Ferrari 355 Lawsuit: Valve Guides

Anyone can *say* that the problem isn't random. Words are cheap.

But to actually mean that the problem isn't random, you'd have to show a pattern.

Certain year? Certain climate? Certain oil type? Assembly problem? Material problem? Timing problem? Maintenance problem?

What's the pattern?

And you don't know. That's why you want more data. That's why you "would like to see numbers of 1995 F355 owners who have had valve guide issues" because you haven't identified a pattern yet.



So instead of just shooting from the hip, you need to be reviewing the list that I gave you above. Instead, you dismissed it in favor of bar talk.

...and all that will do is get you another drink.

 

Every 355 from 94 to mid 98 used the same suspect guides and have equal chances of failure.

Simple mechanics. Support a 6mm valves stem with a soft bronze guide, spin it up to 8500 and run it Chernoble hot and failure is predictable. The upside is Ferrari came up with a good replacement guide that to the best of my knowledge is failure free to date.

What I do not understand is the tolerance for the header failures. By every definition an exhaust header is an emissions part, it even has the air injection rails welded to them. Anything forward of the converter should be covered under the Federal emissions act but I guess I missed something there.

The upside to all of this is there are known reliable, permenent fixes for the troubles that ailed the 355's. Shame it wasnt implimented before the cars came to the market place. Even bigger shame that Ferrari did little to assist in fixing these problems. Hell, if nothing else make the repair parts affordable with very little mark up to verifiable owners of the cars.

Some slack has to be given to Ferrari as they are on the cutting edge of bringing race technology to the street car market place. Reliabilty will always be in question when one is the first with any new technology in a given market. I have been a huge Ferrari supporter over the years but this new trend in warranty dodging in the last few years is appauling to say the least. Guess it is easier to blame someone else for ones problems than to address it head on. So long as there is more demand than product, I see little hope of this changing in any way. Follow the money.......

Dave

 

What protects the car companies is that you have too many vaiables in the mix. Combine the vairables with low volume output and a company that could care less about thier customers like Ferrari. Customers end up being SOL. If I was running Ferrari there would be free headers and valve guides for any 355 for 15 years. Of course if I was running Ferrari there would be a tube framed P4 type car for $200,000.

 

I love the P4 idea!

But are you certain that actual Ferrari *customers* were left out in the cold? I'm not talking about the customers of used car sellers...I'm talking about Ferrari customers who purchased from a Ferrari dealership. You think that *they* were left SOL?

If you are the 3rd owner of a used Ferrari, then you probably aren't a "Ferrari" customer.

Just a thought.

 

If you own a Martin Guitar or guitar from my company SMT Guitars you are my customer. We have a lifetime warrenty with our products. I have repaired,repainted or replaced instruments for customers who are second or third owners and I know Martin does as well. We had a paint problem on a production run that did not show up for 5 years after the guitar was painted. I replaced or repainted all the instruments at no charge. I sold 15 new guitars from customer referals from this. I turned a problem into profit. It is just good business.

 

You aren't being sued for people driving drunk in your guitar and crashing into a light pole...the lawsuit climate is ugly...people sue even when they have no realistic grounds...and the modern courts no longer throw out such nonsense.

In such an environment, it shouldn't be surprising that automobile companies have to distance themselves from product liability, and you don't distance yourself from product liability by fixing a used car for its 5th owner a decade after its warranty expired.

 

That IS good business. I would buy a guitar from you because of this service and I don't even want one. Good for you. A+

 

Do not want to get in details...but in many cases Ferrari gets away with murder...
I had 5 Ferraris up to date and about everything else from Porsche to Mercedes to BMW to Corvette and so on...and I would never accept the problems I had with the Fcars, but I do allow Ferrari to get with it...why?
I guess it all goes back to the old man thinking way back then and the fact that most of us allow Ferrari to get away with this.
I have a 98 355 and a 99 456 and considering the price of this cars new and all the little things that went wrong on both, if my Mercedes I would be very dissapointed.
Hey, isn't why Lamborghini built his own car....
And got another Benz this year and not a Maserati because of that exact reason.

 

Rubbish.

I've been sued so many times it's not even funny. In one instance, the attorney signed up the couple who was hit by a truck. Signed them up right there on the roadside.

The big truck had a sign on it's side with three initial and then "Inc."

So instead of reading the police report to find out the actual owner of the truck, he sued me because one of my companies has a three letter name that is the same as those three initials.

Was it my truck?

No.

Did I have anything to do with the accident?

No. Not involved whatsoever.

Was it my driver?

No.

Was I anywhere near, or any of my employees anywhere near?

No. Not within 100 miles of the accident.

