Need Help! Is my dealer trying to rip me off?

I only wish all ferrari alternators were as accessable and easy to remove as a 360 alt is.5 hours sounds just a little extreme to me but maybe they hire handicapped techs,Who knows?

 

Hope you get this resolved to your satisfaction. FWIW, once a car is out of warranty it's highly advisable that you already have a trustworthy independant guy ready to go. A good independant will be your best friend

 

1/2 hour to remove the alternator does not sound excessive. They either have to raise the car and get to it from the bottom which means they have to remove the undertray or they have to remove it from the cockpit which means removing the seats...but if they are already there doing other stuff, they are probably giving you a break on the R&R.

Edit: Just pray they don't screw up your car while doing all the work...

 

ferrari changed the belt change interval from 5 to 3 years to increase dealership revenue...they dont make much money selling a low volume of cars...the profits are in the service area and what better way to increase revenue than to decrease the maintaince interval...since most 360s site in climate controlled garages and rarely are driven more than 5k miles a year,i doubt the timing belt is going to break on the 37 month..unless its made of rubber bands....

 

They were not all done at the same time. First the 360 was released with a 3 yr then the TSB came out in 10-02 announcing a new belt for 550/456 then later the 355 was added. We were told it was in response to belt failures and personally I had no reason to question that because we had been seeing a few failures before the 5 yr time limit. There could certainly have been other considerations but I am unaware of them.

 

listen to rifledriver.
Gee wiz, these dealers should be investigated for fraud. Glad no one touches my car. F 'em.

 

You are quite wrong. The belts are around $90. Do you really think that will cause Ferrari to have greater profitability? Sure the dealers do OK but what makes you think Ferrari engineers cars in a way that insures their FRANCHISE dealers have greater profitability? If Ferrari was interested in their dealers profitability they would not have some of the policies in place that they do. If a dealer goes belly up there several people waiting in the wings to buy a franchise in just the same way there several waiting to buy a car you may decide to walk away from. All the labor costs that make timing belts an expensive job go to the dealer. Ferrari gets none of that but they do get all the blame for their cars costing so much to maintain. Not a good trade off. And if timing belts are such a great cash cow for Ferrari why would they be switching back to chains, at great expense I might add.

 

I have no idea what business you are in but there are good and bad in every business I have any knowledge of. So just what industry are you in anyway?


Dealers have enormous overheads to overcome. Manufacturers make greater and greater demands on them. In the case of Ferrari, warranty work is usually done at a loss to the dealer so customer pay jobs have to subsidise that.
On top of that the profit in sales of new cars has gone down considerably. In 1987 I got to see the invoice for a 328, in 2000 I got to see the invoice for a 360. If sold at MSRP the profit was about the same.

 

Rifledriver says the belt service at 3 year interval was due to legitimate field failures, where is the fraud?

There may have been a batch bad belts that were installed in the factory...it happens all the time for other components. Prime example of that were the clutch assembly release bearing seals in my 360 that would get stuck at high RPM and at operating temp. They did not replace all those defective seals/bearings; there was a campaign to replace them if the customer complained.
If they had tracked which date codes of bad belts went into which cars then they could've avoided a blanket TSB for all cars.

 

3. All of the above

 

Considering the labor rate and time it takes to REMOVE THE ENGINE to change the belt, I'd say that's a big fat YES! And $90 for a rubber belt is robbery as well.

 

Belt replacement in a 360 has never been an ENGINE OUT OPERATION. The belts are accessible through the cockpit. I think the only reason an ENGINE OUT is required in a 360 if the engine needs be overhauled.

 

Go back and reread the post. Then as 4i2fly said the motor does not have to come out. And $90 isn't bad, shop around for other dealer prices on high end European cars.


Compare apples with apples.

 

My mistake. I thought it was like the 348/355 cars.

Even still, the labor rate and hours to do it are not exactly cheap. What do shops get these days, $120/hr or more?

 

The point is it does not help Ferrari and Ferrari spent lots to make the new motor have chains.

 

good point,i certain dont know about the policies you are taking about and i am not an insider like you are so i will defer to your expertise in this area....i find it hard to believe that ferrari dealerships dont make money charging thousands of dollars for service...as for ferrari getting the blame for the high costs to maintain their cars, who else is there to blame? and if the belts are really prone to break after 3years, regardless of the mileage, then perhaps it wasnt greatest piece of automotive engineering...esp for a car that has a modern design.....conversely, most people should know what they are getting into when they buy a f car.....

 

A I never said that the dealers do not make money on service. They do or should.

B The high costs due to complexity or service intervals are due to Ferrari, so by all means blame them. Just be aware they do not do it for the dealers financial gain.


C Just who promised us cheap to maintain Ferrari's anyway? If I am not mistaken back when I was a kid reading about Ferrari's in car magazines I knew they were expensive to maintain and idiosyncratic. Just when did anything change? The 360 is the cheapest car to maintain they have made in a number of years. I consider it real progress, don't you? And now they are bringing out cars with chains instead of belts, I applaud them for that.


