Low Mileage Ferrari? Maybe Not (Video)
There are legitimate reasons for rolling back an odometer, but getting more money for your car isn’t one of them.
Remember last year when allegations of Ferrari odometer rollbacks started to swirl? You know, with more legitimacy than every car guy in California with a big turbo kit that “knows a smog guy”. We spent a lot of money on smog checks and never met a guy who was willing to do a shady smog. But that’s neither here nor there, let’s get back to those suspiciously low-mileage supercars. Rob Ferretti of the superspeedersRob YouTube channel put together a video about odometer rollbacks, including his personal experience having one reset.
First off, there is technically a legitimate set of circumstances that merit the existence of such a device. Ferretti, who created those compilation videos of people getting pulled over before YouTube was a thing, has owned more than a few Ferraris. He also owns an exotic car rental company, which was the source of his legitimate odometer rollback story. But first, how in the heck does someone roll back an odometer? Well, for Ferrari at least, the deed was done with FULL factory knowledge. The factory issued an electronic authorization for every single incident the software was used to change the odometer. Now, as Ferretti mentions, this doesn’t preclude a technician lying to Ferrari to roll back the odometer on a customer’s car to save them a few bucks on the lease return or make them far more on the sale of a “low” mileage vehicle.
“It’s my estimation that at least half of all exotic cars are rolled back,” Ferretti says. “How do you protect yourself? You go get your car checked out and get it PPI’d and make sure the wear is consistent, the use is consistent.”
ALSO SEE: Ferrari in Hot Water Over Odometer Rollback Allegations
What about Ferretti’s rolled back odometer? The first Ferrari he ever got, a Euro-spec 360, had a peculiar problem. When you jumped it incorrectly the voltage would screw up the gauge cluster. They rented the car to a guy, who jump-started it “obviously wrong”. It came back with 5s across the entire cluster and reading in kilometers instead of miles. “We took it into the dealer, they did the calculations, and they reset the odometer to what it was supposed to be. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
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