Lusso PTU failure....

Good analogy. We had this happen to our E46 M3 at 8,000 miles but went 23,000 miles on our 2012 FF with no PTU issues.

 

My M3 had its engine blow at 25k miles while totally stock, covered under warranty. The second time was an engine with 35k miles that had been supercharged for the last 10k miles or so of its life before the big bang. Was a huge pain to deal with but it's still one of my favorite cars.

At least Porsche was nice enough to offer a 10 year 120k engine warranty on 991 GT3's when they discovered the finger follower issue, BMW to this day denies that it's a design flaw in the e92 engine and never offered any extended coverage for it. IMO Porsche far and away takes care of their customers better than any other brand.

 

Too bad they weren't so kind with IMS bearing failure/design flaw. (over how many years? )

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True, but overall I'd say they consistently go above and beyond what other manufacturers do.

 

Because of the much greater sales of Porsche compared to Ferrari. It’s a lot harder to hide critical failure, and both in truth only care about the new car buyers .

 

I mean even in comparison to the other Germans. When is the last time we heard of BMW/Mercedes/Audi extending warranties for known failure items and expensive goodwill repairs being done?

 

If you can’t give a hefty warranty to a basic 57 year design time to rethink..

 

I have the Lusso and reading this thread is exactly why I just paid the 9k for extended factory warranty. I plan to drive it quite a bit. Currently has 6k miles on and with the 7 years free service and 2 years factory warranty left I feel much happier about adding miles on hassle free.


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Hello, could I get an opinion on rebuilt PTUs vs Replaced with new PTUs? Any thoughts on the recurrence probability in both? Any good honest rebuilders you’d recommend? Thanks

 

Some rebuilds are just that, rebuilds. Some of them come with better seals/forks/whatever it is that breaks, and therefore claim they are lifetime solutions. One solution is provided by http://www.gte-engineering.com/ferrari-4rm-ptu-rebuild.html
I have no clue whether they actually improve over the standard system, and I cannot vouch for them. I just have their website on my bookmark bar for some reason.

 

Hi Gilly, How was your experience in replacing the PTU. I think mine has just failed. I wondered who maybe reliable/experienced in the NYC area to replace/rebuild...can u disclose an approx cost for the new PTU? and how long it took to get/replace? many thanks, Manish, i'm at 646-244-8481...

 

Hi Manish,
What makes you think the PTU has failed? Has Ferrari taken a look at it? If you do have a confirmed failure, please can you tell me your model year and current mileage as I keep a log of verified failures.
Given that you’re in the states, your best bet for a rebuild would seem to be GTE. Good luck!

 

Ok, been reading thru this thread, very interesting info...I have had 2 FF's, a 2014 and a 2015. Both have had PTU failures! One was in the range of 24k miles, and the other was @ 36k miles. Both were bought used, and both failed after I put about 20k miles on them myself. I was told that there is a 20% failure rate, but with my 100% rate on 2 vehicles, I believe it truly is a defect and that they will all eventually fail, just a matter of time (mileage). My second one is being rebuilt right now at GTE in NJ, awaiting for it to be returned and re-installed. Hoping it will last me at least as long as another 20k miles! The Ferrari mechanic says the PTU's are identical, and the only reason there might be fewer 'failures' on the Lusso, is that they haven't reached the mileage 'threshold', whatever that happens to be. I do agree that this is a known problem and should be addressed by F, but my mechanic also says the impetus is not there--the profit in replacing them, mostly out of warranty, is too much of a carrot to want to fix the actual problem. Now, with the Puro Sangue replacing the Lusso, there is zero drive to fix it.

If anyone has a GTE-Engineering rebuilt PTU with mileage on it, pls let us know. I'm curious to see the longevity of their rebuilds. ~$45k with 2 yr warranty for new from Ferrari vs $12k for rebuild/installation and 1 yr warranty----I could have ~4 rebuild failures before new replacement from Ferrari makes sense to me.

 

Thanks for the info. I’ll add your experiences to the database. How old was the first FF when its PTU failed?

 

Age-wise, my 2014 FF was 6 years old, ~24k miles
My 2015 failed in 2021, also 6 yrs old, 36k miles

 

Thanks - your info has been added to the database.

 

And here are the results. 31 failures known/recorded by FChat members and no statistically significant correlation between age or mileage when determining the point of failure. If you remove the ex-Lederman car from the plot (bottom right data point), the correlation only rises to 0.52 which isn't enough. And anyway, it makes sense to a certain extent that mileage rises with age but we can see from the plot that at PTU failure can occur at pretty much any age or mileage.