Did the police report name me, my firm, or any of my employees?

No.

But because I own a firm that has a *name* the same as the three initials on the side of the truck that rammed into the rear of the small car with the couple inside, I got sued.

Did the attorney throw it out when I pointed all of this out?

No. He demanded $10,000 to "settle."

Did the judge throw it out when my attorneys (the largest law firm in Alabama) pointed all of this out?

No.

He held three different hearings to give the plaintiffs' attorney 3 different chances to show why I should be sued.

I had to pay my attorneys to show up to all 3 hearings before the judge finally agreed to drop me from the lawsuit.

That's the legal climate today.


You can't see the legal forest for the trees. You're in too close, plus, you aren't facing the same liability from being sued because your profession greatly limits lawsuits against fellow attorneys (and I've got a great Florida Bar story about an ethics complaint and how that process is stacked against the citizen instead of properly used to keep attorneys in line and ethical).

 

I have no doubt that you have a lower standard than what I posted, and you probably won't even see the irony (or hypocrisy) when your lower standard is matched up to your *other* claims on this thread about the courts generally just pursuing valid claims (as if!).

 

Exotic cars are pieces of ****. Everyone goes into it knowing that. They are not Hondas or Mercedes. They fall somewhere between appliance cars and race cars.

Obviously, Ferrari takes care of their customers and meets their expectations, or they wouldn't be doing well today.

 

Then why did the first generation Honda S2000 with 240hp at 8300rpm,a redline of 9,000rpm out of 2 liters able to go 105,000 miles before its first service ?

 

I had one of those cars and had far more trouble with that car than either of the 2 Ferraris I have owned. They had a mysterious #4 cylinder scoring and failure, recall done in Europe for replacement of oil bolts in the engine, porous engine blocks, failed clutches. My own car, sold at 33k miles, had the clutch fail, I replace the oil bolts to prevent an engine failure, fuel gauge failed 3 times until the dealer finally refused to fix it again and told me it was normal, driver's side window failed multiple times, rear axles nuts would loosen up for no reason, convertible top that wears holes in itself, strike plates for the top wore out prematurely, spark plugs would loosen up and come out, ... there were others that I cannot think of now. I personally don't find Honda to be that great, they just cover their problems better than many such as transmission problems on Accords, Odysseys, Acuras, NSX snap ring failure. Honda just quietly fixes the problems and it is not nearly as public as a Ferrari problem.

 

No, the system didn't work. I had to *pay* to defend myself against incontravertibly bogus charges, and the scheming attorney who sued me didn't even get a slap on the wrist.

He should have been disbarred.

Instead, our corrupt legal climate offers him no downside for suing everyone in sight...and if he actually *wins* the occasional bogus case (because juries are unpredictable), then he will be *rewarded* for his unethical behavior...while in turn the businessmen whom he attacks are running up large legal bills and watching our liability insurance skyrocket.


And that's why I pointed out that you were too close...that you couldn't see the legal forest for the trees.

You have no grasp of business liability because the system coddles attorneys who sue willy-nilly while simultaneously punishes incontravertibly-innocent businesses.

And because the system punishes us with no regard of liability, we have to distance ourselves from liability at every turn.

Which explains why a car-maker can't just "fix" a problem years after a warranty expires in order to earn community goodwill...because any "fix" would extend the business liability window, opening us up to lawsuits for even longer periods of time.

Such ridiculous lawsuits ruined the general aviation aircraft industry, for example. You can't get new engines or fuel injection systems into aircraft due solely to business liability and our corrupt legal climate.

 

No Doubt, I don't often agree with you on these issues but this time I do. As a physician, I have been sued twice for malpractice and in each case, not only had I not treated the plaintiff, but I had never met or been in the same room with either one of them. It cost my malpractice carrier thousands of dollars to defend these cases that were eventually both dismissed.

 

All of my business friends have seen and are seeing the same thing. There's an entire class of people who perform practiced pratfalls on Wal-Mart and amusement park parking lots ("wet floor!") in order to harass successful businesses into $10,000 "nuissance" settlements and such...

...and businesses that don't settle run up large legal bills defending themselves against entirely bogus charges. In your cases and mine, the incidents weren't even related to us or to our businesses, yet we were sued anyway.

 

Touché.

 

I had a 99 Fiorano that had bronze valve guides........I am currently looking at a 95 that has had the bronze valve guides replaced.

 

The service manager at my Ferarri dealer confirms that 95' 355's are indeed the least likely to have valve guide issues.
In a pullling of historical data they confirmed that for they're dealership, 96-98 models represented 100% of the 355 valve guide issues.
Even at that, the total numbers were minimal - only 3. And all those had seen some degree of track use.