california service coupons

[craig elam]

my mates just had his california serviced by the main dealer, theyve told him they cant turn the service light off because the dashboard unit has run out of "service coupons", the only way to resolve this is to remove the instrument cluster send it to the factory and have new coupons loaded at a cost of around £2k!!.
anyone heard of this before or know a way round it?

thanks in advance

craig

[F355GTS]

Sounds like utter rubbish to me, what Year is the car?

[craig elam]

2010 done about 50k miles,

[bertie]

Sounds like rubbish, try a phone call to a different dealer

[Craig elam1]

Ive used this dealer for my aston and they have always been pretty straight, the cars done 50k , quite hjgh for a modern ferrari, my fear is that you all have a limited number of "service coupons" in the dash and when they run out your in for a big bill to buy some more.
My Aston has a stone tablet in the glove box and we just chisel a notch for each service

[willy wombat]

This thing about service coupons rings some distant bell in my memory but I can't put my finger on it. Here's a suggestion. Call Meridien Modena and ask for Dominic in service department. He will know.

[craig elam]

it turns out there are a limited number of service coupons in the cars instrument cluster , once they have all been used the service message will not function until new tokens have been installed, a figure of £2K has been mentioned
i dont mind shelling out for maintenance it comes with car ownership but this seems to just be just a money maker with no real benefit to the owner or vehicle.

[murphyaj]

That just seems ludicrous to me. I'm lining up to buy an early cali next year and had no idea this was a thing.
Like you I'm happy to spend money on maintenance, but that just seems like Ferrari said to themselves "every 10th service we're going to add on £2000 because we can and fk our customers".
Did they say what the issue was beyond the service message not appearing? If you're servicing every year anyway who cares if the service light doesn't come on?

[craig elam]

problem solved ,i contacted meridien they were very helpful indeed and can do it for 385+vat!!!

[bertie]

craig elam said:

problem solved ,i contacted meridien they were very helpful indeed and can do it for 385+vat!!!

What do you get for your £385 plus VAT?

[willy wombat]

I was sure Meridien would be helpful. They are a good bunch (both in service and in sales).

[murphyaj]

bertie said:

craig elam said:

problem solved ,i contacted meridien they were very helpful indeed and can do it for 385+vat!!!

What do you get for your £385 plus VAT?

He got the right to service his car again I guess.
reminds me a little of what Aston did with their service books for the Vantage & DB9. The 200+ page manual and service record only had two pages for services with space for a total of 8 stamps. On the 9th service you had to pay for additional "service record pages" which would be added to the screw-fixed binder at a cost of around £50 for 4 small black-and-white laser printed sheets. I told them to ps off and got it for free as a "goodwill gesture", but I'm sure plenty just stump up.
Ferrari clearly looked at that and figured if Aston can screw their customers to pay for something with no value they can do it better.

[jon66]

This definitely is a real thing with the California (and indeed with many other Ferrari models) as I went through the same process at the end of last year with my 2009/50k car and at the time I was equally sceptical.

The figure of £2k does seem a very high starting point. I'm assuming this was based on the labour time to strip/remove the dash, package and ship it to Italy and then reinstall on return which would be a "worst case" scenario.

Ultimately they were able to reload the service coupons via a remote link to the factory, without the need to strip and ship it to Italy. Fairly sure that the final cost was very similar to that mentioned rather than the worst case figure.

[bertie]

My question is what is a service coupon?

[Adam B]

So this is basically due to a chip not being able to count to more than 10?

[Ferruccio]

Adam B said:

So this is basically due to a chip not being able to count to more than 10?

Designed in short term obsolescence.
As cynical as it gets.

[CUBICLE]

Just had same thing with my 2011MY California. JCT600 Leeds - £250+ vat to do the job - but still seems like a rip-off.