No, it's not what you think.
When a FerrariChat user decides to post a new thread titled ‘Another Ferrari Turned Worthless’, the imagination runs wild (as intended). Are we talking about a car wreck? Did someone paint their Prancing Horse pink or install a tacky spoiler? What about a mechanical failure? Well, it turns out to be nothing really. The Ferrari owner just crossed the 10,000 mile line on his precious F-car.
Yes this was a joke, and the fact that I’m explaining it surely kills the punch line, but this jab at garage queens hits a specific point of discussion- how many miles should you put on your Ferrari? Plenty of people will tell you to just drive and enjoy the car, which is great advice, but let’s be honest, no one really wants to pay a premium for a low-mileage or new exotic car and then put tens of thousands of miles on it. Not only is it more difficult to sell a high-mileage exotic car, but by doing so, you feel the pain of depreciation in its full force.
Well, the same people that tell you to just drive will also tell you that a car is not an investment, especially not a Ferrari. You are going to lose money, that is the point. Yet, however easy it may be to understand this mentality, many people understandably have a hesitance towards heaping miles onto a rolling liability. Hell, I watch the miles on my pickup truck and my wive’s sedan, and I’m sure millions of car owners, Ferrari or otherwise, do the same.
In all honesty, the user that crossed 10,000 miles will probably never reach 100,000. So the extra digit milestone is his first and only one. And for that reason, it makes sense to both celebrate driving the car and joke about it’s diminished value. How many miles did he start with? How long has he had the car? We don’t know, but we can easily understand how keeping the car under 10,000 miles seemed to preserve it’s newness and factory quality. And it is the quality that is most important here. So, how do miles translate to quality?
As we have discussed here at FerrariChat many times, a well maintained Ferrari with more miles is often a better buy than low-mileage car that is barely driven or worked on. Quite frankly, if you want to maintain your car’s value, you need to pay for regular service. You can maximize your investment by avoiding service and miles, keeping a car locked away, but this won’t necessarily maximize your car’s value. You must maintain the car, and part of that is both driving the car and paying for maintenance.
So we have come full circle, maximizing your car’s value means treating the car unlike an investment, driving it and spending (losing) money on it. This doesn’t mean you should ignore the odometer, rather that your focus on maintaining quality is best applied when using the car, as opposed to letting it sit in storage. I suggest maybe picking a mileage number, however arbitrary, as a ‘sell’ point and then evaluate the market and your car’s condition at that milestone. After all, if you really care about your Ferrari, it makes sense that you will take the time and money to both enjoy and preserve it’s quality. So yes, until you reach that next milestone, just drive.
