Imagine dropping off your Ferrari 458 Spider at a dealership. You’re hoping to sell it and upgrade to a new dream car. Then, you get a call: “Someone offered $220k, you really should take it.” You hesitate. That’s lower than expected, so you say no. But the calls keep coming. You finally learn the real reason they’re so eager to sell. A Ferrari dealership employee crashed your 458 Spider during a joyride.

This isn’t a nightmare scenario. This is what Ryad and Diana Bakalem’s say happened to them at Ferrari of San Antonio.

In their lawsuit, the Bakalems say they left their white 2014 Ferrari 458 Spider with the dealership in 2019. They agreed to sell it on consignment for $240,000 or more. Months later, a dealership porter decided to “hot-rod around San Antonio” in the car. That joyride ended when he lost control and crashed the Ferrari into a chain-link fence. The car was “wrecked and totaled,” the lawsuit says.

But the Bakalems lawsuit explains that the problems were just beginning. You see, the dealership didn’t come clean. Instead, they say the Ferrari dealership general manager called them and pressured them to accept a fictitious $220,000 offer for their crashed 458 Spider. Not cool.

“Over the course of the next four days, [the dealership] would continually pressure and deceive plaintiffs into accepting a below-listing-price offer from a ‘client,’ while deliberately keeping the vehicle’s wreck a secret,” the lawsuit states.

The Bakalems eventually agreed to the deal, but moments after signing the paperwork, the dealership allegedly admitted the truth. The “client” wasn’t a buyer at all—it was the dealership itself–which was totaling the car out for insurance. The Bakalems argue this was fraud designed to cover up negligence, collect commission, and possibly profit from insurance payouts. “The wreck had been deliberately concealed to close the deal,” their lawsuit claims.

The truth about the crashed Ferrari 458 Spider

Dealership General Manager Grenville Lewis doesn’t contest the story. He admitted to the San Antonio Express-News that a Ferrari dealership employee crashed the 458 Spider while out driving on a “not-approved path.” However, he insists he acted honorably. “I still offered to pay them the $210,000, which they agreed to sell a car [for] that hadn’t been wrecked,” Lewis said.

He claims his math adds up because he dropped his commission from 6% to 5%. So after “selling” the wrecked car to the insurance company, he’d be cutting the Bakalems a check for the $210,000 they’d been hoping for. That’s right, he was still trying to make $10,000 on a car his employee wrecked on his watch.

Lewis said that according to the moral code of Ferrari dealers, “I tried to do the right thing.”

The Bakalems aren’t buying it. They’re suing the dealership for up to $1 million in damages, alleging fraud and negligence. It’s unclear how the case will end, but one thing’s certain: the next time you consign a supercar, you might want to set some ground rules about joyrides.