"Here's What It Cost Me To Own A Ferrari For A Year"

[frpeebles]

http://jalopnik.com/heres-what-it-cost-me-to-own-a-ferrari-for-a-year-1669923931

For those of you who scrolled down to the bottom looking for one final number, here it is: $8,500 in depreciation plus $4,629.81 in maintenance repairs for a grand total of $13,129.81. In other words: I paid about $1,100 per month to drive this car, or $39.90 per day, or $2.61 per mile

Really, that wasn't as much as I expected. It's 2600% more than my Honda but then again my Honda is somewhat less glorious.

Anyone care to admit a higher $/mi figure past or present?

[MrsPete]

Admittedly, I only read your two-line summary and I'm only a Honda driver, but I'm wondering if Ferraris don't need insurance and gas.  I'm guessing that those things would cost more in a Ferrari. 

[The_Dude]

He did disclose some of the other costs, such as insurance in the article.

If I add the insurance of $3K he paid and assume MPG of 11 per http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15604.shtml and a price per gallon of $3.5...

His cost per mile goes up to 3.52.  That is not cheap!

I'm not home to check quicken but I have a vehicle with a cost per mile that is probably north of $2 :/

[gimp]

I want an old one to work on... maybe I'll get one in a couple years. As you might guess, they cost a lot less; depreciation is zero, gas is gas, maintenance is cheap if you do the simple stuff yourself, insurance is cheap for collector cars.

I wouldn't want to see the depreciation for driving a new one off the lot, though.

[MrFancypants]

The entire series of articles following Doug DeMuro's Ferrari purchase are good and worth reading, particularly if you like cars.

It's interesting to see how his perceptions change through the course of ownership.

[Forcus]

I want an old one to work on... maybe I'll get one in a couple years. As you might guess, they cost a lot less; depreciation is zero, gas is gas, maintenance is cheap if you do the simple stuff yourself, insurance is cheap for collector cars.

I wouldn't want to see the depreciation for driving a new one off the lot, though.

Old, or older? I don't think old ones are that great. By old I mean 1990 or older. Slow (a new Mustang GT could eat any of them for lunch), extremely expensive to maintain except for a handful that are somewhat less expensive (308, etc.). I have thought from time to time of buying one (which I will never actually do) and the 348's and 360's are pretty "cheap" in comparison to others. I think it's because they used that same model for the Ferrari Challenge and other racing and there were lots made. But I think even the 348's had a lot of carryover from the 80's - sucky driving position, not that quick, dated interior, etc. The other bad thing is this type of car sits a lot. Hard on parts.

[gimp]

308, actually, is exactly what I want.

And believe me, I wouldn't be letting the car sit. I'd drive the fuck out of it. I wouldn't keep cars around like trophies. Not as a daily driver but all the time on weekends when going somewhere, you know? Probably 3k, maybe 5k miles a year.

[londonbanker]

I want an old one to work on... maybe I'll get one in a couple years. As you might guess, they cost a lot less; depreciation is zero, gas is gas, maintenance is cheap if you do the simple stuff yourself, insurance is cheap for collector cars.

I wouldn't want to see the depreciation for driving a new one off the lot, though.

Depreciation is minimal if you buy a 360. Maintenance will set you back $600 a year at any indy specialist, and depending how long you want to keep it, but you will have to spend 3k every 3 years on belts.
Reliability is actually v good on 360s so ad hoc repairs shud be minimal if you buyone that has been maintained properly frrom new.
Insurance will set you back 1-1.5k if used as a week end car.
So overall cost of ownership isnt as high as ppl think. The stigma is very bad... And not MMM at all

[Forcus]

308, actually, is exactly what I want.

And believe me, I wouldn't be letting the car sit. I'd drive the fuck out of it. I wouldn't keep cars around like trophies. Not as a daily driver but all the time on weekends when going somewhere, you know? Probably 3k, maybe 5k miles a year.

Someone liked Magnum PI as a kid.... lol. I used to hate that style but it's kind of grown on me. I don't know about actually driving one though.

[Bob W]

Better to buy a Corvette in the years and models that are still appreciating.  That way you can have your sports car cake and drive it too!

[gimp]

I don't like the look of the 360... especially not the cost.

I've actually never seen Magnum PI!