If you build a car with maintenance cost alone in mind you come up with a Toyota Tercel....how exciting.


And as far as costs per hour of the dealers, in the SF Bay Area the Ferrari stores are the cheapest of the high end cars. Sorry but considering the overheads I think it's cheap. In this area any way if you want to make real money fixing cars either as a mechanic or shop owner, fix German cars.

 

Where? quoting the original post:

HERE: Over $10,000 to fix it! They told me the following was wrong with the car.

HERE: New Timing belt, Broken Tentioner, Needs new Clutch and Flywheel, Throttle Bearing, Timing Variators both broken??,
WTF? I thought this car was in the for 15K service? A new clutch AND flywheel, WTF? What BS garbage unless the car was completely abused, what the heck are some people doing to these cars? My 75 GT4 still has the original pressure plate, T.O. bearing and clutch. I have 73,000 miles on mine. I did not pay 250,000 US dollars for mine either.

HERE: Alternator ... 5 hours to install an alternator!!!!!,
WTF? It does not take 5 frigging hours to R/R an alternator. Sorry, I don't buy any of this BS.

And finally HERE: The car has been running fine, Clutch is still firm, no starting issues, WTF!

So if the car was running fine, according to the stated facts from this owner and also the clutch was not slipping, then 75% of the work order for rec. repairs is total nonsense.

That is fraud. That is called padding an estimate. Happens all of the time to the unsuspecting.

I understand about the defective engineering on the clutch assembly and related components. Then put out a recall on those specific items, don't let the customer suffer a breakdown because of it, one would be opening themselves up to lawsuits for mechantibility of fitness violations. My hunch here is that someone: Ferrari or otherwise, is attempting to get back some of that lost revenue of having to change defective components and coupling the service visit with some unneeded repair work that is not covered by the TSB. my 2 cents.

 

agreed, and anyone buying a ferrari should and probalby does know its not going to be cheap to maintain and or fix...and certainly other exotics can be even more expensive to fix...the 360 is a great car, very reliable and well made...and a big improvement over the 355 in that regard...and the chain belt will get rid of the whole issue for the 430.....unless the chain breaks!!!lol

 

I still think $90 is steep for a belt. Is there something very special about the belt itself or is it just what it is going into that justifies the markup?

I had a timing belt put in one of my Scirocco's back in 1987. I drove the wheels off that car for 16 years and never gave the belt a second thought. In fact it was the only car I had up until I bought my 308 in 1997. I R&Red the motor 2 years ago for a more power but I bet I have another 5 years in it.
I think the belt was around $30. Now THAT'S more like it. $30 for one that's good for 150K+ and 16+ years in every type of condition OR $90 for 3 years.

Really, which is a better belt?

 

They are probably the same manufacturer and same quality, but because there are many more of those belts sold for VWs and only a fraction of the number for Ferraris the manufacturer has to amortize the cost of tooling and manufacturing on a much smaller number.

 

5 hours to replace alt. I read .5 or 1/2 hour...I don't know what it takes to replace the alt. but I thought 1/2 hour definitely was reasonable...my misunderstanding.

What is being done to this particular car is beyond me and I cannot make a comment, Rifledriver had said earlier the service people who are quoting these repairs could be crooks since their story doesn't add up.

Three-year interval for belt service is excessive, I agree! I was just speculating that there might have been bad batch of belts (my own theory is different, see below) and Ferrari could have handled it differently. But since I am aware of other issues as mentioned above with clutch assembly and of course campaign was generated, dealers didn't go out of their way to replace those defective clutch assembly components unless customer complained. Ferrari’s policy is if the owner catches the defect while within the warranty fine, they fork the bill...if they complain about the problem after 3 years + 1 day, it’s tough. The bearing and seal replacement is an 18 hour labor + parts.

I have come to realize that's how Ferrari operates and they push back on warranty work no matter what, this is a well-known fact. I was at FoSF (owned and operated by factory) last year before the Monterey events and they had just received a 99 360 with broken cam variator...obviously, this was after the factory had generated the TSB to replace the defective variator but of course the service advisor told me the owner is going to eat the cost because he did not replace the belts at three year interval. Ferrari has known about bad variators since April of 2001 and only issued the TSB to replace them in June 2004 and only if the owner elects to do a the belt service and pay for that portion then campaign would cover the variator parts and labor.

My theory in getting the belts replaced in three years is directly related to the defective variators and tensioners. They broke prematurely and Ferrari did not want to recall the cars so they issued the gospel (TSB) to replace belts in three years and if they didn’t and the variator or the tensioner gave it was not their responsibility. As it was the case I mentioned above and many more around the world that I know first hand, all of whom out of warranty had to fork out $20K+ to repair engine damage because of a faulty component and engineering. All I can say is it pays to be aware and if it happens to you then you know how to deal with them.

 

if you decide to have 'em put your car back together so you can flatbed it to another shop, you -might- wanna just hang around when they 'reassemble' your car, so'z they don't end up with any parts left over, or put things back into the car in a slightly 'different' design than original...