Rubbish paint again

Just collected my F12, or at least refused to collect it. I didn't think it was that easy to photograph orange peel, but it is so in this case. This is the worst part but the entire car is covered with peel and unacceptable at this price point.

My excellent dealer will resolve, but when will they get the message they cannot send out this standard of finish? This is the second time it has happened to me and moves me closer to The Mayors position.

The day you are lucky enough to collect your new Ferrari should be a day to remember. And not for negative reasons.
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Is the entire finish like that? Will the dealer arrange for a respray?

 

To be fair that is the worst panel, but not by much, doors and wings especially poor as well. A complete sanding and refinishing will take the top off the orange peel as Topaz do over here or you have an excellent guy in the States who posts his work. It just takes days of detailed work but can be done so no repaint required. Hopefully.

 

Yes, one hopes and expects that the problem is in the clear coat, not the underlying pigment paint, so that a good paint correction will deal with it. One doesn't know going in how much clear coat will need to be removed in the process. You might consider a final application of one of the new refractory coating layers such as Opti Coat 2.0 / Opti-Coat Pro to enhance the remaining clear coat.

 

If you sand the clear coat flat to fix that you really won't be able to do that much buffing if you plan to keep this car a while and drive it every day or at least more frequent that 2k miles a year.

 

I disagree having had exactly the same problem with my spider and 3,000 miles later, perfect. If Todd or someone sees this post they can hopefully chime in, but done professionally, durability is apparently not an issue.

 

I think that's right about durability, because clear coat is very hard. Rather I was thinking of depth of gloss, which is why I suggested a coating. But let the experts speak.

 

The great thing is that my dealer recognises it is an issue, is not fighting it, accepts that it needs to be resolved and he is getting the Ferrari quality man to have a look and has promised all will be resolved.

You have to ask what the man tasked with quality control at the factory was doing as we see him on all the factory documentaries busy circling imperfections-sure.

 

Sad that one with that much obvious orange peel could get out of the factory. Maybe 7000 cars is just too many.

 

Curious more than anything and you said you have a excellent dealer that will take care of this but did they notice it or did you? As bad as this is I wonder if the dealer when the car was delivered could have rejected it and sent it back to Italy like US dealers do when cars show up with such poor quality. I am on my 3rd Ferrari in 4 years and each one has been worse as far as orange peel and poor paint quality. Ferrari continues to take advantage of those who buy these cars because they know they can sell every car they make.

Thanks for sharing how a $350 to $400k car from Ferrari looks like. Hate to see how bad the LaFerrari paint jobs will be for $1.3 million or more

 

Makes you wonder about issues one doesn't see (or complain about)...

I hate to make a sweeping comment but this seems so typical of many Itlian manufacturers. You would be shocked at what the so-called premium yacht builders will release and let you deal with under warranty.

 

I don't get it how robots in a leading edge environment can cause all that orange peel? Maybe they need to invent robots for finishing/buffing irregularities with the paint process

Currently, they pass "quality" control, first at the factory, then the dealer. Know can wet sanded with multiple grits, 2,000, 3,000 to shave a bit of the clear and then buffed. I nearly planned to order a historical color, as it is sprayed and probably inspected more at the factory, but couldn't justify another 15K more to a 300K+ car.

That said, it is common to see orange peel any brand new car. Some color shows more than others. Just would have thought, the more you pay, the higher the paint and finish quality at the factory. Wrong. Why the factory does not remove the orange peel after the paint process? My guess, the majority of owners don't notice/care about it, and for the smaller percentage that does, they leave it to the dealer for correction. That reduces expenses at the factory for "every" car.

 

Its not that. It's that they don't sweat the details.

When you sell a premium product at higher and higher prices, people expect more than the past.

I understand Traveler's frustration. He paid a lot of money for the car and expects the paint to be better than a Camry or Ford.

I think most would say "of course he would". But, no one in Maranello understands that.

 

Orange peal is not from the process. It's from the finishing of the process. All paint will orange peal. The question is: What do you do after it's painted to improve it?

If it's little or nothing, it's left to someone else to fix it.

 

Another thread on Ferrari defective paint, including my complaints about the paint color mismatch between the metal hood and plastic front bumper...My Maserati has the same problem..A Fchat poster named RP indicates that Toyota solved this issue years ago..

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/florida/416444-ff-tdf-blue-paint-correction-22ple-coating-boca.html#post142467442

 

Congrats on the car and sorry it's starting out with this.

We had our 458 (Rosso Corsa) and FF (Pozzi) professionally corrected and 22ple coated at delivery. $5K we spent....ugh.

If you had told me a couple years ago I'd pay that much for detailing I would have laughed and coughed up a lung. However frustrating, the cars deserve it and the correction work was....phenomenal.

To their credit, my local dealer "saw the light" and in their detail shop, and detail manager, who can now turn this work out himself. Just ordered our next car today before seeing this post and had them commit to the finish being perfect either in their shop, or paying to bring in the gurus.

The paint on both cars was about as good as our Porsches and BMW's....but I expected more.

 

I just watched the video of the 599 being built and ferrari's paint process. There is orange peel because they are water based paint which all companies have pretty much moved to because of the environment. It is done by robots in a sealed environment which is fine. But it showed in the video that it goes to a room with those lights and the car is buffed. They show like 5 different italians looking at this car checking the paint after it has been buffed so I can't believe something like this is let out of the factory. This is a sloppy buffing job.

 

not sure what the dealer is 'obligated' by the factory to do as process for paint work, but that isn't something that will buff out, it's that the paint layers, possibly even starting at the primer layer, has not been wet sanded to smooth with each layer
true that all paint will have some degree of peel effect, it's part of the process as the paint cures
in a base coat / clear coat, we can wet sand out the colour layer, it will even look dull when washed before clear coat is applied, and then from there use the build up cutting to polishing compounds, until the clear is crystal smooth
very disappointing to not see that level of finish being done on a brand new Ferrari?!?!

 

The outrage is no one is surprised. It's Ferrari normal.

Ridiculous but emblematic of the brand and it's opinion of quality.

Headers,... paint,... sticky interiors... all easy fixes for the factory in design phase. Ferrari just can't be bothered because customers line up to buy them anyway.

 

The paint texture on this F12 looks like the one you find on industrial machine tools, from China. There is absolutely no excuse for it.

 

The dealer did not notice it, indeed I don't think many dealers bother to look, or indeed know how to look. What really gets me is all these ferrari documentaries showing quality control guys checking the paint, a total misrepresentation of reality as clearly to max profits they're aren't any except for show cars. Incidentally,mchecked the Geneva F12 also in the same colour, when I was there and the paint was flawless so maybe they just have one guy for show cars or VIP's?

 

porsche has zero orange peel. so it can be done.

 

German manufacturing <> Italian manufacturing

Until Ferrari brings in some heavy hitters from a company like Honda or Toyota -- and empowers that person to actually make changes (not just offer lip service to the rarefied air in Maranello), things will not change.

It is a systemic problem.

.

 

German manufacturing - not so sure. Admittedly, Porsche paint is amazing, but have you seen the paint on BMW's? For what it's worth, they use the same paint supplier as Ferrari - PPG. Coincidence?

 

agree, bmw does suffer from excessive orange peel. is ppg paint the cheaper alternative?