And what I am definitely gonna get in 2016 is a 67 fastback (or similar, I suppose, if I can't find one.) Buy a piece of shit and restore it. Not that I care, but those are certainly appreciating. If I ever get a 308 though, I will want one in decent condition... honestly, it would cost less in maintenance than my current car. (Though I would do my best to look for one with terrible paint - much cheaper, and I actually don't like Ferrari Red too much so I'd want to do something different, but I'd never strip off perfectly good red paint to do it.)

Someone at work has a 308 and it's gorgeous. (Someone else at work has a fleet of ferraris, one a big blue 430, so there are a lot of folks around here who could help with advice on pretty much any topic.)

[BlueHouse]

I used to date a car collector who kept 3 ferraris and 1 Aston Martin at his home. (Others were offsite).  When there weren't errands to run on Saturday mornings, we used to drive about 45 miles out of town to a place where they sold some kind of special gasoline. He'd fill it up and then we'd drive back. The gas tank would read about the same as it did when we left. I could never get my head around it. But then again, one of his cars cost more than my house mortgage at the time! 
I was driving a Toyota rav4 at the time and he had to borrow it a few times to haul things around. He refused to drive it and would make me drive.  Yup. Snob.

[greaper007]

My BIL was a mechanic at an independent shop that did a lot of European stuff.   He told me that Ferrari's and other exotics were a pain in the ass to work on.    Nothing was straight, parts were hard to get to and that they really weren't put together all that well.

[Guses]

I looked up the 308 on wikipedia and apparently, my recent entry level compact can do 0-60 in almost the same time despise having quite a few ponies less.

It's amazing how the average car has improved from the 1970-1980 to now.

[MrFancypants]

I looked up the 308 on wikipedia and apparently, my recent entry level compact can do 0-60 in almost the same time despise having quite a few ponies less.

It's amazing how the average car has improved from the 1970-1980 to now.

Yeah, but that's kind of missing the point.  Sure, a V-6 Camry is about as fast as a Ferrari 308, but sometimes it isn't only about making the scenery whiz by as fast as possible but about the experience of actually driving the car.

The Camry is only ever going to drive like a mundane, if perfectly competent, family sedan with a good amount of horsepower.  The Ferrari is going to give you a visceral experience that is not possible to be had in an entry level compact.

[gimp]

Greaper, you're not wrong. Which is why I'm looking at a model known for its mechanical simplicity. Not only that, but I can design the fuck out of an electrical system (especially an electronics system; electrical distribution is a little different) and I can fabricate my own parts if I need to. The last thing I want to do is buy a car I need to fix every other week (cough - jaguar.)

Guses, it's awesome, isn't it? My old-man car is faster than the fastest race cars from a couple generations ago. And more comfortable and more reliable. Progress rocks. Every feature in a $200k supercar today will be available, if it makes sense, in cars 30 years from now, along with features that blow $200k supercar features out of the water. (The 308 doesn't have, for example, bluetooth connectivity, which is a thing people love.) Features are very often introduced in limited production run cars for testing and fine-tuning. One thing you'll see a lot more is an electronic display dashboard - a standard LCD looks like shit but with the right display, you can get a natural look and great viewing angle, adding awesome things like color customizability (color-blind? select better colors! want to switch colors at night for easier viewing? sure!). One thing you see coming down in price today are paddle shifters, which let you drive like an auto for commutes and like a manual for fun... and, let's be real, shift way faster than you can do in a pure manual. And so on and so on.

Of course, nobody buys a 30-year-old junior-model supercar, currently costing less than an entry level compact, for speed. For me, it would be about the hobby of restoring and driving classic cars, learning a ton along the way, and having fun. And of course, the handling, the looks, the feel; these are things you don't get in an entry level compact. Don't get me wrong, I've driven a bunch of econoboxes, so I'm not talking out of my ass; most of them drive like crap, because their purpose is to get you from point A to B and nothing more. If that's all you want, you'd be crazy to buy something old and exotic.

[BlueMR2]

I looked up the 308 on wikipedia and apparently, my recent entry level compact can do 0-60 in almost the same time despise having quite a few ponies less.

It's amazing how the average car has improved from the 1970-1980 to now.

For sure.  The maintenance on a 308 will make a modern car look like a miracle of "non-maintenance" too.  I walked away from a $10,000 308 GTO a few years ago after looking up the maintenance requirements.  Lots of people can afford to buy Ferraris.  Few can afford to maintain/operate them...

[Guses]

Yes, I get all that you guys are saying. I was just flabbergasted to find out my car was faster. I was expecting a bit quicker from a Ferrari.

