Canadian 430, changed speedo face?

I enquired about the possibility of changing the speedo face on a F430 from mph to kph here in Sydney Australia for a car imported from the UK. I was told by a Ferrari mechanic that it was easily done. I did not proceed with it, but this suggests it can happen.

 

it was a legal requirement to change speedo in Canada years ago, but now they accept the dual mph/klm speedo, this happened long before the F430 came out,,

 

Take a look at th carfax.
If the car was registered in th US prior to Canada, I would lean towards thinking the odometer is in miles.
If it was registered in Canada it's whole life (until recently), I would lean towards it being in KMs.
To believe anything else without some sort of proof, is pure speculation/a leap of faith.

 

interesting.
it also appears to have been registered as a "commercial vehicle" in quebec. wonder what that means?
Quebec is a part of Canada that has fairly long winters ie short driving seasons for an exotic car, so racking up significant mileage *may * indicate rental fleet.

 

It was a company owned vehicle.
The owner bought it using his company's name instead of his personal name, that's what it means. So he might have been the only driver, not necessarily renting/leasing it out.

I recently converted one of my personal vehicles to my corporation in order to get a business toll transponder and to streamline my transportation expenses more clearly.

So he drove a Ferrari during business ventures. Not a problem as long as he could justify it.
Yes in deed, I agree too that there is a lot of hanky panky going on in Quebec (with salvage/flood/accident cars and their eventual registration papers)

 

I do remember that car when it was a HGregg in Fla. in early summer, along with a couple other 360's from Quebec.
It looked pretty tired at the time and I couldn't get comfortable with the odometer issue, so I was more interested in the 360s.
I get at it may be possible that the odo reading was converted, but I wonder how many ppl actually do it? I don't think it's very common....and prob not worth the trouble if it results in confusion like this (unless documentation from the mechanic is included). Speedo faces are easy to change, but that wouldn't change the odometer numbers display.
Fortunately more modern cars like my Audi, allow me to toggle between kms and miles through the settings.

I'd say, if you can live with the possibility that it's actually miles, and may have to live with that if you sell it later, go for it.
But I wouldn't talk myself into buying it based on the hope it's been converted to kms. Future buyers may not be so optimistic.

 

I can't help with the history but I can confirm it is quite simple to swap the dial faces. The needles pull off and the rest is held together by cross head screws.
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Since the speedos have both mph & Kph, the speed readings will be accurate even if the face is swapped.

So someone needs to drive the car with a external gps, zero the odometer and travel 1 mile and see what the odometer registered for that distance.

 

Yes, that's right. Changing the face for MPH will not affect the accuracy.

The digital trip display will continue to show either KM or MPH depending on what market the cluster is configured for. It is perhaps possible to change the market of the cluster using an SD2/3 but I'm not entirely sure - usually it requires a dealer visit to load a different proxy file.

 

Post back and tell us how things turned out.

 

There is a chip in the instrument panel that contains a lot of info for various instruments and functions. Among those are the English/metric units for the odometer. The other gauges all read the same except the instrument faces are marked differently. For early F430s, that chip also tells the system whether she has iron or CCM brakes, as an example, and it also contains ID and maintenance info. FAI in California should be able to change one from kms to miles and vice versa since it looks like the panel is relatively easy to remove. I do not think the dealers can do that because they could not on earlier digital instrument panels on the 360-F430 or 575 series. FAI can also match mileage from an old cluster to a new one, or change the km reading to miles using the 3280.8/5280 conversion factor, but need assurance the change is a legitimate one. They matched the mileage from my 575M to the Superamerica instrument panel I installed.

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