A Ferrari owner in China has just learnt the hard way why supercar owners are so obsessive about where they park their prized possessions. The supercar owner parked his red Ferrari 488 GTB in an outdoor parking spot near his home in Kunming, in the Yunnan province of southwestern China. He came back from a business trip of a few days to find that the neighbourhood kids had used his supercar as a jungle gym in the interim, and thankfully, the entire thing was caught on CCTV camera. While the incident occurred back in May, the owner is now suing the parents after initially giving them the benefit of doubt, being a father himself. Now that it’s actually come down to the question of who foots the not-inconsequential repair bills, the gloves are coming off.
The damage to the Ferrari is exactly what you’d expect from four kids jumping all over it and using the windscreens as makeshift amusement park slides. There are deep scratches across the hood, roof, fenders and windows, and the front bumper has cracked clean through. Worse, the boys had turned up armed with long bamboo poles, poking at the bodywork. The clip of the incident has since racked up tens of millions of views online, not surprising considering it’s not everyday you see kids use a fine piece of machinery from Maranello as a plaything.
The owner says he bought the Ferrari 488 GTB for about 3.6 million yuan, or $530,000, in China, and he’s never so much as scratched it himself. Given the nature of the incident, he skipped the Ferrari dealership entirely, reckoning official parts and labour would run past 100,000 yuan, roughly $14,700.
Factory-trained technicians, genuine panels and paint codes matched to the millimetre don’t come cheap anywhere in the world, let alone on a low-volume Italian exotic in China. Instead he went to independent bodyshops and used aftermarket parts, bringing the bill down to a far more digestible 29,360 yuan, around $4,300.
That’s where things fell apart. Zhang met the boys’ parents at a police station, twice, hoping for an apology and fair compensation. What he got instead was an offer of 5,000 yuan, about $730, and no apology from the kids at all. Negotiations collapsed, and Zhang has now filed a civil lawsuit seeking the full repair cost.
It’s worth noting why this even needs a court. Under Chinese law, children under 14 can’t be held in administrative detention, so civil court is really the only avenue left for someone whose car has just been used as a playground slide. As for the Ferrari, values on the used market have settled well below sticker, though nowhere near cheap enough to make this whole episode any less painful.