I understand the appeal of restoring a classic car.

My personal car fetish would be to do an electric conversion myself. But that is another story.

[paddedhat]

One thing that blew my mind about older Ferraris was the switchgear issues. I'm sure that some of the more knowledgeable folks will chime in, and correct me if I'm wrong, but some of these 80s and 90s units need thousands of dollars throw at the fact that all the dash switches are shot, and there are no cheap work arounds. Can't imagine owning a car that needs a $3-4K round of preventative maintenance on a regular basis and a few grand throw at fixing the dash since the electricals are shit.

[libertarian4321]

http://jalopnik.com/heres-what-it-cost-me-to-own-a-ferrari-for-a-year-1669923931

For those of you who scrolled down to the bottom looking for one final number, here it is: $8,500 in depreciation plus $4,629.81 in maintenance repairs for a grand total of $13,129.81. In other words: I paid about $1,100 per month to drive this car, or $39.90 per day, or $2.61 per mile

Really, that wasn't as much as I expected. It's 2600% more than my Honda but then again my Honda is somewhat less glorious.

Anyone care to admit a higher $/mi figure past or present?

MOD NOTE: LINK REMOVED PLAY NICE OR DON"T PLAY.

Oh, and if you buy one of the extenders above, and drive a more practical car, you will be much better equipped to carry groceries or lumber from Home Depot, while still saving 10's of thousands of dollars.

And yeah, I admit it, I don't "get it." 

[londonbanker]

The 308 is one of the worst car to maintain... Why do you think they are so cheap? Ferrari was not concerned about reliability ever until the worked on the 355.
360 is the most economical ferrari, ex the 430, but 430 still has a bit of a depreciation cost attached to it

[frpeebles]

http://jalopnik.com/heres-what-it-cost-me-to-own-a-ferrari-for-a-year-1669923931

For those of you who scrolled down to the bottom looking for one final number, here it is: $8,500 in depreciation plus $4,629.81 in maintenance repairs for a grand total of $13,129.81. In other words: I paid about $1,100 per month to drive this car, or $39.90 per day, or $2.61 per mile

Really, that wasn't as much as I expected. It's 2600% more than my Honda but then again my Honda is somewhat less glorious.

Anyone care to admit a higher $/mi figure past or present?

MOD NOTE: LINK REMOVED PLAY NICE OR DON"T PLAY.


Oh, and if you buy one of the extenders above, and drive a more practical car, you will be much better equipped to carry groceries or lumber from Home Depot, while still saving 10's of thousands of dollars.

And yeah, I admit it, I don't "get it."

MOD NOTE: RESPONSE REMOVED. ANY MORE UNIMAGINATIVE INSULTS AND THREAD WILL BE LOCKED

[MrFancypants]

Just as an FYI, there are much cheaper alternatives that will do the job:

https://www.smore.com/6sca-2014-s-top-penis-extenders-revealed

Oh, and if you buy one of the extenders above, and drive a more practical car, you will be much better equipped to carry groceries or lumber from Home Depot, while still saving 10's of thousands of dollars.

And yeah, I admit it, I don't "get it."

Yeah that's cool, but your recommendation doesn't help people who simply enjoy cars.  It is possible that people buy these things because they're looking for an enjoyable drive, rather than something to be used as a status symbol.  Read Doug DeMuro's past articles on this car and he's very articulate about differentiating between these two crowds in the Ferrari "scene."

If I were ridiculously wealthy I would probably have at least one Ferrari in the garage.  Not because I wanted people to know I was wealthy, but because I like cars.

[MoneyCat]

Why would people spend all that money on a Ferrari when the surgery to correct their problem would be so much cheaper?

[lithy]

We get it, you aren't a 'car person'.  Or maybe you have a particular brand aversion to Ferrari for some reason.  Unfortunately, your joke has already been made once in this thread.

Anyone who says that with an infinite supply of money and all the free time in the world but wouldn't own a Ferrari is either just not a person that thinks there is fun to be had in a car or lying.

