an unrelated lawsuit. surf
This story came up in the wrongful termination suit - the suit is not about the rollback. My understanding of the situation is Ferrari has used this option/tool in the past to placate owners who were delivered "brand-new" cars. Customers were complaining that between testing/delivery they were receiving new cars with up to 15 miles on the odometer, so they rolled back those miles. It's possible this feature was abused by dealers without explicit knowledge from Ferrari about how this was being used. I don't know if this is true or not but that context makes more sense than Ferrari knowingly allowing an owner to reset the clock at the 30K mile service....then again there's documented stories of Enzo himself providing new cars to customers using old serial numbers so they could avoid paying taxes on the new car.
One has to know that every single Ferrari is being tested and calibrated on Ferrari's own Fiorano circuit right next to the Maranello factory. This is a necessary thing that takes time. Problem is that you american guys expect a new car being a "virgin" with ZERO miles ... But no new car can be delivered with zero miles on it - impossible. If one of Ferrari's great test drivers has taken YOUR new Ferrari for a ride in Fiorano - it's a good thing - he did it for YOU.
On "common" Ferraris like the 458, it's possible to get away with this as long as the rollback isn't major. E.g., rolling from 8000 to 7000. But a minor rollback like that won't alter the car's value much so it's not worth it. A larger rollback would be caught during inspection: An odometer that's rolled back from 30,000 to 5,000 would be obvious because the seats, steering wheel, pedals, etc, show excessive wear. Further, a car with 5,000 would be on the original tires (tires have a mfr date stamp). On ultra-exotics like LaFerrari..... Those cars are so rare that each individual car is known in the market. No way you could roll back, say from 15,000 to 1,000 and get away with it. If you tried that and got caught (which is likely), the entire world of buyers would blacklist you. The exotic car market is a small world. People know each other