Ferrari has been accused of allowing illegal odometer rollbacks in a bombshell lawsuit from a former dealership employee.
Ferrari salesman veteran Robert ‘Bud’ Root is suing Ferrari of Palm Beach, a dealership and a wealthy client after he says he was wrongfully terminated from his position due to age discrimination reasons and after discovering the dealer’s rollback practice.
He alleges that Ferrari’s DEIS Tester diagnostic tool allowed the dealership to roll back the odometers of customer cars so they could be sold for a higher sum. It is reported that Ferrari itself had to authorize any actions using the DEIS Tester and was therefore aware of the rollback scheme.
In the lawsuit, Root also says that a former client, retired Sara Lee chief executive Steven McMillan, payed off a dealership employee to roll back the odometer of his car. The Daily Mail says by winding the odometer of the vehicle back to 0, the value of the LaFerrari hypercar increased by over $1 million.
The lawsuit makes specific mention of a policy from Ferrari itself which instructs its technicians on how to perform a rollback.
“The Ferrari entities published a written policy manual dating back to at least April 2010 specifically detailing how to perform an odometer rollback and expressly authorizing its use. Upon information and belief, this Ferrari policy was used at the Ferrari factory in Italy as recently as March 2015 to instruct Ferrari technicians how to reset to “0″ the odometer on a Ferrari vehicle,” it is alleged.
In a statement, Ferrari of Palm Beach attorney Jason Kairalla said “The dealership does not litigate in the newspaper. Of course, we believe this case is wholly without merit and will be vigorously defended in court.”
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