It appears that the market of automotive has yet more surprises to unravel. This a new one we have in hands today to talk about in this article.
It’s not a matter of road accident, not even an issue of malfunction or deficiency in the production of a sleek vehicle built by a major European car company. It’s a defamation suit filed against a notorious company like Ferrari.
The cause of the suit is the inability to purchase a limited-production Ferrari super-car. Little disappointing, isn’t it?
Rejected purchase application
We all know how a view of a sleek super-car from a major car manufacturer like Ferrari could do to any person. Vehicles of this sort are produced in limited number and get sold out in no time, so Ferrari official prefer to carefully pick the buyers of its own vehicles.
Meanwhile, a flea market emperor in Florida called Preston Henn filed a Verified Complaint for Damage in the United States Court, in the Southern District of Florida for not being able to buy a La Ferrari Spider.
Henn claimed that he mailed a 1,000,000 dollars deposit check directly to Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Ferrari. Nice try Henn.
The filed complaint was leaked to a number of news websites. It included a brief summary about Henn’s history with buying Ferrari vehicles which stretches back to the 60s.
The complaint marked also his extensive collection of vehicles which includes-presumably- one of the world’s most expensive automobiles the 275GTB/C6885 Speciale.
Defamation suit
That’s not the end of it. Preston, who is nicknamed the “Sultan of Swap” went for pursuing a defamation suit against Ferrari.
It looks like Henn is totally adamant to take Ferrari to court for questioning the main reasons behind denying his call for purchase.
The leaked document stated that denying Henn’s application harmed his reputation and made him subject of disrespect and disrepute in his profession, occupation, and trade.
It’s still unclear how much he is going after with this suit, but of course is nowhere less than 75,000 dollars.
Streisand effect
Without the existence of this suit, we wouldn’t have known about the whole issue of Henn’s failure to obtain the La Ferrari Spider.
Whatever the reason which urged Ferrari to do that, unraveling such an issue hurts Henn reputation in the first place, not the company.
Actually, that’s a sort of Streisand effect-like situation as many people we’ll be carefully following this issue since it’s the first time an automaker is getting tried for being discreet in selling his special high-end vehicles.
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon when the attempt of hiding or censoring information results unintentionally in publicizing this information.
It has of course a psychological illustration; most people get curious when they know there something is being kept from them, hence through many means to know it, which makes the spread of this information increased.
Streisand effect is named after an American entertainer who attempted to suppress some photographs displaying her residence, which ended up in drawing more public attention to it.