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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Not as bad as buying a Ferrari: where you have to already own a Ferrari to be allowed to buy one.

A friend of mine is a true petrolhead. Loves cars. When he was in his early twenties he bought a second hand Ferrari. Drove it around for years. He sold it, for the exact same price he bought it, back the person who’d sold it him in the first place.

I wouldn’t call a Ferrari an investment, but if you love them they hold their value pretty well.

Yes, but maintenance costs are very high. You can expect >$5k and typically another few $k for tires. That is true even if nothing breaks and milage is low (eg <5k mi/yr). Costs quickly go up once cars are past 20 years old due to the lack of parts. You definitely need $10-15k in an emergency fund if anything significant goes wrong (or you got sold a lemon).

So that $40-50k car price is about half of 5 years of ownership.

One reason they hold their value well is because they have low mileage. They’re not practical cars to use on a daily basis, not to mention maintenance costs which are quite high if you use the car often.

meanwhile a '93 Honda NSX recently sold for 60k showing 234,300 miles on the odo

https://carsandbids.com/auctions/3OnRAn0v/1993-acura-nsx

I learned how to drive stick on an NSX.

I also wedged my skateboard in the back window when it was open, causing it to completely shatter when the owner tried to close it. Didn't appreciate what a bone-headed move that was at the time, but you've enlightened me.

Yeah but aren’t these cars big with people who do after market mods? Ferraris have to be serviced by licensed mechanics.

> Ferraris have to be serviced by licensed mechanics.

"Have to"? Says who? "Licensed"? By who?

As someone who is very close to both the "factory authorized" and "non-authorized" sides of the Ferrari service industry, this is incorrect or at best a gross oversimplification of things like warranty service or the Ferrari Classiche process.

There are a lot of misunderstandings and myths circulating about Ferrari ownership, but this is a new one to me.

Not that car. A '93 NSX today will be bought by a new-money millionaire in his 40s as a nostalgia piece, his dream car from when he was a teenager in the 90s. It will be kept as stock as reasonable. Even the photographs are designed for such a buyer. An NSX on a crisp Chicago day is the definition of 90s cool.

> Ferraris have to be serviced by licensed mechanics.

If you’re talking about special ones like La Ferrari or some others, i can tell you that there are lots of 458 italia and California and Cali T that have been in no-name shops and still being sold without any problem.

>> not to mention maintenance costs which are quite high.

I remember watching Gas Monkey Garage where they bought a smashed Ferrari F40 for $400K. One of the funniest scenes was Richard Rawlings on the phone with the Ferrari parts dealer telling him how expensive the parts were he needed to rebuild the car with. The funniest was the juxtaposition of Richard, a guy who's used to haggling with people to get a good price on everything, and here he was being reminded that these were OEM Ferrari parts with the quip, "How much for a quarter panel? Yeah, I KNOW its a real Ferrari quarter panel!" with the standard eye roll that the cost of this was killing him.

The whole show gave a glimpse into owning one of these cars. IF something does happen to it, in order for it to be "certified" as a legit Ferrari, you have use all OEM parts and have a person from Ferrari oversee the repairs. The whole show was a lesson in the amount of time and money needed to own one of these - even if you don't drive it very much.

Here's an article that detailed the whole process: https://www.hotcars.com/what-happened-to-ferrari-f40-from-fa...

There's a very popular video from a dissatisfied owner who talks about all the maintenance nightmare of owning a Ferrari.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JgeU3X-2AM

The cost of a Ferrari isn't in the car. It's in the insurance, maintenance, and stress of anything happening to the car. I for one would hate to have a luxury vehicle even if I could afford it and even if you guaranteed to buy it back from me for the same amount I'd get investing in the stock market.

Yeah, I feel like I could (should?) get around town faster in a beat up Corolla, and getting around faster on a highway in a supercar would require taking a lot of physical + legal risk.

Thats true for most cars with a bit of a cult interest past a certain age, not just ferrari. An old civic in one of the nicer engine trims would also hold value at this point, even appreciate.

It's interesting that Jay Leno refuses to buy a Ferrari for this fact.

there are also severe restrictions on your ownership of the ferrari.

You are required to maintain and insure it. by ferrari.

You can't loan it out for performance testing.

You can't street race it.

You can't sully the brand.

and plenty more.

makes me wonder, do the new ones have telemetry to check this stuff?

So...no fun allowed? You can buy the car exclusively for the purpose of being seen in said car. I am definitively not a car guy, but what's the point if you do not red-line it for some quick thrills?

Whatever makes people happy, I guess. I will continue to drive my ~zero maintenance Honda without regrets.

I've ridden in two Ferraris, and they were very much "red-lined for quick thrills". The "Ferrari rules" may build a mystique, but there's also some juice in breaking rules.

it is the same model. in order to buy a birkin you need to buy tens of thousands of dollars of less desireable Hermes product.

...to get an allocation for the latest and greatest model. Pretty sure you can walk into most Ferrari dealers today and order a Roma, for example, without previous ownership history.

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