I'll take an F40

[frpeebles]

Mykl, lithy, I hope you've enjoyed the following:

Ferrari F40 v Ferrari F50. Like You've Never Seen…: http://youtu.be/3MDTcXGsjuo

[londonbanker]

Besides the sound of the F40 which is nuts, i would take a 458 any day over the F40, from a performance and safety...
Amazing what technology does over 30years... Id even go as far as saying that the 458 is almost as good as the enzo (though i never personally tried an enzo... Unfortunately)

[lithy]

Mykl, lithy, I hope you've enjoyed the following:

Ferrari F40 v Ferrari F50. Like You've Never Seen…: http://youtu.be/3MDTcXGsjuo

That's a good video.  Though a bit too much talking for me.  ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YPabCzxMXM

londonbaker:  As for the 458, you're probably right as far as living with the car daily, and definitely right on the tech difference over 30 years, something which the earlier comment about how a 2014 Camry will keep pace with most any pre-1990 Ferrari.  Of course, you don't just drive older cars for the speed and the F40 just looks the part of nutter's track toy better than the 458.

One thing, to keep this thread relatively on topic.  When reading DeMuro's articles regarding the Ferrari as well as the Carmax Land Rover, I always noticed that he it completely unwilling to do his own work.  Now on a Ferrari, I understand major services being done at a dealer or reputable mechanic to keep the value up, but he was getting gouged at the dealer for piddly things like a battery.  There are definitely less anti-mustachian ways to own a pricy car.

Of course, and he admits it in the comments, all of his costs are tax deductible as business expenses.

[frpeebles]

Haha
Regular Car Reviews: 2012 Aston Martin V8 Vantage…: http://youtu.be/ilDx44g-VzA

[anisotropy]

Why would people spend all that money on a Ferrari when the surgery to correct their problem would be so much cheaper?

haha. the surgery is scary though, too much risk involved :P

on the other hand, to own a Ferrari for $25,000 a year doesn't seem to be that expensive :O

[MrFancypants]

Mykl, lithy, I hope you've enjoyed the following:

Ferrari F40 v Ferrari F50. Like You've Never Seen…: http://youtu.be/3MDTcXGsjuo

Oh yes, I am a fan of Chris Harris' work.  :)

[clifp]

Shortly out of college, I lived with some of my old college roommates, we all had tech jobs and after a few years had a decent amount of disposable income.

One roomie got a Toyota Supra, I got an Mazada RX-7, and the other guy a couple old year old 308. The funny thing was the guy who sold him the 308 was on his second Ferrari at the ripe of old age of 17 or 18.  To make matters right after my roomie got the 308, he found out it needed a new engine which I think was like 10-12K.  He did manage to convince the spoiled 17 year old to split 1/2 the cost.

[BlueMR2]

Besides the sound of the F40 which is nuts, i would take a 458 any day over the F40, from a performance and safety...
Amazing what technology does over 30years... Id even go as far as saying that the 458 is almost as good as the enzo (though i never personally tried an enzo... Unfortunately)

I'd take the F40 myself.  It's got plenty of performance as far as I'm concerned (I currently own a heavier car with less power and find it more than sufficient) and the road to 1200hp+ out of that engine is well traveled for those that have to spin the tires in every gear at any speed.  I explicitly don't want all the nanny-state safety garbage.  Just pure, life threatening, sportscar.  :-)

[frpeebles]

I like the way you think, BlueMR2.

When gen MR2? I've got a second gen Turbo that has a few near-kills to it's name.

[Forcus]

Yes, I get all that you guys are saying. I was just flabbergasted to find out my car was faster. I was expecting a bit quicker from a Ferrari.

I understand the appeal of restoring a classic car.

My personal car fetish would be to do an electric conversion myself. But that is another story.

If you really want a trip, the McLaren F1 supercar was considered for a long time to be the top supercar in the world, 0-60 in 3.2 seconds with all kinds of glorious mechanical noises and absolute violence. Cost about $1M new and prices used never went below that. A new Tesla Model S P85D at just over 100k goes 0-60 in 3.1 seconds without any violence whatsoever, just eyeball flattening acceleration. I am not an electric car fan but I really want one of these!!

As far as doing an electric conversion, DO IT! There's guys who have done that and some forums devoted to that too. There is a small cottage industry that takes the juicy bits from Prius' and puts them on a pallet so that you can basically mail order the important parts (obviously, system integration is up to you). I have a design I've been working on that looks a lot like the so-cal belly tank car (look it up) that I was going to use a 3 cylinder Ecoboost engine and standard trans in, but if I can make regenerative braking work in theory, I might get a pallet of Prius parts.

[BlueMR2]

When gen MR2? I've got a second gen Turbo that has a few near-kills to it's name.

Second gen just about to turn 273,000 miles...  :-)