Ferrari Has Been Accused Of Odometer Fraud In North America

Ferrari dealers in North America have reportedly been tampering with the mileage readouts on used cars.

As part of a lawsuit being filed by a disgruntled ex-employee (sounds familiar…), an internal Ferrari memo from April 2017 seems to confirm that Ferrari knew what that a specific piece of workshop equipment known as the DEIS tester was being used to reduce cars’ mileages – potentially adding thousands onto the forecourt price.

Bud Root, a former Ferrari salesman, says he was fired after discovering the cheating going on, and claims that Ferrari headquarters knew all along what was going on because they themselves had to provide unique access codes in order for dealers to reset odometers.

However, Ferrari claims that the tool wasn’t able to reset mileages once the subject car’s odometer passed 311 miles (500km).

The suit has been filed to a court in Palm Beach, Florida, one of the states where mileage tampering is most severely punishable. The key document is the memo, dated April last year, which reads:

“Officially, as of today, Ferrari SpA will no longer supply the DEIS access codes for the NQS ECU reset cycle to Ferrari Technical Service Departments.

“By May 15, 2017, Ferrari SpA will release a software update for the DEIS tester that includes removing this cycle. This update will cancel any item/paragraph regarding the above NQS ECU reset procedure from the tester.”

Ferrari North America’s director of communications, Krista Florin, said that the company had done nothing wrong. In a reply to the Daily Mail she said:

“Resetting an odometer to zero in case of a malfunction of the odometer when the pre-repair mileage is unknown is consistent with the federal odometer law. What the DEIS tool is allowed to do with respect to the odometer was therefore permitted under U.S. law.

“Ferrari determined that the risks of odometer fraud in the United States from unauthorized use of the DEIS tool outweighed the convenience of this functionality of the tool, and thus, Ferrari has informed its network with a technical bulletin that a software update to eliminate the odometer reset functionality of the DEIS tool was necessary and disabled this functionality.”

We’ve reached out to Ferrari North Europe for comment and will update this story if we receive any.

Source: Daily Mail