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Thx for that info. It does seem to be somewhat random, and give that it happened to both of my cars, different mileage points, same age, I do think it is MUCH more common than the 20% the dealerships claim...that's my N of 2! Makes me wonder whether I should 'upgrade' to a newer Lusso!?

 

You’re welcome.
I’ve never heard of dealers claiming a PTU failure rate of 20%. The previous high claim was Guilhermorossi1990 claiming that he was told 12.5% by Ferrari SF but he had a particular axe to grind. Others have only ever replaced one or two (Ferrari FW) and one of those was from track abuse. Miller has apparently only ever replaced 2-3. And in the case of Meridien in the U.K., they’ve never replaced a PTU. If 20% of the PTUs were failing each year then there would be a lot more than 31 recorded failures on FChat over the last decade. I’m sorry that you seem to have suffered disproportionately but I guess that is what can happen when the probability of failure is independent.

The Lusso PTU doesn’t seem to be any more reliable than the FF’s PTU. I believe they’re the same part but Ferrari was able to better address the thermal management with the Lusso’s PTU which is why it can take much more torque. So although the Lusso’s PTU has better cooling, it also ends up with more power being put through it as a result.

Here's how the failure stats stack up;

There are now 31 confirmed PTU failures reported on FChat. There are other anecdotal failures too - a couple with track abuse and one with front end crash damage.

Ferrari built c.2,850 FFs. According to the annual report, Europe and The Americas account for c.65% of sales so roughly 1855 FFs are registered in these countries. I think it’s unlikely that owners outside these geographies would find their way to FChat to discuss/log a PTU failure (due to language differences) and not all owners will come here seeking information - particularly if the PTU was fixed under warranty.

The best case failure rate is if we have a record of all PTU failures (and we know for a fact that we don’t). Of the 31 reported PTU failures, 24 are for FFs. In that case, the best case failure is 1.29% over a weighted fleet age of 8.9 years. That’s a failure rate of 0.145% per annum. If only 15% of the owners with a PTU problem reported it on here then the true failure rate would be 0.97% each year. That’s equivalent to 18 cars a year in Europe+Americas or 28 cars a year worldwide.

 

I sure coulda used your help in statistics class back in the day! [emoji848]


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My feeling is that failures are related to how many track miles these GTs have seen. Do the cars hold anything in memory that can help us determine, i.e. sustained high to v.high revs?

 

Also basing your stats just on Ferrari Chat 'complaints' is not truly scientific. My "20%" comes from my Ferrari mechanic in Utah that has replaced a dozen or more, he has one sitting at his house to send for re-build. He says, again, not scientific, but he says that every FF he has seen in Utah has had a PTU problem at some point, and I personally know of 5 others here in town alone that have had their PTU replaced, or refilled and sold! My mechanic has said his number comes directly from Ferrari in Modena, where all repairs must be authorized. He has not seen the same with the Lusso, but he believes it's because they haven't been driven as much as the FF's, and once they are driven more, get higher mileage, the issue will start to manifest itself--his opinion. Could also be that they truly have re-configured it slightly to adapt to the heat.

As for the theory that the PTU failure is related to track time, not in my experience. I never drove my car on a track, and I used the Powerstart mode once in each car.

Maybe there is a difference in the US version vs EU version, I believe they do have different part numbers, but that is not scientific on my part, either, just pure speculation.

 

Think about it. If the failure rate is 20% per annum then we’d all be replacing or repairing our PTUs every 5 years.

I don’t see anywhere near that kind of replacement frequency on FChat or at dealerships or on internet lore. By this logic, my nearly 11 year old FF should be on its 3rd PTU by now (and it’s still, fingers crossed, on its first).

 

I did think about it, and my 2 PTU's and the experience of my mechanic tells me otherwise. It's not 100%, so you have not had a problem---I don't think it's a time-issue, as that would not make sense, it's more likely a mileage issue. When I've bought and sold my FF's, that was the first question addressed both from the seller and the buyer--if it weren't a well-known issue, then it wouldn't even be addressed. The 7 that I've seen/known about, makes it a much bigger problem than 'less than a 1% issue'. My mechanic is so well-versed in removing it, he did the whole job in less than 4 hours, Ferrari has 8-10 hours both removal and replacement--16-20 hour job total. You don't get good at something without knowing what you're doing from experience. He was not consulting a manual while doing it, either. Not all of them have the issue, that is true, but it is certainly more than the 1% above, and probably less than the 20% I quoted...do you use snow mode at all? Here in Utah, as a daily driver, I'm in snow mode a fair amount from November thru April.